welcome to the abyss

Category: Punk (Page 2 of 7)

Starting Work On A New Jacket

Yes, yet another jacket.

I’m back from the dead! I just needed some away from the internet time and I am doing much better. Hooray! I was going to finish this post a week ago but I caught a head cold and had absolutely no energy. I’m just about over it and feel, much, much better. Off we go!

As the title of this post states I am starting work on yet another jacket. When I go onto the ‘high street’ of my town I always browse the New Look store’s clearance section. I always come out with something because I live in a very conservative area. Anything too ‘out there’ for the local normies goes on clearance, and the prices are cheaper than the local thrift stores. It’s a win win for me because it means I don’t have to pay a lot of money to find a piece of clothing to do some fun DIY type work on. I would say that the quality of their stock is better than Shein, so if you are a weirdo with a budget in the UK you ought to head over there.

Since it is a black and white striped jacket people will assume that I am going to ‘Beetlejuice’ it. I think that type of look is very overplayed and I am not a big Tim Burton fan. Because of all of this I am not allowing any green on this jacket. The patches that I will be using will be mostly black & white. There will be some purple, red, blue,etc…but no green. When it comes to DIY battle jackets you should always put what YOU love on it; not what others tell you that you should have on it.

The purple really sets it off.

So far the only work I have done to it is place some purple studs right beneath the pocket openings. Since it is an unlined summer type blazer I might not place any more studs on it. When you stud a piece of clothing you make it heavier so that would go against the purpose of this blazer; a lighter summer type garment. I may feel differently down the road but that is my headspace right now.

I am waiting for a bunch of patches to arrive. This is going to be a ‘spooky’ jacket: horror films, TV shows, sayings and maybe some bands. When more get here I will show them to you all because they are peachy-keen! Okay, I’m going to cheat and share one below that is defitely going on it. It is a thing of beauty!

Nadja is my spirit animal.

Thoughts about Scene Queen’s Anti-Pedophile Song 18+

Love her!

This is one of the first times I have heard a musician in the pop-punk/metal-core/alternative music sphere actually majorly call out sexual predators who go after underage fans. It is a dirty ‘secret’ that has been going on in alternative circles for literally decades. It happens in punk, goth, metal and every single alternative type music genre you can think of. Predatory musicians who want to screw underage girls, and boys, get away with it way too often because their music is deemed too ‘important’, or their music connections are deemed too ‘important’. Nobody should be deemed untouchable, or ‘too important’, when it comes to calling this shit out.

This is a brilliant song and video and I stand with her.

Madi Danger’s Goth Discord History Raises Some Red Flags/ Part 6

I stand with Suzi Sabotage.

Welcome to the very end of my series of articles all about Madi Danger’s very problematic, and now taken down, goth Discord server. If you have not read parts 1-5 I would suggest that you check them out because what happens in this article is the culmination of everything that had happened previously. The links for them will be at the bottom of this article. Just a warning, some of the screenshots in this article can be distressing to read. In the almost twenty-five years that I have been actively online I have never ever encountered somebody with so little self awareness. So, with that being said let us begin our journey!

We start off with the continuation of the paragraph that C had started at the end of the last article. They are correct, the issues that they and others had in that server were not just about politics. They complain to Madi about all of the crap that the moderator G has pulled; banning people for no reason, and deleting topics that the members thought were important. As you have read in the other articles every single time that somebody tried to start a post talking about how racism doesn’t belong in the goth subculture G would delete them. I am assuming that HK is J, Madi’s now husband. Again, C mentions how it was a bad idea for both G and R, a couple, to be moderators of the server together; they backed each other up and created drama where there wasn’t any. I have been in communities online in the past where this kind of crap happened and it always sucked big time. Madi’s moderators pretty much didn’t know how to properly run an online community and should never have been given that kind of power. Especially since Madi wanted that server to be a place for people to learn about the goth subculture. Madi, if you want people who don’t know that much about the true history of the goth subculture to be in charge like that then that reflects badly on you because you are the one who created that space. The people trying to claim that it had nothing to do with her are delusional as hell.

As I have stated before in an earlier article C makes an accusation that G said some anti-Semitic crap to somebody and then banned them. However, there is not a screenshot of this so I cannot verify this accusation. Judging from all of the racist white nationalist flags planted all over the place on the server it really wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that something like that happened though. Come to your own conclusion. This next part very much angers me because I was diagnosed with MS just over five years ago. If a moderator of an online community tried to tell me that I couldn’t ever talk about it until I was officially diagnosed there would have been hell to pay. Somebody seeking a tourettes syndrome diagnosis needs support from the community, not told to shush up about it until an official diagnosis is made. That is just straight up cruel. Again, there is no proof that this happened, but yet again it’s not a stretch to think that it could have occurred. C then tells Madi that they have actually done academic research into music subcultures; metal, goth and punk included. They are saying that to show Madi that they actually are knowledgable on the subject; some facets of which Madi cannot truly understand. Her lack of self awareness cripples her and holds her back from developing into a meaningful participant of the goth subculture. Remember, you crack open her frippery and she is hollow inside.

