Two Views of Goth Music

It was a stinging Amazon review.

The book’s primary weakness is that the authors proclaim in a self-aggrandizing manner that their work on goth is the only scholarship to deal with the music. This is absolutely untrue … 'The Music of the Goth Subculture: Postmodernism and Aesthetics' by Charles Mueller from 2008 … is full of musical analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, but the authors completely ignore it. …The book does not take into account any of the latest thinking concerning subculture theory. … Last but not least, many of the threads and arguments do not line up because the authors treat goth as a continuous phenomenon when in reality goth died in England during the late 1980s and what passes for goth today is really separate from what came before it.

The book this reviewer, ‘ChasM’, is referring to is Isabella van Elferen & Jeffrey Weinstock’s 2017 volume for Routledge, Goth Music: from Sound to Subculture. It didn’t take much inductive reasoning to work out that ‘ChasM’ could easily be the spurned author, Charles Mueller, himself. Although I found Dr van Elferen’s previous book on music in Gothic, Gothic Music: Sounds of the Uncanny, tough going I also liked much of the analysis, so the harsh review only convinced me I wanted to read the new volume. ChasM avoided the eye-watering price tag of £115 by borrowing it through an inter-library loan, whereas I managed to get a secondhand copy for £12, so that was something we had in common.

But while waiting for Goth Music to arrive I sourced that 2008 thesis from the Florida State University’s website – they let you download it for free – as well as Charles Mueller’s other two articles from the French musicological journal Volume. One, ‘Were British Subcultures the Beginnings of Multitude?’ (2012), only mentions Goth in passing; it’s mainly about the attempt by political sociologists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to update Marxist analysis by re-describing the existing powers of economy and culture as 'Empire', to which they oppose the emergent democratic and libertarian force of 'Multitude', and this is all very well but not Goth-focused. The earlier article, ‘Gothic Covers: Music, Subculture & Ideology’ (2010), though, is an interesting examination of how Goth musicians adapt the music of others to their own purposes, and the light this sheds on the characteristics of Goth itself. This leads to some worthwhile study of Siouxsie & the Banshees’ album of cover versions, Through the Looking Glass, a work most people denounce, and that’s valuable in itself.

That leads us on to Mr Mueller’s thesis. It starts from Dick Hebdige’s work in the 1970s, which posited the Marxist case that subcultures represented forms of working-class resistance against social hegemony. Mueller stoutly defends this basic outline against later analysts who saw no great radical purpose in subcultural activity in general and Goth in particular. He argues that first-wave Goth was one sort of response to the social, economic and political conditions of the late 1970s and early 1980s, relying, he says, on a hundred or so interviews with subcultural participants: ‘my informants were emphatic in the belief that subculture in England was connected intimately with economic, social and political forces … far beyond simple consumerism or teen rebellion’ (55-6). ‘Bands used Gothic signifiers and aesthetics as a way to sharpen and continue the social commentary of punk … and embraced seduction and feminine signifiers as subversive devices’ (vii). Mueller’s interest is exclusively in first-wave Goth and he continually refers to the style in the past tense, while admitting towards the end of the thesis that Goth does survive in the UK, a paradox I’ll return to later.

One of Mueller’s concerns is to identify what makes Goth music Gothic, a worthwhile question as it’s something Goths themselves endlessly discuss; he recognises that the range of styles included under the umbrella ‘Goth’ had ‘from the perspective of timbre and sound … no consistent set of musical characteristics’ (9). Instead his detailed analysis of tracks by a range of early Goth bands leads him to conclude that the element that most links them is a concern to evoke ambience and mood using whatever effects the artists take to hand: Goth music was subversive of power, parodic, tended to camp, and drew inspiration from the wider Gothic tradition, and that was what connected its expressions rather than any formal musical qualities (138-9). It’s the musical analysis which seems the most impressive part of this study: although perhaps that’s the result of this non-musician being somewhat bamboozled by talk of chord progressions and intervals!

