Goth Musical Styles

Central to this book are the assertions that goth music, rather than being one equivalent subcultural practice among many, is the glue that holds the goth scene together; that the rubrics “goth” and the compound “goth/industrial” are elastic, encompassing a surprising degree of musical diversity; and that goth music is “glocal,” broadly shared around the world while incorporating regional variation. ¹ To help illustrate these observations, we first turn to two well-known events with which the authors have personal experience. These events, Dracula’s Ball in Philadelphia, USA, and Göttertanz in Leipzig, Germany, have markedly different characters and take place on separate continents; together, however, they present an interesting cross-section of glocal goth musical activity. Comparing the playlists, practices, and general tenor of these two very different events foregrounds the extraordinary variation in music and mood that characterizes modern goth. Developing from this comparison, we then offer a more general overview of the diversity of goth musical styles. To accomplish this, we make use of four provisional categories proposed in Van Elferen’s Gothic Music and analyze representative musical examples. These considerations of particular songs highlight qualities of goth music that will be scrutinized in more detail in Chapter Two. We conclude this chapter with a consideration of goth media that relates the glocal character of contemporary goth to new modes of musical production, distribution, and consumption. Here we assert that modern digital technologies, by both internationalizing goth and fostering increasingly specific sub-sub-genres, necessitate a reconsideration of older models of musical subcultures emphasizing regional character and variation. Ideas of a “goth scene” or discrete subculture must be rethought in what Van Dijck refers to in the title of her book as the modern “culture of connectivity.”