It is pretty telling how incensed Madi appears to be over C and the others not approving of the supposed ‘changes’ that were going to take place on the server. Obviously the only correct action that should have taken place after the accusations of G being racist should have been G getting insta-banned from the community. They should not have been coddled by Madi and the other mods. Madi and J’s new ‘rules’ come far too little far too late, and remember that banning G for all of this crap was immediately taken off the table even before the others shared screenshots proving what took place. J, Madi’s now husband, cared so much about the safety of the marginalized members of the community that they didn’t think that taking away G’s moderating duties was the right thing to do. Considering that Madi took that server down sometime after all of this took place is very, very telling; she did not want all of this news coming out and reaching the wider public. Remember, she is a goth grifter and wants to become an influencer so that she can make money off of the community and gain subculture clout. All the while not truly understanding how the subculture has always had political elements and is not welcoming of people who actively defend friends wearing Burzum shirts. ‘That’ screenshot is coming up in a few minutes, I promise!

Again, C apologizes to Madi for still talking about this. Madi is the one who should be apologizing to C and to all of the members of that community; since she was the founder of it she had an absolute duty to protect her marginalized fans from racist white nationalist rhetoric. Madi took that trust that they had in her and ground it into the ground with the broken heels of a pair of Demonia boots. C even tells her that they could send all of the screenshots to her of when J argued with them over the issues that C and the others came forward with. Those screenshots are included within my articles so you can read them for yourself.

How dare they assume that your husband is a cis male…how dare they! After all of this and she gets the most angry over that? Do you know why all four of them left Madi? Because both you and J did not take their complaints seriously…at all. She actually admitted that she saw those screenshots and yet she still thinks J handled it fairly?

C continues that paragraph trying again to tell Madi that their concerns are serious and that she should at least try to understand where they are coming from. However, what C doesn’t quite grasp or understand about Madi is that she totally lacks self awareness. She doesn’t listen to advice from others, instead she loves to skip down her own little yellow brick road that is tarnished with pieces of misinformation that are detrimental to both herself and her followers.

Now we come along to a different discussion that Madi initiates with C. If you remember C talked about some online encounters in their story, which occurred a bit after those on the server took place. It was about how both Madi, her husband and their friends stalked C’s comments on different social media sites for any mention of the events that had occurred on that server. Madi claims that C called her a racist even though they didn’t. I also have not stated that she is a racist in any of these articles so if she is saying that I did she is a liar. All C said was that they had heard about Madi defending a friend who was being racist by wearing a Burzum shirt, and that she was gaining a problematic reputation in the online goth community. For those of you who do not know about the black metal band Burzum, it is a band that was founded by the murdering racist white nationalist Varg Vikernes. So, if a person is wearing a shirt with this band’s name on it you can quite easily conclude that said person also has racist white nationalist sentiments. Don’t want to be seen as a racist piece of shit then don’t wear a shirt representing that band. However, Madi is a person who lacks self awareness so she doesn’t see how badly this in turn reflects upon her. You are the company that you keep.

Madi actually goes full on into defending her friend’s choice of wearing a Burzum shirt. It does in fact make your friend racist Madi, since Burzum is a band founded by a racist white nationalist. I don’t care what that murderer sings about in his band, he is still a racist white nationalist. Anything that Varg sonically touches should be avoided because who the hell wants to be affiliated or associated with that piece of shit? Oh, apparently Madi thinks that somebody who wears a bootleg Burzum shirt, and who listens to the music, couldn’t possibly be racist! Madi actually thinks that the ‘logic’ that C is presenting doesn’t add up? Wow! Through the years I have heard idiots say much the same thing about the racist white nationalist punk band Skrewdriver. People would say things like ‘their first album isn’t racist and it’s good’. That kind of crap. C already knows that the other mods of that community weren’t racist too? Madi, that logic that you are presenting doesn’t actually add up.

So, because Burzum’s lyrics, in Madi’s words, are about ‘nerdy shit and a little paganism’ there is no way that Burzum could be considered racist. I’ll let you ponder that for a few minutes. Burzum have never been an unknown underground band. In fact there have been books, films and documentaries that have shown Varg Vikernes to be a murdering racist piece of shit, and yet Madi somehow doesn’t think that listening to his music or wearing Burzum band shirts is in any way racist? C then goes into how multiple people have tried telling her to not defend such things and she just ignores them. I have actually seen her in action online ignoring people when they try to gently correct her about things like bands. For instance, when others told her that certain bands were post-punk and not goth, what does she do? Totally ignores them and then deletes their comments. That might appear to be a minor thing but she does this over and over and over again creating a huge snowball filled with misinformation that is hurtling towards baby bats looking to her for guidance into the subculture.

