Music Related Drama That Has Me Very Frustrated

EDIT: I did not permanently leave the r/goth community after this post, I just kind of held back for a few months before engaging with other people again. I didn’t get kicked out by the power tripping mods until more recently.

There seems to be a real tendency right now for younger people who identify themselves as goth to claim that alternative bands from the 80’s are goth. This is done partially through ignorance, and partially because they think that since they are goth that all of the music they like must also be goth. Echo & The Bunnymen being one of the more popular ones, with their song The Killing Moon being pointed out as a ‘goth’ song. What they fail to realise is that back in the 80’s they weren’t considered to be a goth band. In the strict sense they were considered to be ‘alternative’, a non mainstream band. They toured with Gene Loves Jezebel and New Order in 1987, a concert that I actually went to. There was one band out of the three that should be considered goth with a capital G, and it sure as hell wasn’t Echo And The Bunnymen. Oh, and it wasn’t New Order either in case you get that silly idea in your head.

You can tell some of these people until you are blue in the face, but do they listen? Of course not. It gets me kind of pissed off that the bands that I listened to as a teenager in the 80’s are being hijacked by a bunch of kids who think that they know more about the music of that time than I do. I’m not saying that my opinion is perfect or that I’m an expert when it comes to the music of the 80’s, but since I was a teenager during that time I definitely know quite a bit about the music from that decade.

Another thing that ticks me off is when people tell me that certain forms of music are not related to the goth genre at all, even though they were played at alternative clubs in the late 80’s alongside bands such as Christian Death and Specimen. I was there, I actually remember bands such as Desireless and Fake being played in sets. I associate those bands with the goth subculture because they definitely had a place in it during the late 80’s when the genre was starting to separate and have its own club nights. Anybody who says anything different wasn’t around during that time or is plain lying.

I actually left the Reddit goth group partially because of all of this. I just got sick and tired of people, who weren’t around in the 80’s, telling me I was wrong about what happened back then. Some genres such as synthpop definitely had a place in what was to become the goth subculture in the late 80’s and those songs were important to members of the burgeoning subculture. The synthpop that was created twenty years ago was a totally different animal. It took over goth club nights, along with EBM, and was very repetitive and stale. The current crop of wannabe 80’s synth/post-punk bands try to sound like ‘authentic’ 80’s music but a lot of the time they fall very flat. I like some of them a lot, but the bad really outweighs the good in that genre. A genre, that for some odd reason, is considered goth by the same people who dismiss 80’s synthpop as not being goth related.

What can we learn from all of this? There are people in the goth subculture that are so rigid in their definitions of the music that they can’t, or won’t, admit when they are wrong. When these people double down on their wrong assumptions just walk away, because they don’t want to listen to reason. Instead they only care about being right, much to the detriment of the subculture.