Liisa Ladouceur - Encyclopedia Gothica: A Novel

What Is What Is Goth?

Ask a Goth person What is Goth? and theyll likely tell you, Im not Goth. Which is a sure sign that they are, in fact, %666 Goth. If you find this confusing, this book is for you. If this makes perfect sense, this book is for you but it is also about you.

Its no wonder that the G-word perplexes both insiders and on-lookers alike. This one hard-working four-letter word has been asked to define so many things: music, fashion, architecture, typefaces, literature, cinema, a Germanic tribal horde and, for about 30 years now, the kind of people prone to hanging out in graveyards sipping red wine and pretending its blood while reading Shelley aloud and contemplating the bleakness of existence (and/or holing up in their bedrooms with Joy Division records). At least thats who one might think a Goth person is by the way we are most often portrayed in news reports and the kind of articles that pop up around Halloween or whenever a teenager wearing a black T-shirt shoots someone.

I say we here because I am, unabashedly, Goth.

I wasnt born that way, a daughter of darkness. But it didnt take much. In fact it took exactly 4 minutes and 20 seconds of television. MuchMusic, then the Nations Music Station in Canada, had just come to my area and, being obsessed with popular music, I watched every day after school. And on one afternoon in the late 1980s Much played She Sells Sanctuary by a British band I didnt know, The Cult. Like most videos of the era, it was a simple performance clip, the band lip-synching and fake-playing in a studio in this case one bathed in psychedelic coloured lights. Its not, viewed today, particularly Goth. (Singer Ian Astbury is dressed like a hippie and guitarist Billy Duffy has short white blond hair, to start.) But its opening moments a red curtain parts to reveal a shadowy, Shaman-type figure all in black slowly swirling his hands around in a fog hypnotized me like nothing Id seen before. And the song itself with its incessant drumbeat, intoxicating echoey guitar riffs and infectiously simple, haunting refrain about the world dragging us down was my first exposure to something that bombastically melodramatic. I knew melancholy from poetry, but this was ache you could dance to. For me, being exposed to She Sells Sanctuary was like getting a blood transfusion: I woke up afterwards and my insides were completely different. I had a totally new pulse.