AnEyeForTaste

I sort of hate the phrase “it’s about the music and politics” when it comes to the goth subculture. I’ve been hearing it a lot on social media and recently even in person from one of my friends and… like… yeah? Those are both very important to the goth subculture but trying to define it in those terms is weird for a number of reasons

Firstly, the politics is in the music. Let alone the many of the biggest acts in the scene like London after Midnight, Killing Joke, Sisters of Mercy and Siouxsie and the Banshees, among others, who directly tackle political issues of their time through music (not always well, I might add); the foundation of goth music is music that delves into societal taboos. Goth music shines a light on the things that people don’t want to think about and says “no, this is what the world is. It’s disgusting and it’s cruel. Death, oppression, abuse, suffering and decay permeate every second of it and yet beauty and joy can exist through all of that; that we can create beauty in darkness”

This leads into the second thing that bugs me about the phrase and that’s that it begs the obvious follow up “what are goth politics?” To which the answer is usually to just list generally leftist or even liberal talking points and like… yeah I agree that billionaires shouldn’t exist (more accurately, I think that they should be very swiftly made to stop existing through some external means) but is that goth? I don’t think so. I don’t think every political view needs to define or be defined by every other aspect of my life (provided that those views aren’t actively contradictory).

In my mind, if I had to define what is political about the goth subculture and its music, it’s the ways that it shines a light on the uncomfortable parts of society and says “this is what the world is, you don’t get to live in a comfortable fiction where you can just participate in the engines of cruelty and look away when you see the results of that, or the people it harms”.

The beast was a disgusting thing, pushing her forward each night to consume the living. To cause suffering beyond what Annah’s own conscience would ever have allowed for and yet keeping the fear of death, which by all means should have been excised from her the night her death occurred, alive. This Beast, this presence, held her ransom with fear and guilt.

Annah was in a war with this thing that sought to abandon her, somehow, by holding her body hostage. Yet this simple pleasure of her life, the cigarette which she could not feel the effect of through necrotised lungs, was a weapon.

The beast feared the flame. Annah did not. Annah knew that one day, she would be engulfed by the flame, whether by her own doing or another’s didn’t matter. She knew her fate and did not fear it, for death had already taken her soul only for it to be trapped by this Beast; but the Beast? The Beast feared death. So Annah teased it. Mocking it with the one weapon she could brandish against it. A simple cigarette. Flame. Death.

Cassius: The Chariot

Maeve: the magician (featuring Creed, her rat familiar).