Van Elferen and Weinstock’s book begins with a similar undertaking. The authors met beside a pool during an academic conference and got round to discussing the perennial topic of what Goth music actually consists of, and out of that conversation the book arose. Strictly musical analysis forms a part of Goth Music, but the authors approach the subject from a completely different direction to Mueller’s; rather than start from the history of Goth (which would be the obvious tack to take), they begin instead with two contemporary Goth events, Dracula’s Ball in Philadelphia and Gottertanz in Leipzig (part of the bigger festival Wave-Gotik-Treffen), and think about what the Goth experience consists of. ‘Each event is defined by the music presented, the music is extraordinarily different in each venue, and yet both events are ‘goth’’ (43) so the unity cannot come from any technical or stylistic elements of the music itself. Neither, despite the centrality of social ritual to the subculture (‘horror film samples … corsets … and the scent of patchouli are as much part of goth musical reality as [the music] … Goth music is intricately linked to listening practices and social situations’ (51)) can it derive from any other such element as these, too, are colossally diverse. Despite its apparent inconsistency, Van Elferen and Weinstock are still convinced that ‘music is the glue that holds the goth scene together’, not just ‘one equivalent subcultural practice among many’ (11).

They find their way forward by borrowing the notion of the chronotope from 20^th-century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin. A chronotope is an artwork’s setting in time and space, the range of spatial and temporal associations it evokes. Gothic in general – although van Elferen and Weinstock don’t discuss this explicitly – deals with the intrusion of the monstrous into improper places and times, and human responses to it. Goth music, a more concentrated artform than novels or film, also creates windows into other realities and jars them against the familiar, or takes a familiar world and introduces the monstrous into it: it explores our relationship with these other times and places, or monsters, which can be characterised by desire or revulsion or both. It dislodges time and dislocates space, and its chronotopes are thus in critical dialogue with the everyday present. The authors identify five typical chronotopes that can be used to analyse Goth music (86-7). I’m not convinced that their distinction between the ‘intimate’ and the ‘expansive’ versions of the past or the future are very helpful categories, but the larger point is well made: like Mueller, they are trying to direct attention not to the surface details of Goth music but to its effects and intentions.

Further, they argue, particular chronotopical fantasies are reflected in corresponding substyles of Goth and, therefore, in the subcultural practices (such as fashion choices) that gather around them: ‘the temporal and spatial dislocations of goth musical chronotopes … find imaginative instantiation through associative clustering, which then prompts particular social actions and practices that further develop the world of the chronotope’ (120). Phew. To put it in a more concrete way, if you like listening to, say, neo-medieval or dark folk substyles of Goth music, you’re more likely to dress in a way that evokes a fantasy version of the Middle Ages or the pagan past, to be a pagan, and to go to crossover events with medieval re-enacters and LARPers, stay in a tent (probably not made of real animal skin as you are likely to be a vegan), and drink mead out of horns. You are very unlikely to be a stompy Cybergoth in towering boots and multi-coloured plastic hair extensions, as that fits in with an entirely different, future-directed fantasy and a different sort of music (not that you might not dip into both on separate occasions). Yet there is still a family relationship between all these versions of what Goth is: ‘the consistent distinctiveness of goth subculture inheres in the shared fantasy narratives clustering around the defeat of time and mortality’ (123). I’d argue that ‘defeat’ is a misleading word, but otherwise this is surely right and explains why Goths can always acknowledge each other as fellow-travellers while appearing completely different and listening to such wildly divergent stuff. Well, almost always.

This is very, very good, as it picks beneath the argument I sometimes hear from some older Goths that ‘Goth is about music, not fashion’ and complaints that 'people have become clothes-horses'. Setting up music and dress (or any other subcultural practice) as antagonistic elements within Goth misses the point that both are expressing and performing an underlying discontent with things-as-they-are, and an underlying awareness that not everything we desire is uncomplicatedly positive. That’s where the unity, and the point, is to be found.

At last we come back to ChasM’s criticisms of Goth Music. Is he right to be peeved at the Mueller thesis not getting a mention? Although he’s correct that it was indeed an ‘academic treatment of Goth music’ prior to van Elferen and Weinstock’s book, they don’t actually claim theirs is the first in toto, only that they are taking an original line. There is virtually no crossover between book and thesis and nothing, frankly, the earlier work could have contributed to the later, so a passing mention in the introduction would have been about as much as could have been expected. But there is no fury like a writer scorned!

