Born in the 80s, goth is still going strong. Four devotees discuss the music and fashion and how love of the macabre draws together a warm and friendly scene
Goths are perhaps the most maligned of all subcultures. Over the decades, they have been unfairly blamed for high-school shootings, depression in teenagers and antisocial behaviour. In reality, goths are a collective of people bound by a shared love of fashion, music and art.
Last week I was on Bad Vibes on CFRO. This is the set-list from that show. My bit starts with The Vampire Club by Voltaire, and you can listen to it here. From that point on Marc Godfrey and I were picking from a list of music that I brought with me depending on how the conversation went. I came armed with almost three hours of music for a one hour interview, with everything picked for a reason. What I want to do for the next little while is run through those choices, including the ones that we didn't get to, and talk about why I picked them.
Don't forget to tune your radio receiving devices to 100.5 MHz on the frequency modulated (FM) band today at 3:30 to listen to me tell stories of the glorious past like a goth Grandpa Simpson.
This morning I had a little photoshoot, where I was the subject not the photographer, over by Holy Rosary Cathedral on Richards Street. It is for an upcoming article in The Province related to the "Gothic Migrations" 12th Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association. The International Gothic Association is out of Lancaster University and devoted the academic study of the Gothic founded in, but extending well beyond, the Gothic sub-genre of 19th C.
So the power went out on Sunday evening thanks to a telephone pole rotting (It's worth noting that Vancouver is, as far as I know, the only major city that still uses above-ground wiring on wooden posts downtown). So what are a couple of crusty old goths to do?
One of the things that makes the Gothic subculture (Goth) very difficult to define, even for insiders, is the overlap with what I will call allied scenes.