Just like C I don’t want my goth scene to be infested with racist white nationalists. Her behaviour in the face of all of these red flags in my opinion is very, very suspect. C is right, racists aren’t always the ones who say overtly racist things. A lot of people, including myself, learned that from the whole Sonsombre debacle that happened almost two years ago. We were all used to racist Nazi skinheads trying to barge their way into goth spaces, not somebody who dresses like us and who makes music that we like. To be truthful the blending in that Brandon Pybus attempted is what made me look sideways at Madi. Here is a twenty-six year old metalhead woman coming out of nowhere making videos about ‘goth’ music and the subculture while only having a shallow surface knowledge of the topics. People try to help her and warn her and she puts her fingers in her ears and acts like a a toddler having a tantrum. She is not the kind of person who should be allowed to sit down with baby bats and tell them about the subculture, because she herself is tone deaf and lacks any kind of self awareness. That was the last screenshot in the info dump, but I took a very interesting screenshot the other day of something I found on Google when I typed in ‘madi danger burzum’.

Above is that screenshot in all of its glory. Spotify is notorious for being very slow when it comes to updating playlists and the information contained within them. See that black metal playlist that Madi has? Well, she apparently at some point had at least two different Burzum songs on it. I have underlined them in green. Sometime between then and now she took those songs off of her playlist because if you look at the current version of it they are nowhere to be seen. Did Madi wise up and finally realise that listening to that music made her look like a racist, or did she take them down because she didn’t want people going after her for liking the music of a racist white nationalist? Since Madi lacks any sort of self awareness I’m guessing that she got tired of people not believing her insipid explanations.

If you are online friends with her and are just finding out about all of this information I know how much it sucks when you put your trust in somebody and they betray it. It is never an easy thing to go through. The best way to move on from something like this is to see it as a lesson learned and to grow from there.

There are people and bands online trying to make me out as some sort of villain, that I am ‘bullying’ poor little innocent Madi. It is really obvious to me that they have not read any of my articles and probably never will; they are blinded by all of Madi’s frippery. Do you know what is even more sad than that though? The fact that none of these people learned any lessons from the Sonsombre incident. After a week I am going to make a list of every band and every ‘influencer’ who is still supporting her and put it on this blog. Why? Because others deserve to know the names of those who think that Madi listening to and supporting Burzum is just peachy-keen and a joke. EDIT: After talking to a friend I have decided to be more forgiving to people in this situation, especially to those same people who never forgave me in the Sonsombre conflict. Sometimes you get taken in by somebody and even though shown some evidence your mind can’t quite grasp what is really happening and you just can’t believe that somebody would betray you like that. If you want to talk and try to hash something out I am here and open to having a conversation.

EDIT: I totally forgot to thank all of the people before me who tried to make this information about Madi Danger known to everybody but who were shut down by threats of violence, among other things. All of you deserved to be believed by everybody, instead of being ignored by the majority. I did this partially for you so that you could have some justice. I have your back.

Again, I want to give a big huge shout-out to those who have been supporting me behind the scenes and whom I know have my back. Thank you so very much! I feel very proud to have you as friends. xxxx

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Madi Danger’s Goth Discord History Raises Some Red Flags/ Part 5

I stand with Aus-Rotten.

This was going to be the fifth and last article all about the questionable events that happened on Madi Danger’s now defunct goth Discord server. However, I have had to enlarge all of these screenshots by hand and I had forgotten that there were yet more that I had to do! So, there will be either one or two posts after this and the links to the older articles in this series will be at the bottom of this post. I highly suggest that you read through the first four articles before diving into this one, because all of the others together show the patterns of behaviour that were on display; be it somebody continuously asking the moderators if they had racist white nationalist political views, or somebody refusing to kick out the other moderator who was accused of racism. Once again these are shown in the order in which they appeared. Off we go!

We are now exactly where we left off in part four. This is finally where Madi starts accusing C of insinuating that she is a Nazi. C says that they never got a straight answer from G when asked what their political views were when it came to racist white nationalism. As you have witnessed G danced around that question so much that it became apparent that something was just off about the entire situation. Why wouldn’t G answer that simple question? C then says that they never called her a Nazi and somehow C still trusts Madi to do the right thing. C really seems like the kind of person that just tries to see good in everybody. There is nothing wrong with that at all, they are just trusting the wrong kind of person.