Pointing out the lack of ethnographic research in Goth Music is fair: it struck me, too, that there is a gaping abyss in the book between observation, and theory based thereon, and any material deriving from Goths’ own experience (except the authors’). It would have been good to have something that reflected what subcultural participants themselves think they are about and the relationship they have to their music and their schmutter, and any subsequent work that examines the validity of van Elferen and Weinstock’s ideas should at least have a go at this.

It is also true that Goth Music adopts a different sociological stance from the Mueller thesis. Their take on Goth subversion is that it takes the form of personal (though collectively-explored) fantasy, and they don’t examine how this might link into broader political concerns, although the two are far from mutually exclusive. But if by the ‘latest thinking concerning subculture theory’ ChasM means the ideas about 'Empire & Multitude' Charles Mueller lays out in his 2012 article, the last paragraph of that piece makes me most uneasy.  Mueller writes, ‘During the 1970s and 1980s British subcultures often expressed hostility against each other … ignoring how they were united by the same set of concerns for their future and for British society. ... Future subcultures and social movements cannot make this mistake’. Can’t they? This is a manifesto in the form of an analysis. Rebellion may be all well and good, but telling a subculture how it ought to be behaving from your own ideological standpoint is quite a thing to do, and it makes the reader wonder about the assumptions of the analysis itself.

Which brings us to the last point, that ‘goth died in England during the late 1980s’, and that therefore van Elferen and Weinstock are barking up the wrong tree. Now, Charles Mueller’s own fieldwork for his thesis was conducted in about 2006 including, among others, many attenders at the Whitby Goth Weekend that year, and although he doesn’t generally describe who these people were and whether they were longstanding or relatively recent subcultural participants (no actual ethnographer or even humble historian would be so imprecise), some of them must have been around the scene for quite a while, thus demonstrating the very continuity the reviewer denies. Mueller himself states in his conclusion that ‘many of the original participants are still active … and … young people are still involved in goth because the music speaks to them’ (222). Any suggestion of complete discontinuity is simplistic, as anyone involved in the Goth world will confirm.

Just as Charles Mueller concentrates exclusively on first-wave Goth, so van Elferen and Weinstock put that to one side and focus on contemporary Goth, referring to the bands that shaped the original template briefly and in so far as their style feeds into the modern scene; they analyse songs by Alien Sex Fiend and Specimen but only as representative of existing Goth substyles. As regards their fields of study, then, Mueller’s thesis and Goth Music are effectively complementary rather than contradictory.

That said, ChasM has a point. There is more and more justification for recognising a fundamental gear-shift in Goth at some point, perhaps, in the very early 1990s. A couple of years ago a wonderful book called Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace was published, consisting mainly of worldwide images of first-wave Goths with a bit of explanatory commentary. It made very clear how early Goth maintained the makeshift, do-it-yourself ethos of punk, mainly because there wasn’t the scope to do anything else: it was only later that Goths themselves began to make clothing, art and accessories to service their own market. You can see this reflected, too, in the amazing film from Slimelight in 1987 that I highlighted a few months ago. Furthermore as Goth diversified and extended Goths began to encounter and draw into their net elements from other imaginative worlds – from LARPing to the fetish scene to vintage – that didn’t have anything to do with music as such. Van Elferen and Weinstock do make reference to shifting consumer habits within the Goth scene (43-9) but don’t draw out the implications for its history. Charles Mueller insists that the early Goth movement was predominately working-class and he may be right, even if it isn’t directly relevant to Goth Music: that doesn’t seem to be the case now, assuming it makes any sense to talk in terms of ‘class’ in contemporary Western economies. There is therefore quite enough evidence to conclude that something happened to Goth along the way that changed it, but we don’t quite yet know what, or what was the balance in the change between continuity and re-invention.

I found Goth Music exciting in its presentation of a way of thinking about Goth which escapes from the sterile debates Goths themselves often engage in. Yet, as so often, it begs more questions that could do with investigation.