The Idea Becomes an Institution
Quasi-memoir of Goth.
[Note: this is a long-winded response I posted on social media a few weeks ago. I figured it was long and comprehensive enough to warrant an entry to tide over my adoring public until I do another longform post - ZG.]
“A man has an idea. The idea attracts others, likeminded. The idea expands, the idea becomes an institution. What was the idea? That’s what’s been bothering me, boys. And I’ll tell you, when I used to think about the idea itself, it put a big old smile on my face. You see, gentlemen... greed is for amateurs. Disorder, chaos, anarchy — now that’s fun!
When I started the first fires in this goddamn city, before I knew it, every charlatan and shitheel was imitating me! You know what they got now? Devil’s Night greeting cards. Isn’t that precious? The idea has become the institution, boys. Time to move along.”
- Michael Wincott as Top Dollar, The Crow.
“The darkest places in Hell are reserved for the neutral.”
- Ihsahn, Malediction.
I’m not exactly the biographical sort, but for the purposes of establishing pedigree, I feel some context is in order: I started listening to “alternative” music fairly young. I bought the Spawn soundtrack and some other compilations of the like around fourteen or fifteen years old, which is when I started going to Indie punk shows, and it wasn’t long before I was, at about sixteen or so, listening to European Heavy Metal, and not long after that, at seventeen or so, I was making routine trips to the HMV music store in downtown Toronto, snatching up all the comps I could find. A year later, I got a credit card and that’s when I put myself on the Canadian Customs radar because I was receiving packages from Austria, France, and especially Germany (I can understand why they were opening my packages; some were coming from a company inauspiciously called “Nuclear Blast”).
A year later, at nineteen, I was legal to start clubbing, and I did so tentatively at first, but it didn’t take long for me to get immersed in it. I don’t know how it is elsewhere, but in Ontario (Canada), club nights were more known as “Dark Alternative”. It was nothing to hear some Tool and Björk thrown in with Suicide Commando and Bauhaus and Escape With Romeo and whatnot. So I think my papers are in order.
The social appeal, however, was always limited for me. It seems like, for many others, Goth is who they are. For me, it’s a facet that satisfies the psychosocial longing for aesthetic fulfillment. In other words, reading Sandman and looking at pictures by Camille Rose Garcia and Victoria Frances strongly appealed to me, particularly if backed by a soundtrack of The Cure or Dead Can Dance or This Mortal Coil or Cocteau Twins, etc. But I never really identified as “Goth”, per se. I’m not Andrew Eldritch or anything and I’m not going to call the scene down to the dirt, but if I’m being totally frank, I might have long hair and thirty-lace Demonias and don many of the trappings of Goth, but I don’t think it would be fair to say that it tells the whole story for me.
See, Goth by itself has its roots in a mix of both esoteric aesthetics and rebellion, and like all other art movements, it sort of metastasized and morphed from earlier movements that were either evolving naturally, or punctuatedly as a protest against the status quo. That’s where Goth appeals to me, in many ways: as a modern movement founded on the grand traditions of Byronic and 1800s romanticism, and it’s a semiotic echo of the impact of these selfsame traditions while a brazen inversion of an established order; an iconoclasm.
However, I would say that that interpretation is a minority viewpoint, which is why I eschew the label “Goth”: not because I want to distance myself from it; but because it’s too reclusive for my liking. I’ve always noticed that, among the scenesters, there seems to be some common denominators: a sort of maladjustment with regular society, but also a resentment that accompanies it against others as though it was somehow their doing that you found yourself ostracized. This is not unwarranted, but it is still inaccurate and unfair. I’ve also found a predilection toward fantasy-play: there’s a lot of references to Warhammer and Vampire: The Masquerade and Dungeons & Dragons, and there’s a heavy focus on the cosplay aspect of it. I confess, I’ve never engaged in any of those except for a couple of drunken games of D&D where all I did was screw around and piss everyone off.