C agrees with Madi that they haven’t recently seen any transphobic jokes on the server, but they think that since people are joking about Varg, who is a murdering and racist piece of shit, that it wouldn’t be far fetched if others started making transphobic jokes. Considering all of the side stepping going on can you really blame them for not feeling safe? Oh for fucks sake! She actually thinks that a very belated answer to a very important question is acceptable proof that G is not a racist white nationalist? That C should be grateful that G has finally graced them with an answer? Madi lacks the self awareness to understand just how bad this whole situation looks and feels to people looking at it from the outside. Most black metal fans see black metal as a joke? How the hell are people in a damn goth server supposed to know that, never mind the fact that marginalized people don’t see racism, transphobia and white nationalism as a joke. Somebody who is a murdering, racist piece of crap like Varg should be condemned and looked down upon as the piece of shit that he is, not joked about around the very people that somebody like Varg would hurt and even kill.

C mentions that they have friends who are into black metal that do not find the meme in question funny. Madi then asks why does C feel the need to spread all of this info all over the internet. Why? Because it is majorly fucked up what happened on that server and C wants to warn others not to step into that pile of shit. Yet again, why the hell does somebody need to know the origins of a metal meme in a goth community? If I had a dollar for every single time I have mentioned this in the articles I would be a very wealthy woman.

Even after all of this C is still trusting Madi; a person who in no way deserves it. Again, how the hell did it get to this point? I know I have said that a few times in these articles but it really boggles my mind just how long this went on for. Their next point is a very good one, it really feels like Madi is not quite grasping how important it is for her to take a strong stance against racist white nationalists online. She can use her platform to send this message loud and clear to those who need to hear it; that racist white nationalism should not, and will not, ever be accepted in the goth community. It’s very important to be self aware in these kind of circumstances and to understand that protecting the marginalized in the goth community should be a priority, rather than just dismissing their legitimate concerns. I honestly hope that Madi does some long and hard critical thinking about all of this and learns that her inaction can lead to people actually being hurt both emotionally and physically. However, her lack of self awareness makes this more than likely an impossibility.

This is C continuing their thoughts on the matter and I fully agree with their stance. Over the years various people with racist white nationalist views have snuck into the goth subculture under the radar because others in the ‘scene’ think that everybody should be accepted into the subculture without any question as to what their true intentions are. The only way that this kind of thing is going to end in the goth subculture is if people confront this crap when they see it happening, instead of not lifting a finger because they are scared of being threatened. I have been writing in this blog for over two years now and I have written articles calling out some pretty horrendous shit, yet I have never received a threat. If you are a cis white woman, such as myself, there really is no excuse to not speak up. C then goes on about how POC don’t feel like they would be welcome within the goth scene because the goth community as a whole has historically not pushed back as hard against Nazis as much as say the punk community has. I mentioned in an earlier article in this series about how I witnessed the punks and SHARPS physically beating the crap out of Nazi skins back over thirty years ago, while the emerging goth scene rarely lifted a finger. Again, I think that has been slowly changing within the last ten years and that can only be a good thing as far as I am concerned.

I can totally feel where C is coming from. Story time! When the goth scene in the SF Bay Area started to evolve out of the alternative scene they wouldn’t lift a finger to drive WAR(white aryan resistance) skinheads out. I would see WAR skins at club nights in which more and more ‘goth’ music would be played. I’m not even kidding about this next part. Some of the people who volunteered at 924 Gilman over in Berkeley were starting to hear about this from people such as myself. So, a group of the bigger punks from there showed up and I don’t remember the WAR skins ever appearing at that club again after that. The reason? Because it was a message to the WAR skins to never show up again or they would physically be forced to leave by any means necessary. If it wasn’t for the punks doing the heavy lifting the goth scene in the SF Bay Area could have died before it was even born. This is all just to say that the punk scene has always been more unified when it comes to a common purpose such as fighting against racism or physically fighting neo-Nazis. While the goth subculture has always been kind of more divided. As I said above this has started to change within the last ten years. Handled fairly on ‘both sides’ Madi? A moderator of the server named G is accused of racism by various members AND judging from the info contained in some of these messages they actually showed receipts of what happened. Yet it is fair to them that G gets no punishment for this? Let alone the fact that it took ages for G to finally answer that damn question. I think Madi has got to look up the meaning of the word ‘fair’ in the dictionary. Reading is fundamental.

Madi, I’m just going to say this again because it bears repeating. You wouldn’t be up in the middle of the night if G would have just answered that question in the first place. C has been more than patient through this entire ordeal and you are going to complain about having to get up early for work in the morning? Again, her lack of self awareness rears its ugly head.

Well, this is the end of part five. As I stated in the beginning of this post there are going to be either one or two more articles after this one in the series. Part 6 will be up on Friday the 27th. I’m giving myself an extra day to put it together because some of the screenshots coming up are rage inducing and I need a little more time to process them in my head before I start. Thank you for reading this, and I would love to give a shout-out to all of the people supporting me behind the scenes; your encouragement has helped me so much and I deeply appreciate it.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Madi Danger’s Goth Discord History Raises Some Red Flags/ Part 4

Again, I stand with Jello.

