In comments, Eldritch and I were discussing why some bands seem reluctant to call themselves “goth” even though they seem to have that style.
Eldritch gave the example of Dr Arthur Krause who said “Some people call it goth and we are fine with that.”
I note that the TRAITRS song I just posted sounds a lot like early Cure, but their bandcamp page labels it as “punk / coldwave / post-punk”.
Is that kinda thing common? If so why?
Look Siouxsie straight in the eye and tell her why.
You’re only really goth if you deny it
omg for some reason this made me think of the cartoon character/avatar/sprite Tina the Troubled Teen saying “I hate my stupid friends!” and I just spent the last half hour looking up the history of that.
Edit: Something like this:
Tons of bands are like this, and it isn’t just with the “goth” label. I think that artists hate to pigeonhole themselves, because it makes them feel derivative.
Well, I think it’s a little different with punk and metal, bc a band is more likely to want to call themselves punk or metal. Now someone may disagree that they are in fact punk. And they may disagree that the band is a certain kind of metal. But the band itself won’t be as reluctant to identify as such.
…I think? I dunno I’m not an expert.
The Cure are considered Post-Punk, sometimes even New Wave. It depends on the era of their music.
Sisters tend to fit into in the genre known as Gothic Rock, which is uniquely different it’s sound.
Souxie is more on the Post-Punk side, but understand it’s not unusual for bands to cross genres as they aren’t trying to be a specific genre, they are the product of their influences and creativity.
There are stylistic distinctions as well as differences in musical origins that separate lots of music which still gets grouped into the generalized term of “goth”.
To the people who are passionate about music, knowing and representing those distinctions is often important.
That’s pretty interesting, because it suggests a whole historiography of music appreciation. Like, the term “post-punk” was meaningless before punk, right? So imagine there’s some new groundbreaking genre a couple years from now, and everything we’re listening to is re-contextualized to determine how “proto-NewGroundbreakingGenre” it is. And the people who listen to NewGroundbreakingGenre literally hear music differently than we do.
I am in no way minimizing your comment – I think it’s pretty awesome when some DJ puts on a song and gives it a genre name that I’ve never heard of before. Clearly they spend a lot of time listening to music and can identify distinctions that I can’t.
Well I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that no artist sets out to create for a specific genre usually. They are just out to create art. Genres are usually an afterthought created by people trying to categorize things. The term goth was popular back in the '80s and '90s but was often assigned to people Etc who were considered outcasts by popular culture. Most don’t willingly seek to be outcast. Or considered outcast. Even though many of us have chosen to embrace It ultimately.
I don’t think post-punk was anything that was ever widely used in the time a lot of music that started it was created. The name itself literally meaning after the punk explosion of the 1970s. Itself splintering into not only the goth movement, but also new wave, industrial, and this little known genera that popped up in the 90s called alternative. Another non descript nom de plum. Post punk is a bit more embraced today I think because it’s a bit more artsy and catch all.
But for me if you’re in a minor key, or you wail like Andrew Eldritch or Siouxie and her Banshees. You’re in goth territory. If your subjects are introspective, dark and emotional, as bill engval might have said. You might be a
redneckgoth.From what I understand, “gothic” was used initially as a kind of insult when describing art or an aesthetic style. It meant “uncivilized” and “barbaric”.
Then there’s the apocryphal story of Bauhaus describing their music as “gothic” when compared to other contemporary bands, deliberately embracing that meaning of barbaric and uncultured.
From then on the music press ran with the term, but as with most genres it’s a blunt tool for describing a sound or a style. A lot of bands from the same era who had some crossover or shared elements with goth bands were pigeon-holed as goth themselves, which they felt was restrictive and didn’t accurately describe their sound.
For example, listen to The Cure’s “Hanging Garden” and Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. Both songs share a similar claustrophobic atmosphere but beyond that they sound very different.
I think it stems more from the Victorian Gothic than it does the Visigoths. A lot of specific goth fashion and steam punk are Victorian remixes. Frocks, frills, frills, waistcoats, and ruffles all in black. Victorian times also marked a particular obsession with death and the occult. Which should set your goth sensors tingling. Victorian traditions and rituals, surrounding death along with their embrace of death. It was something else. Something eschewed by more squeamish so called proper cultures that came after.
Also didn’t you hear? Bella Lugosi’s Back. Heh
The use of the term “gothic” in the Victorian era initially meant “barbaric”, but people ran with the description and it came to define what you mentioned: the interest in death and the occult, tragedy and darkness.
Good point fair enough LOL
