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| ISBN-13: | 9780253111562 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2005 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 409 KB |
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Goth's Dark Empire
By Carol Siegel
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2005 Carol SiegelAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34593-6
CHAPTER 1
PERILS FOR THE PURE
Goth Cultures and Abstinence Programs
In an epilogue to his history of Gothic rock and roll music and cultures, The Dark Reign of Gothic Rock, Dave Thompson speculates that because the 1990s second wave of Goth began in America, it has been characterized by a harsh, infuriated seriousness that the original movement lacked (242). Thompson seems bemused by what he perceives as an American tendency to treat rock and roll as a form of revolution. Why are American teens so humorlessly angry? What are they angry about? Donna Gaines is more illuminating on this topic. Throughout her classic study of 1980s heavy metal fans, Teenage Wasteland, Gaines insists that music cultures function as a kind of religion for young people who are denied realistic preparation for the adult world and instead are subjected to "custodial schooling" and "infantilizing rules and regulations" necessitated by society's failure to teach the young how to protect themselves (259). This is nowhere more evident than in the dominant culture's treatment of young people's sexuality, to which rock and roll cultures are an obvious reaction formation. Trapped within a culture that withholds from them (by design, as I will discuss) almost all useful information about sex, and thus doomed to err in great numbers, as the United State's appalling rate of unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases among teens reflects, young people form radical countercultures around their musical tastes. And this makes sense because of the nature of music.
As Foucault wisely proclaimed, "One is not radical because one pronounces a few words; no, the essence of being radical is physical" ("Clarifications on the Question of Power," 191). Due to the physicality of human responses to music, the inescapability of feeling its strong rhythms in the body, rock music has become a stronghold of American physical resistance to conservative politics. At this point it seems necessary to stop briefly to address the usual cultural studies position, derived from the Frankfurt School, that this resistance is meaningless because all popular music will inevitably be commodified and thus fuel the very capitalist system it was meant to oppose. Leaving aside Paul Hodkinson's argument, discussed in the introduction, that Goth music has always been primarily distributed through small independent networks controlled by Goths themselves, one can also recognize that even the most corporately controlled rock and roll still has a somatic existence outside the marketplace, where it enters the body's rhythms and creates feelings. Music gets inside of us. "Not only is rock music ... an integral part of the life of many people, but it is a cultural initiator: to like rock, to like a certain kind of rock rather than another, is also a way of life, a manner of reacting; it is a whole set of tastes and attitudes," and thus the music "offers the possibility of a relation which is intense, strong, alive ... through which the listener affirms himself" or herself (Foucault, "Contemporary Music and Its Public," 316). Rock and roll, with its long history of association with the rituals of youthful sexual initiation, gets inside the physical movements and postures we associate with freedom of sexual expression.
As anyone looking at a rock and roll performance of any type can easily see, part of the music's intensity comes from its self-conscious symbolism of eroticized rebellion. So the question should perhaps be not whether rock and roll is understood by its fans as rebellious, but whether it can be the vehicle for the overthrow of corporate capitalism and the system of bourgeois sexuality which serves as its foundation. To that question, I must answer that it has not yet succeeded in doing so, but this failure does not mean that we need pay no attention to the function of rock and roll as a technology of resistance for the young. Like Foucault's, "my ethic is ... to be respectful when something singular arises, to be intransigent when power offends against the universal" ("Is It Useless to Revolt?" 134). And of those who revolt through their musical choices, I can only say, as he does of the criminals, "madmen," and political revolutionaries whose activities put them into opposition to the dominant powers,
One does not have to be in solidarity with them. One does not have to maintain that these confused voices sound better than the others and express the ultimate truth. For there to be a sense in listening to them and in searching for what they want to say, it is sufficient to say that they exist and that they have against them so much, which is set up to silence them. ("Is It Useless to Revolt?" 133-34)
By focusing on Goth rock and roll cultures, I do not mean to imply that they stand out as the most radical node in the area of resistance to conservative normalization of youthful sexuality; however, Goth is an important object of study for many reasons, including the rapidity with which Goths have been demonized and forced underground at the end of the millennium.