Welcome to part four in my series about the very problematic history of Madi Danger’s now defunct goth Discord server. If you have not read 1-3 of this series yet I would suggest doing so because they show a clear pattern of behaviour. Links to those earlier posts will be at the bottom of this article. Again, I am showing these screenshots in the order in which I found them. None of them have been left out. Just a warning, this and the next article in this series are composed of just conversations that took place that prove that what C has been saying is true. Again, there will be racist white nationalist flags planted all over the place

This looks like yet another conversation that has started between C and Madi, one of which that C had previously talked about in their story. Yet again C tries to explain why they, and others, do not feel safe in the community because of J’s lack of action against G. J apparently made some excuses such as ‘I don’t know anything about you’ trope. Why the hell does J even need to know the background of anybody; if the members say that a moderator had repeatedly said and done racist type things to them they should be 100% believed, especially when they have some receipts to prove it. Madi says something that makes absolutely no sense so let us continue on.

That above message that you cannot see the entirety of? It is of G saying that they are not a racist white nationalist. EDIT: Madi has kindly shared all of G’s statement and it is at the bottom of this article. :EDIT That is way too little way to late for C’s comfort and for mine as well. G was asked over, and over, and over again by C if they had racist white nationalism type views and G repeatedly refused to answer. There is no backing up and retroactively saving yourself from this sort of situation. If a leftist, such as myself, was asked if they had racist white nationalistic type views the resounding answer would be a huge no. Also, more than likely, a leftist would explain why racist white nationalism is wrong. Unfortunately, it really feels like we are dealing with people here who reside on the other side of the aisle.

C explains why they do not feel safe in the server; they personally know people who have been doxxed and one that was a victim of a hate crime. C was not being overly sensitive in this situation, they had an absolute right to not feel safe in that community. They were just beginning to make YouTube videos about mainly goth type topics, but C also wanted to include videos about trans issues since they themselves are trans. They had wanted to link it to the server, but because of all of the unanswered questions about racist white nationalism in the community they took it down. I do not blame them one bit.

C’s paragraph continues here; their explanation of why they do not feel safe because of all of the red flags that have been planted throughout this entire ordeal. Again, C deserves a lot of praise in this situation because they will not lie down and take this crap. Madi Dearest responds by saying that C shouldn’t share any personal information in the community if they do not feel safe. Her excuse? That it is a large server that she keeps open for anybody to find out information about goth. Since she and the other moderators refused to make rules against bigotry you can easily come up with your own concludion. As I have stated previously in this series there has been a long held tradition in both the punk and goth communities of punching racist white nationalists and banning them from both online and ‘real world’ spaces. From what I witnessed over thirty years ago the punks, and Sharps(skinheads against racial prejudice), did a lot of the heavy lifting, but since that time the goth community has stepped forward and has been more actively involved in pushing racist white nationalists out. As a reminder J, Madi’s now husband, had previously stated that politics don’t belong in the goth subculture and that their inclusion would ruin the ‘scene’. Spoken just like somebody who doesn’t know what the hell they are talking about. If Madi is going to put herself forward as some sort of fountain of knowledge about the goth subculture she, and those mods, should actually learn about the truth of the subculture instead of making shit up as they go along. Again, I find all of this disturbing as hell since her audience tends to skew younger. People are putting their trust in the hands of others who in no way deserve it.

C then starts talking about their experience of also being into punk music and being a member of the punk community. This gets me teary because I have also always loved punk music along with goth music. Over thirty years ago I would go to punk shows and alternative clubs during the same week. I was not alone because a good amount of people back then got into what would become the goth subculture in the San Francisco Bay Area through also liking punk music. Just like C I learned all about racist dog-whistles and crypto-fascists through listening to bands like the Dead Kennedys and from attending shows. C is right, all of the behaviours that Madi, her husband, and those two other moderators are showing would not be tolerated in the punk community. In fact there would be a concerted effort to push them out, I guarantee it. By the way Madi claims to love 70’s-80’s punk music and she has even made a Spotify playlist including songs from the Dead Kennedys and the Subhumans, which tells me that she is not actually ‘listening ‘ to the music. This type of thing happens pretty frequently. It’s like when right wing morons claiming that punk music has become too ‘woke’ and that politics don’t belong in punk. Gee…that sounds familiar doesn’t it?

C goes on about the paradox of intolerance; that if a group of people accept everybody, including the intolerant, eventually the group will be destroyed and taken over by the intolerant. Do you want people such as Madi and her husband holding power in alternative subcultures and destroying them from the inside out? I sure as hell don’t, and they shouldn’t be allowed to freely roam online teaching baby bats what their idea of the goth subculture is all about. All of the frippery and teased hair in the world can’t hide the truth of her actions, and inactions, when it comes to all of this. C also mentions the old saying that if eleven people sit down at a table with one Nazi then there are twelve Nazis. You are the company you keep.

