That is me on the left in early 1991. I painted and studded the jacket myself.
As most of you know I have been listening to punk music for as long as I have been listening to goth/alternative music. I refuse to use the term ‘post-punk’ for that time because we didn’t use it and punk was still fully alive and kicking. I am more in tune to modern goth type bands than I am with modern punk bands so these songs will be mainly from the 80’s. I like everything from UK 82 type bands to skate-punk and horror-punk so there is a wide variety here. If you always wanted to get into punk music but didn’t know where to start any of these bands would be a good jumping off point. By the way, the Sex Pistols would have appeared on this list but Lydon is now a supporter of fascist bullshit. Fuck him, he is now dead to me. Included is hands down the best Joy Division cover song ever made ; Day Of The Lords by Neurosis. I saw them do it live at the punk club Gilman in Berkeley over 30 years ago and it literally gave me goosebumps, it was that powerful. Don’t skip it, you are in for a treat. Also, some of these songs may be considered deathrock or metal but some bands don’t fit into just one box and that is a good thing.
These songs will not be in any kind of order because sometimes my top spots totally change. I hope you enjoy these songs and that you discover music that is new to you.
MISFITS – BLOODFEAST (1983)
BAD RELIGION – DO WHAT YOU WANT (1988)
GBH – I AM THE HUNTED (1982)
BODY COUNT – COP KILLER (1992)
7 SECONDS – 99 RED BALLOONS (1985)
CANCERSLUG – GIRLS CHAINED UP IN THE BASEMENT MAKING BABIES TO KILL (2013)
UK SUBS – LIMO LIFE (1982)
RAMONES – BONZO GOES TO BITBURG (1986)
JELLO BIAFRA WITH D.O.A. – FULL METAL JACKOFF (1990)
This man did not make goth music, did not invent wearing thrift clothes and has been dead for almost 30 years.
I wrote this rant elsewhere out of frustration when it comes to younglings claiming that they are ‘grunge-goth’, because in truth grunge was never a subculture and has never had anything to do with the goth subculture. Enjoy!
The amount of people who think grunge was an actual subculture is disappointing and yet doesn’t surprise me. Just because some dark fashion retailer is trying to sell you something that they label ‘grunge’ doesn’t mean that it was a damn subculture. You know what grunge was? It was a marketing label used by mainstream record execs to sell pre-packaged ‘safe’ rebellion. Those bands that they labeled ‘grunge’ were playing punk meets garage music and their original audience was made up of mostly punks.
All of that changed when the label ‘grunge’ was pushed into the mainstream and the new audience was mostly made up of trend whores who thought they were now at the peak of being alternative. They were the same people who would give punks and goths massive amounts of shit for looking too different or for listening to music that was too strange. The lyrics for Nazi Punks Fuck Off say it perfectly:
‘You ain’t hardcore ’cause you spike your hair when a jock still lives inside your head’
THIS! Needless to say grunge had nothing to do with the goth subculture. Did some goths like grunge? Of course, but that didn’t mean that the two were connected. Punks, metalheads, and everybody generally alternative wore flannel, military surplus gear and thrift store clothing way before ‘grunge’ made its appearance. The bands labeled ‘grunge’ were just wearing what other weirdos wore, they didn’t invent a style. The mainstream took that style and marketed it to the masses.
Now there are a bunch of people who are using the term grunge-goth, which makes zero sense because of the reasons I talked about up above. It is a term made up by dark fashion companies to sell nostalgia to kids, as if grunge was also a subculture equal to goth. ‘If you buy this grunge-goth top you are going to be double cool and ultra rebellious!’ No, no you are not because grunge was never a subculture and if you buy into those marketing tactics you are nothing but a fashion victim, the same as those mainstream trend whores from 30 years ago.
Within the last few years there has been a resurgence of interest in anything having to do with the 80’s. Everything from endless posts about mediocre 80’s ‘post-punk’ bands to people asking questions as to how to directly copy the look of ‘trad’ goths litter the internet. Then there are the truly special individuals who constantly talk about how cool the decade was and how they wish they could have lived back then. They should never wish that. You want to know why? Because for the most part the 80’s was a hellish landscape of conservative neo-liberal politics mixed in with a highly conformist society that punished those who were in any way different.
I was a teen in the 80’s and graduated high school in 1989, so I spent pretty much the entirety of my teen years in that decade. I was very politically aware during that time and paid attention to the world events going on around me. For example, I went on a trip with some classmates to Washington DC in late 87 that was called Close Up. Teens from all over the US go every year to learn about politics. You get to meet your representatives and talk about important issues with others. We got enough free time to wander about the area exploring and one day two friends and I were walking near the Capital Building when a motorcade appeared. During that week Soviet officials were there to draw up the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty along with officials from Reagan’s cabinet which included the Secretary Of State George Shultz. I hated, and still hate, Reagan with the burning heat of a thousand suns so I was obviously not a fan of anybody serving under him. The first limos going past us had Soviet flags attached to the front, rolled down windows and Soviet guys waving at us with smiles on their faces. Seriously, it was as cool as it sounds. We smiled and waved back of course. Then the limos infested with the lice off of Reagan’s head rolled by and not one of them rolled down their windows. However, it was easy to see through the tint that one of them contained Shultz. I started yelling to him that he sucked and gave him the finger with both hands. Yes, I told a high ranking US official to basically go fuck himself. My friends were panicking telling me to stop but I wouldn’t. To this day I am still proud that at the age of 16 I had the balls to do something like that.