Forasmuch as I love esthetics, I’m foremost an eccentric, whether I like it or not. There are a lot of people who like to read books about vampires sucking blood and werewolves and whatnot. Myself and my friend had very gruesome tastes: we were watching banned horror movies, Saudi execution videos, and looking up botched autopsy photos on Rotten.com. My interests were always more grounded than fantastic. I think the Divine Brown/Hugh Grant/Heidi Fleiss affair was hilarious, and I was reading about the Project for a New American Century when many of my peers were vapidly shouting “No War for Bush!”, or whatever.
Now, that preamble was sort of my cumulative premise attempting to demonstrate the hazards of nomenclature, and how, like with Top Dollar, once the original idea gets lost, it turns into an establishment – an institution – whose inclination is to grow, and the only way to do that is to slowly shave off all the edges until you’re left with is a product that is not only indistinguishable from the original intent, but has essentially opened it up to interpretation from the encroaching rabble who want to use its trappings as a form of elitist supremacy focused on keeping out elements they don’t consider amply orthodox. Before I proceed, it may be apparent that it sounds like I’m denigrating institutions while attempting to defend one, and in a way, perhaps, that’s true. But I did a bit of weighing of this issue and decided that, at my core, I am not neutral, and it would be disingenuous of me to feign ignorance, despite having a decidedly limited investment.
“Is Goth Political?”
This is a common question that’s asked, but it’s a canard. What should be asked is, “Can or does Goth exist absent of politics”, and the answer is a resounding yes. However, it should be noted that this question is often posed as a sort of wedging technique, because one way or the other, you would have to ponder political implications whether you think the answer is yes or no. It doesn’t allow for divorce of Goth and politics, which should be a sign that someone is playing dirty pool.
I noticed a common thread along with many of the same long screeds of this ilk coming from people who must, from the outset, fancy themselves the paragons of moral philosophy: the performative bathos. “It makes me sad to see…” is a sort of propaganda technique (not to mention a flagrant display of rhetorical weakness masquerading as sensitivity). Whether or not one is sad should be irrelevant, save to wear on your sleeve your disappointed idealism. But it’s basically there for the same reason any special interest group throughout history bewailed the decadence of moral turpitude with such saccharine crocodile-tears: because it seems to make anyone who wishes to call them out balk for looking like “the bad guy”. It’s a ham-fisted emotional vampirism technique meant to control the narrative.
The other appeal of politics to these selfsame-minded is that you can couch any number of human affairs into political positions. That’s fine, but what they don’t tell you is that supporting or opposing any singular issue does not, ipso facto, mean you subscribe to the associated political programme. But this is another way of wedging, because it allows anyone with a seething confirmation bias and a chip on their shoulder to associate seemingly innocent viewpoints ad absurdum. “What? You’re a conservative? Fascist!”
So “Goth as politics” is largely a propaganda technique. I’m not telling any of you anything you haven’t heard before, but just in case you needed it articulated, there it is. Goth is far from the only milieu, movement, or subculture that’s been adulterated by the invasive species of self-interested, supremacist ideologues; it’s just the one that’s relevant to us at the moment, but it happens just about everywhere: science, religion, politics (the actual practical kind), etc.
Goth As Political Ostracism: the Gris(t)ly Truth.
“Just look at our audience. The average Black Metal record buyer is a stereotypical loser: a good-for-nothing who was teased as a child, got bad grades at school, lives on social welfare and seeks compensation for his inferiority complexes and lack of identity by feeling part of an exclusive gang of outcasts uniting against a society which has turned them down. And with Heavy Metal as a cultural and intellectual foundation, these dependents on social altruism proclaim themselves the ‘elite’. Hah! Could it be more pathetic?”
- Erik of Ulver.