C again tells Madi that all they want is a place to talk about goth without having to worry about being targeted for abuse by people who are anti-trans. Their concern is totally understandable and if I were in their shoes I would feel the same way. I would never be comfortable sharing what I love if I had to worry about literal racist white nationalists wanting to hurt me. Madi, G chose not to answer that very simple question an endless amount of times. Yet you want C to feel safe now just because G finally says that they are antifascist? Seriously? Is she just that dense to think that a statement that came too little too late would just solve everything?

EDIT: That was going to be the end of the article but Madi responded with some screenshots that I supposedly purposely skipped using. In reality I had used the first photo she shared in my first article already and I did not have access to the other two because they were not in the info dump. So I will share those two with you and give my opinion as to the contents of them.

I think the person responding to G is Z from the second article but I am not sure. Z doesn’t find Varg Vikernes funny and neither do I. Varg is a vile murdering racist piece of shit that should be taken seriously and not laughed at. Condemning racists such as Varg should be the priority, rather than laughing about him. Again, how are people in a goth server supposed to know about a metal meme? Laughing about Varg like he is a drunk uncle, rather than condemning him, throws up yet another flag for me. Sorry not sorry

What the hell has G actually explained? As you have seen from the other screenshots in these articles G always evaded the questions thrown at them and repeatedly refused to answer the question as to whether or not they held racist white nationalistic views. Plus, on top of all of that G had been accused by multiple people of deleting talk of racism on the server. Oh, and G and the other mods didn’t think that a rule against bigotry would be be a good idea. Do you know who I am going to believe after reading this entire sorry mess? Not him.

That is the end of part four. Part five will be up on this blog on Tuesday the 24th and it will be the last article in this series. Thank you for reading!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Iggy Pop’s New Album Every Loser Is Insanely Good!

The song Frenzy which is heavy as fuck!

EDIT: I am half asleep and mistitled this post! LOL It is now fixed! Iggy Pop is literally one of the people who helped invent punk music so to say that his music is very important is not an overstatement at all. When I learned the other day that this album had been released, and that people were praising the hell out of it, I knew I had to give it a listen.

Back in 1988 I went to go see The Jesus & Mary Chain open for Iggy. I knew a few Iggy songs back then such as I Wanna Be Your Dog and Cry For Love, but after watching his performance that night I went right out and bought a copy of his newer album Instinct and didn’t look back. I was also getting into punk music during that time so that album was definitely a step down the road of the musical journey I would take and that I am still on. So, as a musician he has always been important to me and I respect the hell out of him.

The song calling out famous pop punk musicians.

I am waiting for the cd of this album to get to my house so I have been playing the YouTube videos for each of the tracks and I haven’t been disappointed at all! In quite a few songs he is calling out rich pop punk musicians and their corporate bullshit, which I am totally here for because if one person has the total right to criticize that crap it is him. This album must be causing the boys in Green Day a huge amount of discomfort and that can only be a good thing.

Biting social commentary.

Even the slower songs on this album have a huge amount of social commentary to them. It feels like Iggy got up one morning and said ‘fuck all of this bullshit’ and wrote out some of his frustrations about this rock in space that we are living on. I can’t overstate this enough, but I think this is probably one of the best social commentary albums to come out in quite a while. If you are into punk music you will love this, and if you are new to Iggy Pop this album would be an excellent place to start checking out his music.

Subhumans Are Doing A Kickstarter For A New Book All About them

My all time favourite Subhumans song.

You read that right, the Subhumans are raising money for a big new book about their band history. They have been around for over forty years so it is bound to be a really good read. They have already reached their goal but you can still pledge to help them out. I got the book, postcard and shirt combo.

I’ve been listening to them since around 1989 and they were very instrumental, along with the Dead Kennedys, as to informing me what is really going on all around us politically and socially. They are a very important band, and if you would like to get into punk music they are an excellent place to start.

My Thoughts On That ’50 Best Goth Songs Of All Time’ Rolling Stone Article

Strawberry Switchblade was not a goth band just because they dressed strange.

There is a recent Rolling Stone article titled The 50 Best Goth Songs Of All Time making the rounds, and my goodness are people pissed off about it. The main reason being that the author of the article is a noted historian on the goth subculture, Andi Harriman. Personally I think she is full of shit, based mainly on the fact that she writes for post-punk dot com, a very problematic website that I have covered on here before. It is run by a trust fund guy who is actively buying his way into the subculture. You are the company that you keep.

I read somewhere yesterday that dearest Andi has claimed that she was told by Rolling Stone to expand the list with famous bands that maybe weren’t goth in order to appease their audience. Instead of having standards she gave in and wrote it. I guess getting her name on the byline of a Rolling Stone article was more important than telling the truth of things. Go figure. So, come wander down this path of half-truths and outright lies with me. This is going to be fun! I will quote sections of the article and then give my response.

