Goth subculture
Post-punk artists who anticipated the gothic rock genre and helped develop and shape the subculture include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure and Joy Division.
[3] That same year, the Velvet Underground song "All Tomorrow's Parties" created a kind of "mesmerizing gothic-rock masterpiece" according to music historian Kurt Loder.
In a live review about a Siouxsie and the Banshees' concert in July 1978, critic Nick Kent wrote, concerning their music, "[P]arallels and comparisons can now be drawn with gothic rock architects like the Doors and, certainly, early Velvet Underground".
[5] In March 1979, in his review of Magazine's second album Secondhand Daylight, Kent noted there was "a new austere sense of authority" in the music, with a "dank neo-Gothic sound".
[14] In July 1982, the opening of the Batcave[15] in London's Soho provided a prominent meeting point for the emerging scene, which would be briefly labelled "positive punk" by the NME in a special issue with a front cover in early 1983.
Outside the British scene, deathrock developed in California during the late 1970s and early 1980s as a distinct branch of American punk rock, with acts such as Christian Death, Kommunity FK and 45 Grave at the forefront.
[17] The bands that defined and embraced the gothic rock genre included Bauhaus,[18] early Adam and the Ants,[19] the Cure,[20] the Birthday Party,[21] Southern Death Cult, Specimen, Sex Gang Children, UK Decay, Virgin Prunes, Killing Joke, and the Damned.
"[24] By the mid-1980s, bands began proliferating and became increasingly popular, including the Sisters of Mercy, the Mission, Alien Sex Fiend, the March Violets, Xmal Deutschland, the Membranes, and Fields of the Nephilim.
Record labels like Factory, 4AD and Beggars Banquet released much of this music in Europe, and through a vibrant import music market in the US, the subculture grew, especially in New York and Los Angeles, California, where many nightclubs featured "gothic/industrial" nights and bands like Black Tape for a Blue Girl, Theatre of Ice, Human Drama and The Wake became key figures for the genre to expand on an nationwide level.
According to David H. Richter, settings were framed to take place at "...ruinous castles, gloomy churchyards, claustrophobic monasteries, and lonely mountain roads".
Typical characters consisted of the cruel parent, sinister priest, courageous victor, and the helpless heroine, along with supernatural figures such as demons, vampires, ghosts, and monsters.
E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822), Edgar Allan Poe[33] (1809–1849), Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867),[33] H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), and other tragic and Romantic writers have become as emblematic of the subculture[34] as the use of dark eyeliner or dressing in black.
Baudelaire, in fact, in his preface to Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) penned lines that could serve as a sort of goth malediction:[35] C'est l'Ennui!
[36] Some people credit Jalacy "Screamin' Jay" Hawkins, perhaps best known for his 1956 song "I Put A Spell on You", as a foundation of modern goth style and music.
[41] Goth icons include several bandleaders: Siouxsie Sioux, of Siouxsie and the Banshees; Robert Smith, of the Cure; Peter Murphy, of Bauhaus; Dave Vanian, of The Damned; Rozz Williams, of Christian Death; Olli Wisdom, leader of the band Specimen[42] and keyboardist Jonathan Melton aka Jonny Slut, who evolved the Batcave style.
[48] Robert Smith,[49] Musidora, Bela Lugosi,[50] Bettie Page, Vampira, Morticia Addams,[46] Nico, Rozz Williams, David Bowie[51] and Lux Interior[51] are also style icons.
In contrast to the LARP-based Victorian and Elizabethan pomposity of the 2000s, the more Romantic side of 1980s trad-goth—mainly represented by women—was characterized by new wave/post-punk-oriented hairstyles (both long and short, partly shaved and teased) and street-compliant clothing, including black frill blouses, midi dresses or tea-length skirts, and floral lace tights, Dr. Martens, spike heels (pumps), and pointed-toe buckle boots (winklepickers), sometimes supplemented with accessories such as bracelets, chokers and bib necklaces.
In the world of Goth, nature itself lurks as a malign protagonist, causing flesh to rot, rivers to flood, monuments to crumble and women to turn into slatterns, their hair streaming and lipstick askew".
Use of standard horror film props such as swirling smoke, rubber bats, and cobwebs featured as gothic club décor from the beginning in The Batcave.
The interconnection between horror and goth was highlighted in its early days by The Hunger, a 1983 vampire film starring David Bowie, Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.
The dark comedies Beetlejuice, The Faculty, American Beauty, Wedding Crashers, and a few episodes of the animated TV show South Park portray or parody the goth subculture.
Morticia was played by Carolyn Jones in the 1964 television show The Addams Family and by Anjelica Huston in the 1991 version, and voiced by Charlize Theron in 2019 animated film.
Despite the fact that Brite's first novel was criticized by some mainstream sources for allegedly "lack[ing] a moral center: neither terrifyingly malevolent supernatural creatures nor (like Anne Rice's protagonists) tortured souls torn between good and evil, these vampires simply add blood-drinking to the amoral panoply of drug abuse, problem drinking and empty sex practiced by their human counterparts",[74] many of these so-called "human counterparts" identified with the teen angst and goth music references therein, keeping the book in print.
Upon release of a special 10th anniversary edition of Lost Souls, Publishers Weekly—the same periodical that criticized the novel's "amorality" a decade prior—deemed it a "modern horror classic" and acknowledged that Brite established a "cult audience".
On 31 October 2011, ECW Press published the Encyclopedia Gothica[80] written by author and poet Liisa Ladouceur with illustrations done by Gary Pullin.
[88] Visual contemporary graphic artists with this aesthetic include Gerald Brom, Dave McKean, and Trevor Brown as well as illustrators Edward Gorey, Charles Addams, Lorin Morgan-Richards, and James O'Barr.
[104] A study conducted by the University of Glasgow, involving 1,258 youth interviewed at ages 11, 13, 15 and 19, found goth subculture to be strongly nonviolent and tolerant, thus providing "valuable social and emotional support" to teens vulnerable to self harm and mental illness.
[105] In the weeks following the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, media reports about the teen gunmen, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, portrayed them as part of a gothic cult.
[114] Actress Christina Hendricks talked of being bullied as a goth at school and how difficult it was for her to deal with societal pressure: "Kids can be pretty judgmental about people who are different.
[115] On 11 August 2007, while walking through Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Lancashire, a young couple, Sophie Lancaster and Robert Maltby, were attacked by a group of teenagers.
