Goth on a (Large) Budget: 'How to be a Goth' by Tish Weinstock (Octopus Books, 2024)

This is a book I wouldn’t have bought but for my vague sense of being honour-bound to cast an eye over anything about the Goth world that emerges into print, and this isn’t so much a review (theblogginggoth did a fuller one a few weeks ago) as a reflection. I will say that it can’t have been a hard book to write, whatever experience a reader of it might have: Ms Weinstock delivers her authorised lists of books, movies and clothing items in a series of short paragraphs which anyone could have come up with internet assistance. The second point is that the book offers a very narrow vision of ‘how to be a Goth’, driven by an unusual personal experience. This is Goth as it appears to an ennobled, wealthy industrialist’s granddaughter who becomes beauty editor of Vogue and marries a Guinness, a background Ms Weinstock never mentions beyond alluding to growing up in a ‘house full of precious antiques’ and her father’s death when she was five. When they aren’t long-dead actresses or fictional characters, her list of role models for young Goth women is heavy with fashion designers and artists; her roll of clothing retailers includes outlets in New York and LA, which is fine for anyone who casually jets across the Atlantic. This is a world most of us come nowhere near.

In such a world, when the rich adhere to the markers of revolt, what does Goth mean? For the author her ‘dark’ enthusiasms clearly became a means of negotiating a sense of alienation, but in circumstances of relative privilege – very different from so many first-generation Goths’ experience of suburban emptiness, as outlined by Cathi Unsworth – what’s in the darkness? Ms Weinstock praises her arty heroines for their ‘rebellion’ and ‘individuality’, but these instincts are pursued primarily through consumer choices which aren’t going to frighten anyone, no matter how edgy you regard yourself. Capitalism doesn’t care how you express your individual identity, provided you hand over cash for it; you can have any colour, including black.

In 1993, when Tish Weinstock was all of two, one of her suggested idols, Christina Ricci, played Wednesday Addams in Addams Family Values. In the movie, Wednesday gets packed off to summer camp, that particularly American childhood horror that features so largely in the narratives of alienated US children, and naturally does all she can to obstruct the compulsory wholesomeness inflicted on the youngsters there. Traditionally, that’s what all Goths have felt they’re doing: resisting the mindlessly sunny and optimistic. But 2024 isn’t 1993. This is an age of individualism, in which the ideals Goths say they stand for are precisely those that wider society claims it values too; and one of anxiety, where sunny optimism might come as relief. How To Be A Goth unwittingly contributes to the sort of debate that writing on Goth has grappled with for about a decade, for instance in Catherine Spooner’s speculations about ‘happy Gothic’ and the Spracklens’ rage about Goth going consumerist. Has it become nothing more than a vacuous style choice? This book poses the question in an acute form. The answer is, Not quite, I think.

Conformity and adherence to a common, all-embracing narrative are not what our society values now, but the urge to demand such obedience – not just to an outward standard of appearance, but an inner submission of the soul – is an abiding part of human thinking, one of our instinctive survival mechanisms. It’s easy to reach for such narratives when the times are anxious, and when malign parties are there to exploit the instinct. Goth, on the other hand, always says, No, it’s not that simple; no, I will not do as you tell me; I will not tell your story; I will tell my own.

Maybe Goth’s committed to deathliness isn’t about deathliness, but about what can’t be accommodated in univocal statements of identity and purpose, about what can’t be digested and understood. It points towards the truth that there is always more, always something else, in the same way that the priest’s black garb signposts beyond this world and therefore always unsettles by suggesting there might be another scale of value than our own. The deathliness stands not for itself, but for irreducible complexity, and the critique of any grand narrative other than ruin. Beware, it says. In that sense, we can’t tame it, no matter whether we’re onlookers or adherents – and no matter how much or how little privilege we enjoy. In that way, even a Goth on a trust fund can think of themselves as an eternal outsider. But they should beware, too: there is a subtle enemy who can buy off the Church, and it can buy them off as well.