There are a bunch of people right now who think that recent really shit hip-hop/trap bands are goth just because they sing about sad or dark subjects. This is perpetuated by said bands who advertise themselves as ‘goth’ in order to seem ‘dark’ and ‘dangerous’. The funny thing about all of this is the fact that these bands create a falsehood about a subculture because they believe in certain stereotypes about the subculture that are false.
Before I really dig into this I would like it to be known that I am a fan of early hip-hop and rap music. I respect the hell out of bands such as NWA and Public Enemy because they were not afraid to write songs about the issues that affected them and their communities. Hip-hop/rap music grew right alongside punk music, and I think what those two bands accomplished was way more in the spirit of punk that mainstream type pop-punk bands such as Green Day. I am looking forward to Public Enemy’s new album What You Gonna Do When The Grid Goes Down and have pre-ordered it. This is all to say that I do not hate all hip-hop/rap music.
Who are these bands causing these issues? One of the more visible groups of musicians associated with this phenomenon are gothboiclique, who frequently also get labelled as ’emo rap’. It’s all actually a bit confusing because their fans quite often can’t decide to either call them goth or emo. Many think both genres are the same, when in fact we know that they are not. Just because somebody sings about emotional or dark topics doesn’t mean that they are automatically goth or emo. Goth is a form of post-punk that started in the late 70’s while the roots of emo stretch back all the way to the 80’s. They are both guitar oriented types of music, in which some keyboards may or may not make an appearance. It’s not the other way around. They also get described as SoundCloud rap because it is the music platform they mostly appear on. Also, there is another collective group out of Atlanta called The Vampire Cult. How edgy of them.
When called out on all of this they will almost always call you a gatekeeper, because you are calling their identity into question. Most of them are teens who want to desperately belong to a subculture, even if they don’t really know what said subculture is actually about. If one of their favourite musicians call themselves ‘goth’ then they latch onto that because basing their identity on the opinion of a musician is seen as more ‘real’. They even try to look like these musicians, drawing crap on their faces and wearing black hip-hop/rap associated clothing.
As I said in the start of this these musicians who call themselves ‘goth’ are basing their understanding of the goth subculture off of the mainstream stereotypes of the goth subculture. For instance, a lot of them love Marilyn Manson and think that he is a goth who makes goth music. Apparently, from what I have read online, he hung out with some of them and has name dropped them before. I don’t know how true that is but it really sounds plausible. Since the mainstream has always thought that Manson is goth because he’s ‘spooky’ and ‘dark’, these musicians think that if they sing about the same subjects that they should also be considered goth. What they fail to realise is that Marilyn Manson has never been considered a part of the goth subculture by the majority of the people who actually participate in it. He is an abuser of woman and a vile piece of shit on top of all of that.
Another really obvious thing that contributes to this whole miasma of misunderstanding is the image that ‘dark’ clothing companies perpetuate as being how ‘goths’ are supposed to look. The moon, pentagram, pentacle, ankh and general clusterfuck of religious symbols vomited upon clothing and objects is something really easy for these musicians to latch onto. All they have to do is spend some money and they can look ‘dark and ‘spooky’ and be granted automatic entry into the goth subculture. When they try to enter the goth subculture by dressing this way, instead of actually listening to real goth music, they get very defensive and the term ‘gatekeeper’ gets thrown about.
If you are one of the people that I have been describing here is a list of actual goth bands. This is a very diverse list so there is something for just about everybody on it. If you don’t like any of these bands at all then perhaps you should look into a subculture whose music you actually do like, because it makes no sense to call yourself a member of a subculture whose music history you hate.
- Christian Death
- Lycia
- Sex Gang Children
- Sonsombre
- Pawns
- Mystic Priestess
- Nox Novacula
- Detoxi
- Then Comes Silence
- Panic Priest
- Kentucky Vampires
- Scary Black
- Horror Vacui
- Bauhaus
- Love &Rockets
- Sisters Of Mercy
- Virgin Prunes
- The Cure
- Mephisto Walz
- The Creeping Terrors
- London After Midnight
- Angels Of Liberty
