I discovered goth music about the same time I discovered Anne Rice. I was in the sixth grade and spent much of my time listening to Siouxsie & the Banshees on my portable record player and summoning ghosts with my Ouija board, then I found the paperback of Interview with the Vampire on my parents bookshelf and never gave it back. I still have it. I still have the Ouija board too but now it’s mostly for decorative purposes. Mostly.
That’s the interesting thing about goth. For a music-based subculture it has a remarkable longevity that spans generations from Elder Goths to Baby Bats. Bands may come and go, music evolves, fashion ebbs and flows but goth will never die. I may wear less eyeliner and there’s a lot less velvet in my wardrobe, but I love cemeteries, horror movies, and prefer my skies overcast. My name means “dark as night” in Arabic and I occasionally faint for no apparent reason. I was a spooky kid who grew up to be a spooky adult.
Depending on your age, goth probably evokes a different image; the sulky South Park goth kids, or Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice, but before goth was “goth” it started with music, specifically the post-punk band Joy Division. Bauhaus, Siouxsie & the Banshees, and The Cure followed and with it came a DIY aesthetic mixing punk, Victorian mourning and memento mori iconography. Over the years it has evolved to encompass other subcultures creating splinter groups: vampire goths, lolita goths, cyber goths, rock-a-billy goths, pastel goths, and corporate goths, which I suppose would be me.
Goth, of course, comes from gothic. It’s a nebulous word that can be applied to almost anything; architecture, fashion, art, film, music or literature. But it generally evokes the dark and the eerie, an unheimlich quality (as the Germans say). There are usually references to death and the supernatural, the creepy and the kooky. Mysterious and spooky.
But 168 years before Charles Addams’ The Addams Family first appeared in The New Yorker, Horace Walpole wrote what is considered the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto in 1764. It was considered a bit trashy at the time, but Otranto introduced the horror genre as we know it and is the blueprint for almost every episode of Scooby-Doo. Walpole also coined a term that would come to encompass goth culture: gloomth. It’s not an attractive word. It doesn’t so much roll off the tongue but awkwardly fall off. Gloomths would be those who turn wallowing in melancholy into an art form. Since the Graveyard poets of the eighteenth century (Robert Blair, Edward Young and Thomas Gray), there have been those who languish over tombstones contemplating mortality, who meander through ruins on foggy nights, those who embrace the dark side and look fabulous doing it.
Walpole may have been the pioneer, but my personal favorite of this first generation of gothic novels is The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis. Published in 1796, it is one of the craziest, most over the top books I’ve ever read, even by today’s standards. It’s like a horror movie mixed with a soap opera, but set in a monastery. It’s bonkers.
The gothic literature of the Age of Enlightenment was often a throw-back to the more superstitious Middle Ages and there is something anachronistic about goth and the gothic. Edward Gorey’s work spans from the 1960s to the 90s but his characters were Edwardian or from the 1920s. Gorey didn’t consider himself a goth but his unique blend of morbid humor and eccentric style makes him a goth icon. The biography Born to Be Posthumous: the Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery is illuminating. Turns out he was a huge Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan.
Jane Austen might have created the first goth in Northanger Abbey. The protagonist is 17 year-old girl obsessed with gothic novels including The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. It’s also perhaps the first instance of Goth-shaming. Unlike Radcliffe’s Catherine Morland, Emily the Strange is a weirdo and proud of it. Like Hot Topic, Emily was after my time, but if this was around when I was 13 I would have been all over it. It certainly would have been more age appropriate than Anne Rice.
But I’ll end where this all began, the music. Joy Division was formed in 1978 and their debut album Unknown Pleasures was described as having “gothic overtones.” While they aren’t strictly considered a goth band theirs is the sound that started it all. Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division written by the former bass player Peter Hook, who with the rest of the members of the band went on to form New Order after the suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis. RIP.
Death is a constant theme in goth. It’s an aesthetic of mourning drag, skulls and tombstones, but it’s not just a culture of doom and gloomth. Picture a peacock. Now picture a peacock that’s entirely black. That is what goth is to me: dramatic, impractical, ostentatious, romantic, glamorous, all under a cloak of darkness.
So my Darklings, on this World Goth Day I recommend putting on something black, picking up a book and contemplating your mortality. Now, if you’ll excuse me, all of this writing has made me quite weary and I fear I may swoon. Plus, there’s a big black bird on my shelf that keeps staring at me and it’s freaking me out. Be right back, someone’s knocking at my door…
Leila Taylor is Creative Director at BPL and author of Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul. She lives in Brooklyn where she collects typewriters, Victorian mourning stationery and hangs out in cemeteries for fun. Media vita in morte sumus.
Add new comment