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Rambling About Goth

Submitted by Atratus on

So now that Decadence has come and gone and Gothic BC is now quite officially ten years old I'd like to look back a little a talk about what this site means to me and why I do it. I don't think that is going to be possible without also getting in to how I see the Gothic subculture, or "Goth culture" as the mainstream press has deigned to label it in the last couple of years.

Perhaps that's as good a place to start as any. When and how did our so-ill-defined-even-"we"-can't-explain-it post-punk subculture of the early 80's inadventently become substantial enough to lose the "sub" and be culture? Goths are showing up on the society page of the New York Times. Right now the FIT Museum in NYC is featuring Gothic fashion with long-time Goth fashion maven Kambriel showing right along with Alexander McQueen, John Galliano of Christian Dior, Anna Sui, Olivier Theyskens, Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy, Jun Takahashi of Undercover, and Yohji Yamamoto. That's just a couple samples.

Gothic BC is ten years old, but the Gothic subculture began emerging from punk thirty years go. By the time this site went up Goth had invented itself, reinvented itself, and was entering into a third round of reinvention. And here we are now. We're crossing generations. Somewhere there are Goth grandparents giving their children stuffed bats for their grandchildren's cribs. Hell, Ikea sells stuffed bats (I have two for my cats).

And we're everywhere, and strangely well connected. I could walk into a Goth club in just about any major English-speaking city on the planet and expect to know someone. Since so many of us of a technical bent we've been meeting online since before most "normals" even knew what e-mail was. Wanting to meet the people we knew from Usenet spawned gatherings like Convergence, Whitby, Blue Moon, Goth Cruise, and others.

Right, I'm rambling. Clearly I have a lot to say here and no plan whatsoever. Isn't that pretty much blogging in a nutshell? Stay tuned for another pointless prosaic pontification coming... next time I feel like it.