A few blocks from where I live in Greenwich Village, CoSTUME NATIONAL recently opened a display for Fashion Week. With black drapey clothes, they've called their line "New Wave-No Wave-Dark Wave."
The three waves named here are recognizable to fans of progressively obscure music: New Wave often describes both punk and its commercial, synth-driven fallout; No Wave was New York's underground postpunk collision of disco, free jazz, noise, and funk, all fueled by cocaine; Dark Wave was a little-used term that emerged in the 1990s to describe a lush, orchestral blend of gothic and industrial music.
These three waves offer up a collective tsunami of fashion potential in their attitudes and aesthetics, but what really catches my attention is the mainstream recognition of so esoteric a thing as Dark Wave. The bands originally called darkwave were and remain nearly totally unknown (and not in a hipsters-want-to-reclaim-them sort of way); do you own any records by Oneiroid Psychosis, The Machine in the Garden, or Covenant of Thorns? Didn't think so.
So looking at the store's clothing and some wider emerging trends in culture, it's clear that this use of "Dark Wave" connotes a different, younger darkness; a reimagining of darkness as a cultural aesthetic. Specifically, I want to talk about how we can understand stuff like Witch House, Nü-Goth, and the whole constellation of dreary musics that frustratingly (but importantly) tend to resist simple genre classification.
I'm not the first writer to wet his feet in these murky waters; after all, this stuff has been around in various inflections for anywhere between three and fifteen years, depending on who you ask and what acts you include in the spread. Simon Reynolds asserts that the related quasi-genre of Hauntology eulogizes that long-ago moment when a forward-looking future seemed possible, and does so by trying to recapture snippets of a cultural past that never really existed to begin with. What I'm hoping to do here, however, is to go a bit deeper and to zero in the belief systems of this new darkness. That'll come in the second installation of this entry, but before I can do all that, I want to historicize and unpack the west's previous inflection of subcultural gloom.
As a teenager in the 1990s, I was in love with latter-day goth music; long before the word "epic" was completely mainstreamed and derailed by video game culture around 2007, goth music truly (and nearly uniquely) connoted the epic. The drench of reverb that soaked The Cure's Disintegration album placed it physically in a gigantic space. The genre's pseudoclassical instrumentation and its modal harmonies—especially that ubiquitous flatted second scale degree—gave songs like Switchblade Symphony's "Clown" an oppressive pall of the magisterial. With such stony magnitude and resolve, it makes perfect sense that even this music's label—gothic—casts it as a new soundtrack for old cathedrals.
Goth music paid homage to the past canonically: bands like Dead Can Dance obsessively glorified the medieval while records by Bauhaus and The Sisters of Mercy namechecked the likes of Artaud and Marx—iconoclasts yes, but iconic ones. And similarly, fans genuflected to the genre's own short history; the scene's taste was famously slow to evolve, with musicians and clubgoers in the 1990s more invigorated by decade-old Depeche Mode and Skinny Puppy records than by the new CDs that labels like Cleopatra and Bedazzled were releasing. A newbie's cred was most readily assessed by whether she preferred First and Last and Always or Floodland, Seventeen Seconds or Wish, or whether her t-shirt proclaimed allegiance to Cocteau Twins or Nine Inch Nails. This ancestor worship entrenched the music in remarkable consistency and tradition. Reverse-engineering the decade's goth music reveals a blueprint by which no album was complete without lyrically deploying an army of words like fire, scream, night, soul, mirror, stars, blood, purity, ocean, torture, and of course, death. Any sniff of the quotidian—you know, things that real people talk about—was noxious. Whatever experience an artist wished to convey, there was a stylistic mandate to cast it through the most grandiose, intellectual, and abstruse metaphors imaginable.
Having long since dyed its punk roots black, goth music seemed pretty apolitical on the surface, but there's a lot wrapped up in so consistent a deference to the Kantian sublime. Specifically, when we take in this imagery alongside the genre's love of history, canonicity, and high art, a culture comes into focus that is remarkably conservative in its adherence to all things Apollonian. Consistently billed as sensitive, intelligent, moody and—it should be noted—functionally tolerant of both androgyny and corpulence, goth was heady and bookish, not bodily and base. To a large degree, the goth scene viewed itself as an institutional guardian of a measured and severe elegance, and the loneliness of this duty was an essential facet of its aesthetic. This identity surely doesn't apply to all fans and musicians–for example, the ideology of some early anarchist deathrockers was quite nearly the opposite—but it was nonetheless part of the scene's unspoken ethos when I was there in the 1990s. At age 16, I reveled in that sadness, going so far as form a band called Cordium Detractio—Latin for "separation of the heart," I was quick to tell you—and then to write a zero-irony waltz about exhuming a dead bride. I read Shakespeare and Poe. I wanted to belong not just to a scene, but to a lineage.
[I'll get to the actual topic of the new dark wave in the second half of this post, hopefully in the coming day or two. Thanks for reading so far.]
Floodland all the way, baby. But is it Seventeen Seconds versus Wish, or Disintegration versus Pornography?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, as usual I agree with most of this, and there's a lot of insightful stuff here. I would take issue with (or maybe just complicate) one thing: "goth was heady and bookish, not bodily and base." Heady and bookish, definitely. (I would argue that Andrew Eldritch's references to poetry are more important than namechecking Karl Marx. He expects that a substantial portion of his audiences will get the references to "the lone and level sand stretch far away," "the body electric," and "the violet hour.") But while goth wasn't bodily AND base, it was definitely bodily--arguably more bodily than a lot of other scenes. I would argue that understanding goth's construction of the body is crucial.
In a lot of pop music, the body is a site of pleasure (pop music also frequently commodifies the body, but that commodification is usually covert and is usually based on treating the body as a sexual object, i.e. a site of pleasure). In some alternative scenes, the body is deliberately devalued and ignored (grunge's shapeless flannel shirts, for instance). In industrial, the body is definitely base--a site of pain or power, weak and mortal but perhaps subject to cybernetic upgrade. The goth body is a site of sensuality and the sacred, and nominally of personal expression.
No scene that elevates anti-normative fashion to the extent that goth does can be non-bodily. There's a strong connection between goth an a sort of pagan, neo-primative spirituality which treats the body as sacred, and that attitude extends beyond the actual-pagan minority into the aesthetic sensibilities of the whole scene. The commonly observed fact that "goths can dance to anything" illustrates this nicely: when the body is sacred, the physical act of dancing is a sacred act. Given the modern conception of dance music as non-spiritual (even vulgar) it's unsurprising that a subculture that approaches dance from a quasi-spiritual perspective would value the ability to dance to music that is not generally considered danceable. The acceptance of corpulence is partly because when bodies are sacred all bodies can be beautiful. The sacredness of the body also means that sexualization of the body carries, at least aesthetically, a spiritual component that is missing in much of the mainstream. Feminism seems to have a lot of clout in the goth scene, too, and a lot of sexualized female goth fashion can easily be read as a form of lipstick feminism (let's call it "black-lipstick feminism"). Androgyny, I would suggest, is not merely tolerated--for men especially it's a viable aesthetic choice, even in purely heterosexual contexts. I don't have a good explanation for this, but my impression has always been that a straight goth girl being sexually attracted to a straight androgynous goth boy was a pretty normal thing. The body also becomes another tool for seeking the connection to lineage and history that you talk about. The neo-victorianism that pervades goth fashion is, in part, a way to aesthetically integrate the body with the lineage, and to declare to the world that this body is in some way apart from the "mundane" world in which most people live.