And it is a shame! Foucauldian sex radical that I am, the essence of Goth was expressed for me by the Revolting Cocks' 1993 parodic cover of Rod Stewart's imbecilic 1978 disco anthem, "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" Like many covers produced by alternative rockers in the early nineties, this song presents a pointed contrast to the original that suggests the depth of changes in attitudes about sex and love. As Ian Buchanan argues, such revisions within popular music are meaningful because they give "a voice to teenagers [and other subculturists] who, in most senses of the word do not otherwise have one." He sees this sort of revision of popular music as specifically Deleuzian in that they "use the voice it gives them to enunciate themselves differently and in so doing make habitable the objective conditions of their existence ... set[ting] in motion a becoming-minor — or, what amounts to the same thing, a becoming-public of the otherwise 'private' individual — which as Deleuze and Guattari have said, is the initiation of a line of flight that is an escape" (185).
While this parodic song cannot, of course, be considered representative of all Goth music, it nonetheless helps define a particularly Goth form of deterritorialization. Because the cover is done in the Goth/Industrial mode, using electronic equipment to distort and reassemble samples, as well as to shape the instrumentals and vocals supplied by the band into dissonant noise, it participates in the process Robert Walser rightly attributes to rap: it critiques the values and assumptions of a past musical culture while simultaneously articulating its own, on the level of sound itself (294, 303). Sampling, in particular, literally brings back to life dead youth cultures, and sampling within Goth rock tends to then subject the resurrected sounds to a dissection meant to reveal traces of the sickness these corpse-songs once carried.
Stewart's song, through a narrative of a one-night stand that works out so well that one can assume the pair will continue as lovers, combines an accurate enough portrayal of meat-market discotheque folkways with sugary romance. In fact the song's subtitle is "Sugar, Sugar." Gender stereotypes define the behavior of the two lovers, who are heterosexual, despite disco's association with gay cultures. The girl is appropriately passive: "She sits alone waiting for suggestions." When the man propositions her, she replies with a girlish request for "a dime so I can call my mother." Even the song's descriptions of their bodily responses conform to images of innocent female weakness and passionate male strength: "her heart is gently pounding," while "[h]is heart's beating like a drum." The long, hook-rich refrain exemplifies the repetitive beats of that especially unimaginative and formulaic disco music aimed at the segment of the heterosexual bourgeoisie who, at the time of the song's release, had belatedly decided to experiment with sex with strangers, but generally only as a means of seeking marital partners.
The Revolting Cocks give this insipid song the send-up it deserves in a cover version filled with ominous Industrial noise, a hint of seemingly terrified shrieks following the line "Relax baby now we are alone," and hilarious substitutions for the stupidest lyrics, like "gimme a buck so I can buy a rubber." Guest vocalist Trent Reznor's alternately leering and panting vocals and his sardonic phrasings twist the song's original mood into something dark and strange. But the heart of the cover's darkness can be found in its suggestions of the changes in the physical circumstances of casual sexuality in the eleven years between Stewart's disco days and this song's release.
Today a young person bent on casual sex is more likely to be preoccupied with getting a condom than with calling home to tell lies to a concerned parent, and her sex partner is more likely to be apologetic because he's "out of KY jelly" (as in the Revolting Cocks' chortling rendition) than because he has no milk or coffee, as in Stewart's original. But more importantly, the reason for these changes, the reason that flesh can no longer meet flesh in an innocent, naturalized atmosphere where "all the birds are singing," is that every sexual encounter now carries with it the threat of disease transmission. And this implicitly accounts for the transformation of the happy bopping of Stewart's song into the groaning, crashing, mechanistic dissonance of the Revolting Cocks'. Notable, too, is the later song's lack of moralizing and its refusal to offer any alternative to what it depicts as the near-death experience that bar pickups have become. In classic Goth style, it shows us today's horrific sexscape and then makes the very horror sexy and delightful.
Writing about dark music, in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari provide a description useful to understanding Goth music's treatment of sexuality:
Music is never tragic, music is joy. But there are times when it necessarily gives us a taste for death; not so much happiness as dying happily, being extinguished. Not as a function of a death instinct it allegedly awakens in us, but of a dimension proper to its sound assemblage, to its sound machine, the moment that must be confronted, the moment the transversal turns into a line of abolition. Peace and exasperation. (299, emphasis Deleuze and Guattari's)
In an increasingly grim world where spontaneous pleasure — once a near universal youthful dream — seems to be receding ever more rapidly, Goth offers a truly alternative vision because of the courage with which it confronts our new reality principles. But all that may soon come to an end, now that Goth has become the most demonized counterculture of the new millennium. Although it may seem premature to start eulogizing a countercultural movement that is not dead yet, every Goth adores a good funeral and there is something quintessentially Goth about the very concept of decline. So in the spirit of Goth's celebration of dissolution and decay, this chapter begins the task of unearthing the hidden history of Goth's suppression, commemorating its continued resistance, and memorializing its gloriously dark empire.
