Bela Lugosi’s Dead and I Don’t Feel So Good Either: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music

If rock ’n’ roll is the blues with an emphasis on adolescent sex, then goth rock is rock ’n’ roll with complete dysfunction-where death, sex, and madness combine into a heady potion. Gothic imagery and influence have skulked at the margins of rock music for decades, and even the blues have plenty of subject matter-mortality, eroticism, insanity, and loss-in common with what came to be known, in the late seventies and early eighties, simply as “goth.”