The Death of a Scene

So you’ve probably been poking around Alterati for a little while, maybe you’ve wondered a bit “why the weird name?” or “what’s up with the whole ‘inside scoop / outside culture’ thing?” Well, by way of getting at that in my usual “tangential analogy” style, I’d like to talk about the death of a scene. I think in that you might get a better glimpse of what I at least get out of our branding.

This death could be of any scene, but I’ll use a case I’m well acquainted with.

I’ve always had the sneaking suspicion that too much success is a poison pill that somehow turns everything into it’s opposite, almost like a one-way pass to Star Trek style bizarro-world. Case in point, Metallica is the heaviest band on Earth one day, a decade and a half later they’re distributing DVDs of their group therapy sessions.

But I’m not here to talk to you about “Metallica As Metaphor For Cultural Decomposition And The Degradation Of Everything ‘METAL’” today. That’d be too damned easy, Lars may as well have painted a gigantic “NOT HIP” sign on his forehead right before testifying to the senate. Nor am I going to use metal, though that could reap it’s own reward.

No, I want to talk about a scene that became it’s own opposite: the goth scene.

To date myself, I wandered around the periphery of this “scene” long after its birth, but a bit before black lipstick and Marilyn Manson (let alone Anton LeVay) were iconic. None of us thought of ourselves as goth, but we hung out in smoky clubs late at night where they played Bauhaus, or in Mausoleums reading Baudelaire, so I can’t totally fault the people who had such misconceptions.

I’m sure some of you still only know it through the cultural stereotypes that overtook it: exaggerated black eyeliner and clothes, the morose music, the “gother-than-thou” attitude masking a complete lack of socialization or indeed personality. Granted, these things always existed to some extent within the many groupings of friends, related sub-cultures, memes and tropes that got retroactively called “the scene.” This is in part how a stereotype perpetuates itself in the first place.

However, those surface trappings that really caught on and branded the scene were for the most part accidental. What wasn’t borrowed from the scenes that immediately preceded it were often merely a matter of convenience. Most of the goth kids in the late 80s or early 90s just wore black because they didn’t have to change their clothes as often if they did. As Neil Gaiman pointed out some time
ago in his blog, there’s simply no worrying about which pants match which shirt. (When you’re as busy as Neil, this is probably a fashion to keep in vogue.)

Everything that constituted this scene beneath the surface a decade and a half ago has been replaced by its opposite, even while the surface remained more or less the same. And this “social polarization” is what I’d like to focus on.

This will not be a comprehensive history. Not only would it require a whole lot more than 2,000 words to fully explore, I simply don’t have the inclination to do it. To make my point, it simply isn’t necessary. So if I don’t mention your favorite shade of black hair dye (number one, duh) don’t feel slighted. This is merely a case-in-point, a “thought experiment,” if I might borrow an often used expression of Einstein’s for such a plebeian use. (Don’t worry, I won’t return ‘ir with any diseases.)

What common thread was this scene woven out of in the beginning? I’m not talking about “It all began with Siouxsie and the Banshees,” ”no it all began with Morissey,” “no it all began with Switchblade Symphony!” (No, it really didn’t.)  These are all outcroppings of what, exactly? What attracted these people to each other so that they could be stereotyped in a cultural lineup as one “scene”?

I thought about this for a couple days, and got nothing useful. I even considered scratching this article as a horrible idea. Well, the jury is still out on that last bit, but I did have my “eureka!” It hit me when I was sitting in an Olive Garden, of all places. (No, I don’t recommend the food. Yes, I do recommend the $5.95 all you can eat soup, salad and bread stick lunch.)

At it’s birth, the goth scene was a scene composed entirely of outsiders. The one thing that everyone involved had in common was that they were outside all other scenes. As a rule of thumb they were often on the intellectual and morbid side, yet they – we – weren’t classifiable as nerds. In high school we were the kids others didn’t beat up because they were afraid we would snap, or conjure Satan right there in homeroom. There is some sort of deeply rooted limbic system response in predators to perceived insanity, or such a high degree of otherness- fear. They might be able to take you down in a second, but they suddenly just don’t have the stomach for it.

You could make an interesting investigation into the musical and ideological underpinnings of this clustering of mini-scenes which people later called “goth” culture. The term “goth” itself was co-opted from a variety of telling sources, from the Germanic tribe to the art, architecture and genres of fiction later associated with the name. It’s music arguably came out of late (first-wave) Punk and Euroclash, much of the aesthetic and ideological sensibility came equally from the Romantic and Victorian writers and 19th and 20th century German Philosophers.

In this specific instance, the commonality of “otherness” sticks out, and is sufficient for us to dig a little deeper. (This is even evident in some of the first dateable uses of the term: ”The first dateable use of the term “gothic” in relation to post-punk music was by Tony Wilson, who described Joy Division as gothic compared with the pop mainstream on a BBC TV programme, “Something Else” (15/9/79), when Tony Wilson and Steve Morris were interviewed.” (Ref.)

