What a clusterfuck of an event. A lot of people flew in just for this event and will be flying back out today. They should have announced this last night. Remember, large corporations really don’t give a fuck if you miss your favourite band.
Category: punk music (Page 1 of 3)
I used to DJ goth-rock, deathrock and punk music over twenty years ago. It was at the height of when synthpop and EBM music took over goth clubs so it was a pretty dire time to be into goth-rock or deathrock. In fact I was one of the few DJs in the areas that I lived that spun the deathrock revival music that was appearing during that time. So, needless to say, I own a lot of goth music from the 80’s and 90’s. Including tons of compilations. During the 90’s there were a lot of them and many were quite good.
So, I will be spending the next few days uploading all of them to my new laptop. Technology is both a curse and a blessing.
How did I get my hands on this early? Again, Amazon delivered a new release to me a little early. Not a complaint, just an observation. There is an upside to living in the middle of nowhere.
Again, I am just going to give you my feelings on listening to this the first time rather than go in depth on every song. There are people really good at giving flowerly descriptions of songs…and I am not one of them!
First off I would like to say how much I love the instrumentation on this album. You have fast punk guitar, spooky keyboards and even horns! Phantasmagoria, Everything and Grave Disorder are all represented within these songs with some added psychedelic type guitar work. These songs actually remind me of the band Vanilla Fudge, which can only be a good thing. If you like a more ‘rocking’ Damned then this is the album for you!
This is a very political album which is so awesome! The Damned have never been ones to shy away from speaking out against bullshit and they do it here in spades. My favourite song so far is Follow Me, a little ditty about how shallow and fake internet influencers can be. Some ‘goth’ influencers are probably going to feel called out by it; which can only be a good thing of course.
Well, first listen and I really, really like this album! The title of the album is a very apt name for it; lots of psychedelic keyboard and guitar work. If you are new to The Damned this would be an excellent jumping in point, and if you are an older fan this album will make you want to boogie: From Your Lips made me want to uber-goth dance!
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.
Killing Joke is back with a very cool politically driven song and video. It is very good and if this is a preview as to what their new album is going to sound like then we are all in for a treat. It hearkens back to their punk roots which is very exciting!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.