According to legend, goth originated in the Batcave Club in Soho, London, United Kingdom, which existed in the brief period between 1982 and 1985. Hollow-voiced and black-haired, the bands that performed there chanted gloomy lyrics of decay and Thatcherite emptiness over foregrounded bass lines.
Seeing Heavy Metal As Controversy And Counterculture
Heavy metal is now over forty years old. It emerged at the tail end of the 1960s in the work of bands including Iron Butterfly, Vanilla Fudge, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, and — most importantly — Black Sabbath. In the 1970s and early 1980s, heavy metal crystallised as a genre as bands such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden removed most of the blues influence on the genre, codifying a set of basic metal characteristics that endure to this day: distorted guitars, aggressive vocals, denim, leather and spikes.
The Artistic Origins of Modern Gothicism
Preceding and throughout the first half of the 1980s, certain frequently British-based compositions and photographs of the paramount post-punk atmosphere became crystallized into an identifiable tendency.
Black Metal Heritage and Crimes Against Culture
On the night of June 6th, 1992, the wooden church at Fantoft, the Fantoft Stave Church in Norway was burned to the ground. The accused arsonist was Louis Cachet, more popularly known as Varg Vikernes, the sole musician associated with the black metal project Burzum who would later be jailed for the murder of fellow musician Øystein Aarseth (also known as “Dollarsnymous”, the pseudonym he used in the seminal black metal band Mayhem).
The Goth Movement and English Society During the 1980s
As Hebdige has documented in Subculture, the style, fashion, and music of these British youth groups was inexorably linked to social and economic conditions in England.
Goth Subcultural Studies and the Postmodernism Lifestyle
Including a chapter on postmodernity and goth music may on the surface seem out of place, but I am convinced that the Marxist and semiotic scholarship of the Birmingham Center for Subcultural Studies, of which Dick Hebdige ‘Subculture: The Meaning of Style’ is the most famous and often-cited example, does have merit and validity.
The Music of the Goth Subculture and Aesthetics
The majority of bands associated with the English goth movement have never been widely known, understood, or appreciated beyond the confines of the subculture itself. In fact, few genres of popular music are associated with such a narrow demographic.