Goth's darkest hour came on April 20, 1999, when Dylan Kleibold and Eric Harris opened fire on their classmates and teachers at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, killing thirteen and wounding twenty-three. Despite the lack of any evidence that the shooters considered themselves Goths and repeated testimony from surviving classmates that the boys were excluded from the school's reputedly Goth clique, "the Trench Coat Mafia," the mainstream media quickly applied this label to them, and a frenzy of anti-Goth sentiment followed. That relatively few adults outside rock and roll music subcultures had any conception of what Goth might mean to the young in no way impeded the wildfire spread of the idea that the nation's middle and high schools harbored darkly dressed murderous psychopaths called Goths who were likely to kill any other adolescents with whom they came in contact, but especially those whom conservative adults usually consider good kids: athletes and the exceptionally religious. Because of the extreme dangers Goth was deemed to pose, parents and teachers began a campaign to suppress anything associated with it among the young. Their success was reflected in the rapid shrinking and retreat underground of the hitherto enormous and diverse group of intertwined subcultures variously called Goth and Darkwave culture by those who identify with their music, literature, film, fashions, aesthetics, and philosophy.
Obviously those, like myself, who enjoy Goth culture see this as a tragedy. However, the decline of Goth's influence over the young is also to be lamented by those not under its sway, primarily because of the sophisticated and brave willingness to engage with difficult questions about sexuality and gender that Goth has represented since its beginnings. Some comments on Goth and Industrial music and art by Csaba Toth help elucidate how Goth attitudes inflect sexual styles: "They've dealt with their feelings of alienation from society by reinventing themselves as 'monsters'" (96); "They position themselves as reporters or tour guides to the macabre, rarely its victims" (96); "In [the music video] Gothic land of the end of the long cycle (of the post-industrial war boom), boundaries between the 'normal' and the pathologized 'other' collapse, and the 'normal' is often more dreadful than its 'unnatural' opposite" (88). Consequently it is fairly easy to understand why for many people sexual "queerness" of all kinds is associated with Goth, why clubs often combine Goth and fetish nights, and why many shops and online emporia that cater to Goths also sell supplies for bondage and S/M.
As many of the postings that appeared on www.gothic.net after Columbine tell us, a central principle of the Goth scene is open-mindedness, especially about gendered behaviors and characteristics and about sexualities condemned by the mainstream. A "Goth scout" who goes by the name of Voodoo lists some of the "general ideals the vast majority of Goths can agree on": "Most Goths prize individuality and consider tolerance and acceptance of others among the highest virtues." Preston A. Elder reports he has "found that the Goth scene tends not to discriminate on sexual preference." Lady Chaos testifies, "I would say without a doubt that I have yet to meet a more tolerant, open, and non-judgemental group in all my life." Michael S. Burg, a self-identified San Francisco Goth, writes that the subculture's "propensity is ... towards a community that accepts [all interested young people] in spite of their differences. The only discrimination practiced by goths would be the occasional dress code required by various nightclub owners." Hodkinson emphasizes that Goth deliberately creates an "androgynous environment" which "loosen[s] the links between stylistic facets of gender and the fixed sexual categories of male and female" (55, 48). Although he ultimately judges Goth "transgression of boundaries of gender and sexuality" to be only "partial," Hodkinson finds the rejection of fixed, conventional gender identities one of the most significant features of this subculture (197). If the ordinary world of the young is now a place where they are driven to near madness, suicide, or murder by continual group and administrative policing of gender and sexuality, as numerous Goths and nerds posting in response to Katz's "Voices from the Hellmouth" claim, then the Goth subculture represents an area of escape from what many young people refer to as "norming."
Long before May third of 1999, when an ACLU press release reported that high school students had written in with "literally hundreds of complaints" about violation of their rights based on their Goth dress or demeanor, the forces of normalization had begun an attack on young people who could not or would not conform to what could be called the new morality of the end of the twentieth century. To understand this conflict is to begin to understand Goth, the second wave of which began rising during the same time period.
