"Nu-goth", Romanticism, Darkwave, and Labeling

"Nu-goth" is a catchy little term people have been throwing around as of late. I have expressed my frustration with the term "goth" before: I think it's a ridiculously generalized term--used to denote both a musical subset and a fashion movement.

My main issue with the idea of a "resurgence" is the implication that it's a comeback, that it's regaining a place that had been left empty for a spell. In my opinion, we can't describe anything as "nu goth" because goth never left in the first place. An essential part of the human psyche is a craving for darkness--we are fascinated and transfixed by it. The relationship between what we describe as "mainstream" and what we define as "deviant" holds our world in place, and not just in music. Society craves order, and this order and logic manifests itself in mainstream politics, religion, and science--but within the cracks and mutations of this order we find art. We cannot have this essential, Dionysian darkness without the mainstream, Apollonian order. Hence the constant complaint that "mainstream music" is in a downward spiral towards meaningless, saccharine fluff is a rather weak argument in itself. Music, politics, science, and art exist in an organic and symbiotic cycle--constantly progressing and reinventing themselves. Darkness isn't something that dies and is resurrected every 20 or so years, it's a constantly evolving concept. After 80's goth-rock bands Bauhaus, Christian Death, and Siouxsie & the Banshees left the scene, 90's grunge and trip-hop filled the void.

 

Take, for example, Massive Attack.  Pioneers of the 1990's trip-hop movement, their song "Angel" (off the album Mezzanine) is a lusciously dark six minutes of pure machine-made music with a strange, otherworldly sexuality. Mezzanine is historically interesting, because it represents the sound of the 90's and experimentation with new technology, but it also proves that darkness doesn't go away from decade to decade--it simply develops and morphs.

In Massive Attack, Nirvana, and other members of the grunge and trip hop movements, we get a continuation and formation of the 1980's new wave and goth sound. Though music scholars like to complain about the moral depravity of mainstream music: pop culture is essential to maintaining the balance between light and dark. If we didn't have pop stars and major labels, there would be no incentive for counter-cultural music movements like goth rock, trip-hop, grunge, darkwave, horror electronics, or witch house. Mainstream culture provides the sounding board against which independent labels and artists develop their values and their sound. The cracks and gaps in mainstream structures provide the space for new artistic movements to develop.

The genre that is getting overwhelming amounts of press for its fatalistic sound is, you guessed it, witch house. Whether you like witch house or not, whether you think it's silly and vacuous, or emotionally moving or mesmerizing (or whether you think it's a little of both)--it cannot be ignored as a social signal, and an another example of our ideological craving for darkness and chaos. 

However, witch house isn't the only manifestation of this decade's experimentation with nihilism. We're starting to see a darkwave movement even in hip-hop, with the LA-based label OFWGKTA, led by Tyler, the Creator. Take a look at his video for the single "Yonkers": 

 

I'm interested to see where Tyler and his crew end up. Though seen by many as "alternative" hip hop, they've also received a fair amount of attention from Top 40 rappers like Kanye and performed at SXSW last week. Tyler and Odd Future have humorous but refreshingly dark lyrics. The video for Yonkers is set in simple black and white, moving in and out of focus as Tyler eats a cockroach, pukes, strips, and eventually hangs himself, in a completely mesmerizing, grim, fashion.

And of course, we have my personal favorite, Zola Jesus--whose unparalleled voice and ability to make completely haunting music out of very few materials sets her apart from many synthesizer-based bands that come and go. She keeps herself fairly removed from a lot of the label favoritism and musical inbreeding, and she has responded rather indifferently to the amounts of attention she has gotten in the past few years.

I think rather than defining something as "new" or "retro," we should consider first the ways in which it is specific to our own era, and what it means in the context of history. The attraction we have towards darkness is a constant, however, the way it manifests itself is ever changing. I find the current obsession with vampire mythology interesting--it's yet another way we revel in the sexually and culturally deviant. (Also notable is the Jane Eyre remake that just came out, as well as the box office flop Red Riding Hood, featuring Amanda Seyfried's boobs...some special effects, and not much else.)   The 19th century Romantic movement was described as, "a fascination with the exotic, erotic, and strange." The Romantic movement is appealing to many because of its escapist aims--its depiction of Heaven and Hell merging into one horrifying and beautiful landscape.

The Spanish artist Francisco Goya made the above etching in 1797, twenty years or so before the Romanticism movement began. The plaque translates to, "The sleep of reason produces monsters." What Goya is trying to express is his frustration with the puritanical ideals of the Enlightenment era. He is telling us that the sleep of reason, our constant obsession with order and the Apollonian universe is subverted by darker impulses (in what 102 years later, Sigmund Freud would dub, the "Id".) It is really no different today. We need logic and control to allow darker impulses to develop. The cycle of humanity is the interplay between light and dark, logic and chaos. From the Greek "bacchae", to the Enlightenment vs. Romantic tension, to goth rock, to witch house--we both revel in and struggle with these cycles. So I guess shaving half my head, scratching an upside down cross on my ribcage, and finishing off the look with some maroon lipstick isn't any dumber than Edgar Allan Poe and his cronies getting hopped up on laudanum and writing short stories about cats and supernatural waifs (okay, maybe Poe deserves a bit more credit than that, but you get the picture). 

So all in all, I don't disagree with people dubbing something a part of the "darkwave" or "nu-goth" movement, I more object to the term because it becomes a lazy way of categorizing something, and god knows, people love to categorize. Like what I said in my review of Puerto Rico Flowers' "3 Sisters", I think the general thought process is "Oh, Sharkey has a low voice, kinda sounds like Ian Curtis. PRF = Nu-Goth rock. Done." That's just lazy. Music is inherently of its time, and throwing it into a general grouping based on a movement that happened thirty years ago isn't doing justice to its modernity. And of course, a lot of this is marketing. If you're writing for Pitchfork, the title "Nu-Goth: A 21st Century Movement" is going to sound of a hell of a lot more interesting than "Music Today Incorporates, Synthesizes, and Builds Upon Past Sounds and New Technology".

This plays into the larger issue I have with categorization. An element of music that I have always struggled with is music and cultural categorization. I've always been wary of people who deem themselves as "goths" or "punks" because in their desire to defy cultural expectations, they are actually conforming to them, and fitting exactly into a defined social subgroup. I don't think it's necessarily bad to conform and I've never seen anything wrong with it, but the essential irony of seeing oneself as an outlier and yet belonging to a massive trend seems rather silly to me. I was once asked by someone who looked at me and sneered, "You like punk? You don't look like you like punk. You look like a white girl who collects Devendra Banhart on vinyl." (First of all, I am white so thanks Sherlock, great point.) My reaction to that question was to burst out laughing, because it seems ridiculous to me that my taste in music should extend to the way I present myself looks-wise. In short, people just love to label.

Categorization is essential to every aspect of life, however, there are times when it takes away an element of nuance that makes the world so interesting. And that's a challenge in reviewing music for me. I want to give readers a sense of history, the roots of what they're listening to, and entice them to look at an artist or a release in a more nuanced sense. However, I don't want to sway their opinions and steal the magic of discovering a piece of music without being tainted by prior prejudices.

What do you think--is labeling a necessary evil, or is it a positive action? Can music ever be "new", or is it simply recycled from past movements and artists?