As the Goth turns..

[gwen]

So, with Ceremony closing down, I've started to reflect on how goth
has been changing for a while.  I still remember in my early days as a
gothling (babybat), people were still very much darker, dressing in
different times, costuming much more than we've seen in the past
decade.  And when I've gone to Ceremony in the past few years, the
people there are even different than our industrial practicality of
'97, dressing more in prefab outfits bought at Hot Topic or online
goth outlets.  I don't think this is bad, just different.

But the thing I've noted all this while is that goth has gotten
brighter.  The music is more dance-oriented, the outfits are more
"perkygoth", and even the publications that I've seen have been more
comic.  Emo is the new goth, but it's really much more about the mopey
than the morbid.  This isn't bad, mind you, don't get me wrong, but I
have wondered why we were so bleak back in the late 80's/early 90's
than now.

Then I happened upon this comment in Irregular Webcomic's #2085's
annotations about the Cold War and the threat of Nuclear War:

   ..in the 1980s, we were worried about something that would affect us.

   That would kill us.

   At any time.

   With little or no warning.

   Live with that for any amount of time, and you do become somewhat
inured to it. Life must go on, after all. We went to school, we learnt
our schoolwork. It was no good arguing to the teacher that we may all
die tomorrow - you just had to knuckle down and do the work. But in
the back of our minds, we knew that we might die tomorrow. We always
knew that. It never went away.

And I realized that is what probably really inspired the original
goths when they sprung out of punk, thus the scene was much darker for
it.

Thoughts?

-- 
Gwendolyn R. Schmidt