To a point, this common thread is even responsible for the later co-branding of the goth scene with the musically divergent industrial scene. This co-branding most likely occurred for utilitarian reasons: because there simply weren’t enough people to fill the clubs in those days unless you were drawing from two subcultures. Despite an often uneasy tension between the hardcore fanatics of both camps, “goths” and “rivetheads” have a distant camaraderie, like a silent acknowledgement of solidarity in estrangement.

Many bands over the years that followed helped to bring much of what has come to be known as “goth” to other subcultures. Sisters of Mercy, Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson, Type O Negative, The Cruxshadows, and many others played their part in this process.

Fashions and easily parroted hooks were carried from one to the next. It’s just how the market works.

In that inevitable fusion and percolation of groups, something both interesting and terrible happened. The cultural badges used by the hardcore “scenesters” of that original scene, usually worn to differentiate them from everyone else, became acceptable. Many people had to go further and further into body modification, tribalism, or plain drug abuse both to test their own limits, and to keep themselves ahead of the curve. A smaller minority didn’t seem to realize that this change occurred, and still seem to be beating the same drum, now broken. As Mike Patton said in the album that became Faith No More’s eulogy to themselves, “you can dress up the dead man, but you can’t bring him back to life.” The rest of us saw what was happening a long time ago, and aside from the occasional public appearance, we got the hell out, thereby leaving a vacuum that was easily filled by the youngins’, all of whom knew the scene through identifying with its stereotypes.

This is how the reversal occurred, and it is- I imagine- how it happens within any subculture. What is on the outside can be seen and replicated, what goes on under the surface gets lost at the changing of the guard, it gets
replaced- for better or worse.

Goth fashion slash amateur strip shows have replaced poetry readings, the truly industrial sounds of buzz saws and metal pipes have been replaced by lush synths darkwave and EBM, and literacy has been replaced by… well, you just go and try to walk up to a random stranger at a goth/industrial club and talk about Neitzsche’s influence on postmodernism.

Don’t get me wrong, all of this isn’t necessarily a bad thing- it has just become something completely different from what it once was, even if it looks very much the same on the surface. Given much of the poetry that was presented at those readings, I’ll take the naked and a 5th of whiskey myself. (Though back in the day we often had all of the above.)

So how does all of this get back at Alterati, and this idea of inside and outside culture? Wes Unruh, Alterati “editor at large” and I were talking about all of this and he encapsulated the point I’m ultimately driving at here: “when outsider scenes become insider scenes, where do the outsiders go?”

Where indeed? Here’s the point, which I discussed from a different angle in the first article I ran here- Wake Up Neo, There Is No Counterculture You Twit. An outsider scene, oxymoronic as it may seem, is constituted primarily of individuals who group together based both upon a common outlook, and a simple reaction to the fact that they don’t belong anywhere else. They are, at their outset, subaltern – individual, but like all humans, in need of a social sphere both out of necessity and desire, no matter how subverted, disenfranchised, or alienated they may feel.

It’s likely that the predominant psychology that works here is one of opposition against- whether through direct action or rebellion, cultural distancing through physical modification or fashion, or simple isolationism. Outsider groups are almost without exception elitist- whether we’re talking about the proto-goth scene or a myriad of secret societies and other fringe groups that have existed throughout history. Oftentimes this elitism can grow into full blown xenophobia, though given the bitchy but externally passive nature of most outsider groups, that xenophobia only goes so far as bitter mocking directed at the auslanders, rather than actual physical violence. (Speaking of songs with this name and the foreigner/outsider theme, check out the Living Color track “Auslander.” They kicked so much more ass than they were given credit for.)

Then that inversion begins to happen. When any such scene truly becomes “a scene,” it takes on more and more of the aspects of an insider scene- where it becomes more than anything else valuable to move up an established pecking order, a heirarchy develops, and elements of that insider scene become ubiquitous within “the mainstream.”

Of course, again as I discussed in Wake Up Neo, I think the “mainstream culture” itself is more a corporate creation than an actual social body. The point then is that the elements of this scene enters the market place- they have been defined, commodified, and made replicable. Anything that it was is no more.

This is precisely the same process that occurs from one generation to the next. It isn’t that the goth scene – or any scene for that matter – needs to be re-vitalized once it has reached this stage. They are all dead shells, ideas which at one point in time served a purpose, and are now just fetishes. We can continue to build places, both virtual and material, that can be utilized by people who share common goals. We can continue to evolve and avoid being stuck into our cast off stereotypes. It is our hope that Alterati can continue to be one of those “virtual places.” That, I think, is where we’re coming from. If you want to contribute your voice, all you
have to do is step up to the microphone.

(“Research assistant”: Christie Casey.)