In Goth's first wave, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, styles that would come to define the movement were adopted by a relatively small number of people in a few major cities, most notably London. These early Goths were usually involved in rock and roll scenes informed by the Punk anti-pop ethic but might also be enthusiasts of Gothic horror literature, especially the works of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. Intellectualism was one of the salient characteristics of Goth's first wave, and it was expressed primarily through an emphasis on literature and high art. Dave Thompson credibly argues that "today's Goths, the black-clad, white-faced, ghoulishly grave individuals for whom Bela still remains undead, have little to do with the Gothic Rock that was created and christened in the first frightening years of Thatcher's Britain" (10). In place of the early Goth "ideal of 19th-century Romanticism and beauty," the American Goth wave that began with Trent Reznor's 1989 album Pretty Hate Machine's fusion of Goth and Industrial gave severely disaffected young people a sound expressive of their rage and pain (243).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Goth's Dark Empire by Carol Siegel. Copyright © 2005 Carol Siegel. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. Perils for the Pure: Goth Cultures and Abstinence Programs2. In Memoriam Darkwave Hippies: Angela Carter through a Goth Lens3. That Obscure Object of Desire Revisited: Poppy Z. Brite and the Goth Hero as Masochist4. Boys Don't Cry: Brandon Teena's Stories5. Heterosexualizing the Femme Boy: From Tea and Sympathy to Crime and Punishment in Suburbia6. Identity Hunter A: Asian American Goths and New MasculinitiesConclusion: Goth's Come UndoneAppendix: A Discography of Goth Rock Artists, by Don Anderson NotesBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"Siegel (English and American studies, Washington State Univ., Vancouver) counters the dearth of research into goth and the hostility of post—Columbine representations with a sympathetic, compelling examination of goth subculture as premised on gender fluidity, with sadomasochistic practices as 'radical technologies of resistance.' This argument is strongly informed by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, presupposing some familiarity with their arguments. To this end, goth is a revolutionary mode of becoming in the face of alienating culture. Methodologically, Siegel draws loosely from many online discussions with goths, but more so on portrayals of goth through music, novels, and cinema, including Boys Don't Cry and The Matrix. For example, Siegel examines Poppy Z. Brite's novels to foreground the male hero as a masochist challenging the gender binary by 'queering' masculinity. Siegel also challenges perceptions of goth racism with attention to Asian American youths involved in goth. This book is sometimes difficult to follow. Chapter one opens with gender and sexuality in goth—related music and closes with a critique of abstinence—only education. Linkages between such elements depend on careful readers; such readers will be rewarded with a provocative analysis of the challenge and resistance goth desire represents within 'America's culture of denial.' Summing Up: Recommended. Upper—division undergraduates and above."
Siegel (English and American studies, Washington State Univ., Vancouver) counters the dearth of research into goth and the hostility of post—Columbine representations with a sympathetic, compelling examination of goth subculture as premised on gender fluidity, with sadomasochistic practices as 'radical technologies of resistance.' This argument is strongly informed by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, presupposing some familiarity with their arguments. To this end, goth is a revolutionary mode of becoming in the face of alienating culture. Methodologically, Siegel draws loosely from many online discussions with goths, but more so on portrayals of goth through music, novels, and cinema, including Boys Don't Cry and The Matrix. For example, Siegel examines Poppy Z. Brite's novels to foreground the male hero as a masochist challenging the gender binary by 'queering' masculinity. Siegel also challenges perceptions of goth racism with attention to Asian American youths involved in goth. This book is sometimes difficult to follow. Chapter one opens with gender and sexuality in goth—related music and closes with a critique of abstinence—only education. Linkages between such elements depend on careful readers; such readers will be rewarded with a provocative analysis of the challenge and resistance goth desire represents within 'America's culture of denial.' Summing Up: Recommended. Upper—division undergraduates and above.
Siegel (English and American studies, Washington State Univ., Vancouver) counters the dearth of research into goth and the hostility of post—Columbine representations with a sympathetic, compelling examination of goth subculture as premised on gender fluidity, with sadomasochistic practices as 'radical technologies of resistance.' This argument is strongly informed by French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, presupposing some familiarity with their arguments. To this end, goth is a revolutionary mode of becoming in the face of alienating culture. Methodologically, Siegel draws loosely from many online discussions with goths, but more so on portrayals of goth through music, novels, and cinema, including Boys Don't Cry and The Matrix. For example, Siegel examines Poppy Z. Brite's novels to foreground the male hero as a masochist challenging the gender binary by 'queering' masculinity. Siegel also challenges perceptions of goth racism with attention to Asian American youths involved in goth. This book is sometimes difficult to follow. Chapter one opens with gender and sexuality in goth—related music and closes with a critique of abstinence—only education. Linkages between such elements depend on careful readers; such readers will be rewarded with a provocative analysis of the challenge and resistance goth desire represents within 'America's culture of denial.' Summing Up: Recommended. Upper—division undergraduates and above.