‘The scene was a torch passing of sorts. Murphy’s Bauhaus had helped invent goth during the early Eighties; Way had brought it to stripmalls and arenas in the 21st century. And, still, neither could answer a question that has haunted people for decades: What is goth?

Woman, My Chemical Romance is not a goth band. I repeat, My Chemical Romance is not a damn goth band. Just because a band dresses in black does not automatically mean that the band makes goth subculture music. It wasn’t passing a torch from Murphy to Way, it was more like Murphy spitting up in the air and his phlegm landed on Way. What is goth? A question that she sure as hell also doesn’t know how to answer.

Let’s travel back to 1983. A time when London’s Batcave club was in its infancy. There, the aesthetics of goth were cultivated—a love for horror movies and Gothic novels, a sickly pallor and a koosh ball of hair, pointy winklepickers and a mish-mash of fetish materials, and most of all, a romance with melancholy. ‘83 was also the year that vampire-thriller The Hunger, co-starring David Bowie, hit the big screens. Vampires, Bowie,  Bauhaus – it was the perfect trifecta, beautifully bound in an orgy of tragic eternity.

Um…on the US West Coast during the same time there were bands doing the exact same thing. The Batcave was not the only place where goth music came into being and was born; it’s just the obvious easy answer that people repeat over and over and over….again. So much of this is repeated elsewhere that there are tons of people who weren’t even alive during the 80’s running around wearing Batcave shirts and patches right now. I was a teen in the 80’s in the San Francisco Bay Area and even though I was alive during those Batcave years I wouldn’t sport a shirt or patch of a place that I never went to. An orgy of tragic Eternity? It’s not an orgy if it is only attended by three people. Just saying.

The first batallion of dark 1970s post-punk bands fed off the energy of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust character, an androgynous creature who didn’t quite seem human. The allure of Ziggy, mixed with the magnetism of Dracula (namely Christopher Lee, Udo Keir, and of course, Bela Lugosi) helped to assemble the essential iconography of the subculture– at once dreadful and oozing with sex appeal.

A whole lot of those bands came out of Los Angeles and not the Batcave; specifically Christian Death and 45 Grave, who both used darkly themed aesthetics in their stage performances. Alice Bag, who was in the early Los Angeles punk band The Bags with Patricia Morrison, actually goes into detail in her book Violence Girl as to how everything creatively morphed after the early punk scene there imploded due to the violence that was happening at shows. I highly recommend her book, because she was best friends with Morrison and her insight is very valuable.

And the sound? It’s atmospheric. Somewhere between a banshee scream or a bellowing, reverberated howl that could part the Red Sea, goth began as a transition point from the jaggedness of punk’s confrontational simplicity into an elegant darkness, one cloaked in sorrow and so much emotion. In order to achieve goth status, there must be as much drama as possible: the music, in true Hitchockian fashion, must be as frightening as a spiral staircase in a creaking haunted house.

Again, a whole lot of early goth bands were anything but elegant. Sex Gang Children, Virgin Prunes, Christian Death, etc…were all very confrontational and anything but elegant, but that was the appeal. You could speak up about how fucked up the world was along with looking like you were mourning it. Personally, that is one of the reasons why I have always been into goth music along with punk; they can be on different sides of the same coin.

Think of this list as a roadmap to that sound—from B-movie horror thrills, to reanimated rock and roll rituals, to complete sacrilege, bulging with blasphemy, bondage, blood and lots of bats. It’s a history that touches on subgenres like dream pop, hard rock, synthpop, and glam, that makes pit stops in Spain and Germany, pays homage at the doorsteps of black-clad country heroes and spooky blues legends, and dives into seedy art rock grottos and DIY punk venues. So pour yourself a goblet of red wine and hold your rosaries tight. It’s gonna be a long, dark night of the soul.

A roadmap to the sound? Then why the hell would you call this list ’50 Best Goth Songs Of All Time’? It should have been titled ‘music that influenced goth bands’ instead then. She should know better than to mislead people with this article, because right now there is a ton of misinformation about it. So much so that teens, and even adults, are running around calling themselves goth without listening to any of the actual music. Instead of trying to stop this crap she is doing her part to perpetuate it. Awwww…….how peachy-keen of her!

I am now going to briefly comment on each band on that list that are in no way goth, and give my reasoning for my opinion on each.

50. Strawberry Switchblade They were basically a pop band who happened to dress in a lot of polka dots. Seriously, that’s it. Plus, Rose McDowall got all cozy with Death In June, a very problematic band. A big huge thumbs down from me.

49. AFI This one is a huge WTF. I actually used to go to the punk club Gilman in Berkeley during the same years that Havok went there before he got famous. I just remember that he had the cover of TSOL’s album Dance With Me on the back of his leather jacket. The dude does like some deathrock music, but that doesn’t mean that he actually makes deathrock music. Their sound has morphed multiple times over the years, but it has never been strictly goth.