The last thing I want to touch upon is one of the elephants in the room: Goth is distinct from more popular and “mainstream” movements because of its more macabre and morbid appeal to those who don’t fit in cleanly to default majorities: the disenfranchised. Art movements start for one reason only: to be the mother of invention for those who feel necessity. DIY has a strong appeal for people who want to cast off the archaic trappings of old-hat thinking and embrace something new and totally radical.
On its own, this is a good thing. Cultural exuberance is one of the hallmarks of the human experience, and if it can be prompted without monetary incentive or a need to create a rigid, conformist orthodoxy, so much the better! However, getting back to both the institutional AND political implications of Goth, this exuberance has a tendency to build up its own momentum and go awry.
The motivation to stigmatize Goth to politics isn’t just for power or exclusivity (ironically, those who decry “gatekeeping” the loudest are the ones who employ it with the most gusto). It’s also to pontificate between the lives of those who embrace it, for good or ill, to relate to the larger world around them. Dressing up and listening to spooky albums with your friends is a lot of fun and has an element of psychodramatic and cathartic fulfillment, but wouldn’t it be awesome if we used it to “usher in a new order”?
This is where the aesthetics really starts to take a back seat to a sort of naïve narcissism enrobed in a need to fathom oneself at the top of some hierarchical order. It is not an accident that the most politically-fervent Goths – along with the Hippies of old – are also of limited marketable skill, only marginally gainfully employed, lack many social skills, and also harbour a deep frustration about their own marginal role in a world they are becoming more and more keen to all the time which seems to make them mean less and less in the grand scheme. Rather than take the time to understand why all this is, they rely on biases that seem to suggest that there is an “us versus them” dynamic upon which all society is built, whereby there is a stark dichotomy everywhere between the rich and the poor, the privileged and underprivileged, the powerful and the serfs, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, etc.
Unfortunately for these fantastic types, there is no concrete basis for these claims, save it makes for a comforting fantasy. “If the world is really on a two-plane axis, then all I have to do is start a movement strong enough to invert it, and then all the “underprivileged” people of the world will have their day in the sun, too!” (With a not-so-subtle hint that they’ll be raising their own hand taking their place in this new utopian order).
There are a number of issues with this thinking. The first of which I’ve covered, which is that it strongly prompts those who want to be in this “new order” to want to ascend and proselytize so they can get as many people on their side as possible. Forcing people to conform to your orthodoxy is a strong yen for those who are in low places who have been sold a pipe dream. This is why the Cancel Culture types are so zealous: they NEED this to be true, and since it doesn’t stand on its own merit, they need to pull out all the stops to create the ILLUSION of credence, including, but not limited to: doxxing and threatening those who appear to threaten their fragile worldview; using emotional extortion to pose as emissaries for the downtrodden; doing everything they can to establish a social dominance, even if it’s an ersatz one; and needing to hew to a grandiose vision of a “day of reckoning”, like the Book of Revelation - a day when all the heretics of the world will “get theirs”.
Sadly, this is also a seductive fantasy even for people who lack fervour and mean well. But the fact of the matter is this: stigmatizing grandiose ideas to your social circle, whatever it is – punk, Goth, Metal, polka, etc. – will not make you more powerful. Nor will it increase your own social capital (unless you become an artist, a singer, a musician, or someone who gets accolades writing drawn-out essays on milquetoast social issues on social media forums. Ahem). Nor will it make you really anything that special at all.
We’re here for a limited time only, and as much as we love our aesthetics and our music and all those happy trappings of Goth, there’s no good reason to see it as anything other than it is, in all its humble glory. Just don’t use it as a means of revenge against those who have hurt you in the past, or to chase a dragon of success you’ll never catch. Goth is best when you’re realistic about it. It can be used to heal rather than to hold you back. That’s the difference between you and the cancel culture people: with any luck, you won’t be willing to delude yourself into believing you’re some Fey or Grand Mufti; and by extension, you will realize that all the people who try to shut you up aren’t anything worth writing home about, either.
ZeroGrav,
12/16/25.