Rewind: Goth

I approach this topic as I've been doing a lot of things on my blog lately -- as a consummate outsider. Unlike Winona Ryder's character in Beetlejuice, I myself am anything but "strange and unusual." I rarely wear black and I live for the longest days of summer when it's already 70 degrees and six in the morning, and the sun doesn't go down until 9:30 in the evening. I generally don't come out at night. The "gothiest" thing I've ever done was cultivate a long-standing, and confusing, crush on Bauhaus's (and later Love & Rockets) Daniel Ash during latter part of my high school career.



To be honest, listening to that music now makes me feel like a petulant teenager: a bored, white, suburbanite with a little too much self-indulgent angst. I realize I'm probably harboring some serious stereotypes of goth subculture, but since its 70s/80s heyday, it's become somewhat of a punch line. (Or a brilliant marketing tool -- see Twilight, et al.) And that's sad, because there's a lot of transgression and subversion of traditional gender roles, and during my teenage years MTV actually played a lot of these bands during most people's waking hours.