47. She Wants Revenge Members of this band have been accused of sexual assault. They opened a ‘goth’ club in Los Angeles and preceded to do nothing about their workers being sexually assaulted by their guests. Fuck this band up the ass with no lube. I guess our friend Andi is perfectly okay with all of this. Good to know.

45. My Chemical Romance Not a goth band folks. A band isn’t goth just because they dress in black and whine about their lives. The song she chose sounds like straight up pop punk, which is a music genre that really needs to jump off of a cliff.

44. Type O Negative This is one of the big bands that is always called goth by people who don’t know any better. Andi should know better, but apparently she thinks misinformation is okay as long as she gets the clicks. They are straight up metal and that is it.

43. Echo And The Bunnymen If I had a dollar for every single time a misinformed kid calls this band goth I would be a wealthy woman. They were never goth….at all. I actually saw them live in 1987, so I was around when they were big, and they were never called goth. The internet has been spreading this misinformed crap for the last decade. Sorry kids, just because a post-punk band made maybe one or two sad songs in the 80’s doesn’t make the band goth. Period. Thanks Andi for perpetuating this bullshit.

41. Suicide They have always been considered punk. That’s it.

38. Fad Gadget Their songs used to be played in the alternative/goth clubs I went to over 30 years ago, but that doesn’t mean the band was goth. I have always considered them to be a new wave band more than anything else.

36. Nine Inch Nails Seriously? Wahahahaha!!!! Industrial music, maybe, but definitely not a goth band. Nope, just a trust fund dude whining about how shit his life is while playing a keyboard.

33. Depeche Mode I have always loved their album Black Celebration, but is it a goth album? Synthpop definitely, but not really goth. They were an important goth gateway band for me in the 80’s, but they themselves were not a goth band. They could lead you down a road of discovery if that is where you wanted to go. A lot of people would just stop at them and not go any further, and I found such people to be boring as hell.

32. Johnny Cash I love some Johnny Cash, but was the dude goth? Nope, he was solidly a country musician who sang about dark subjects. Then again a lot of old school country bands did the same sort of thing and they don’t appear on this list. I think Andi only included him because of his Nine Inch Nails cover song, a band who is also not goth. Way to go Andi!

21. The Velvet Underground Definitely a proto-punk band, that is in no way goth.

12. Iggy Pop Again, a proto-punk band and not goth….at all. Iggy Pop’s music isn’t goth just because Ian Curtis hung himself while listening to one of his albums. I saw Iggy perform in the late 80’s and it sure as hell wasn’t a dark romantic performance; it was aggressive, energetic and punk as all hell. If he tours near you go and see him, he puts on an excellent show.

7. Joy Division They were a solid post-punk band and that is it. Ian Curtis killed himself before the subculture was even fully formed so I think sticking the music of the band into a goth box does it a disservice. Retroactively calling bands goth is just lazy and trite journalism. I wrote a whole article about how they were never a goth band. The only people who think they are goth are the kids running around who think that all sad songs must be goth. They couldn’t be more wrong.

6. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins Not a goth musician at all. I wouldn’t even call him proto-goth. However, I think the dude influenced the hell out of horror punk and shock rock. The Misfits even played some shows with him over forty years ago. Just because a musician uses dark theatrics doesn’t make said musician goth. That is unless you want to call both the Misfits and Alice Cooper goth.

4. David Bowie Again, yet another musician who was in no way goth but whose music influenced both punk and later goth musicians. His music is very important but it just isn’t goth, and that’s okay.

Well, that’s it folks. What lesson can we learn from this whole mess? That to some people getting an article in a mainstream music publication such as Rolling Stone is more important than actually telling the truth. Sad but true, and it is this attitude that is really hurting the subculture right now; fame at all costs, and if you have to step over people and lie to achieve it then so be it.

I Have Finally Started Working On The Glenn Danzig Themed Jacket!

The patch placement on the back I am more than likely going to run with.

You have read that correctly, I have finally started working on the Glenn Danzig themed jacket! This will entail including patches from the Misfits, Samhain, Danzig and other related spooky stuff. The funny thing is that all of this is happening around the same time that I finally got my eyes tested and found out that I need reading glasses. It was getting difficult to thread a needle so that really needed to happen.

We own a cat, can you tell?

Without glasses I managed to sew on the Samhain death dealer patch. I used red thread to make it pop a little. I have decided not to tire the hell out of my eyes any further and just wait for my glasses to arrive before I start on another patch. So, I will be back at it next week. While I was waiting for the last patches to arrive I started yet another project.

Love this hoodie so much!

I bought the above Misfits hoodie from Hot Topic’s website about a month ago. I only order from the site once a year because they charge way too much money for shipping. I’m just going to slowly sew more patches to it and perhaps add some spikes.

All of the patches shown in this post I bought from Etsy.

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