Now that you have learned a little bit about me I will now tell you a little bit about what it was really like to live in the 80’s.
THE COLD WAR AND THE CONSTANT FEAR OF NUCLEAR ANNIHILATION
I don’t think that younger people right now quite realize just how close we came to all being killed in a nuclear war. This fear was largely due to the constant posturing of Reagan. He would call the USSR the evil empire and threaten them on a very regular basis. Frankly I was way more afraid of Reagan back then than I was of the USSR. To the credit of the USSR back then they didn’t give in to Reagan and start a war. I honestly think the professional war mongerers who stood behind Reagan wanted an all out war with the USSR because they would have made billions from that. Both empires fought a proxy war in Afghanistan when the USSR invaded the country while the US backed and trained the rebels. By the way one of those rebels was Osama Bin Laden.
Scene from the UK film Threads.
Nuclear war was such a possibility at the time that two powerful tv films were made about it happening. Threads in the UK and The Day After in the US. Since I was living in the US at the time I saw The Day After when it was first aired in 1983 when I was in the 7th grade. It freaked my friends and I out so much that we went to our vice principal and asked about whether the school had a nuclear fallout shelter. Think about that for a second. Imagine being a young teen and having that kind of fear hanging over your head on a constant basis. It sucked. A few years ago I finally saw Threads and it shows the reality of a nuclear war; people being burned alive and the unsanitized reality of what would happen after a nuclear conflagration. If I had seen it back in the 80’s I would have had full blown nightmares.
IF YOU WERE IN ANY WAY ‘DIFFERENT’ YOU GOT CONSTANTLY SHIT ON AND CONFORMITY WAS A WAY OF LIFE
I always see younger people in online goth communities say that they wished that they could have experienced an ‘alternative’ subculture back in the 80’s. With confidence I can say that the vast majority of them wouldn’t have been emotionally equipped to have handled all of the shit that they would have gotten from others. It wasn’t just the ‘normal’ people that you had to deal with back then, you also had to deal with intense pressure within the alternative community to fit in by liking the same bands and behaving the same way. Woe onto you if you actually acted happy or liked a band that wasn’t considered cool. People think that ‘gatekeeping’ is bad now? They have no idea.
Jello even wrote a song about the pervasive conformity.
There was a huge amount of pressure back then by society to fit in. Reagan constantly preached about how America was better in the good old days, which were actually not good for anybody who wasn’t wealthy and white. If you didn’t go along with his not so hidden racist agenda you were seen as unpatriotic and a traitor. I am not exaggerating. You had to hate the USSR, be scared of black people, and look just like everybody else. If you didn’t have a perm, didn’t dress in the trendiest clothes and didn’t listen to the latest pop bands you didn’t fit in so you were considered fair game to tease and even physically attack. Luckily I was never physically attacked but I know that lots of people were. Far more violence happened back then than now. However, I had things yelled at me on a constant basis, for doing such things as simply walking down a street. In high school I was even told by a teacher that I wouldn’t have as many problems if I just dressed like everybody else.
IT WAS DIFFICULT AS HELL FINDING OUT ABOUT BANDSAND SHOWS
There was no functioning internet back in the 80’s. There were some bulletin board type communities but computers were expensive as hell so most people did not have them. There were thee ways of finding out about bands back then. You could be one of those lucky people that lived near a radio station that actually played alternative and punk music. These were usually college radio stations, but sometimes pop stations would play less popular music in the the middle of the night. There was a pop station in my area that did this. So much so that by the very late 80’s they became an ‘alternative’ station. However, by that time they played more radio friendly bands than experimental ones. However, I did learn about some bands by listening to them. Another way to learn about bands was by getting mix tapes from your friends. In early 86 I got one from a guy, who then ghosted me. There was no track listing written down so it took me literally years to figure some of them out. However, I had another person introduce me to Joy Division by handing me a tape with Unknown Pleasures on one side and Closer on the other. The last way to find out about music was by cold buying it. You would see somebody cool wearing a mysterious band shirt and you kept a log of those band names in the back of your head. I actually cold bought November Coming Fire by Samhain using this method, and more times than not I had really good luck.
You probably wouldn’t know who this band was back then if you had been around.
On top of all of this there was a code of silence that the uber goober type people would pull when you would ask them about what bands they liked. Seriously. There was some sort of strange code that some weirdos lived by that made it very uncool to share musical knowledge with anybody. It was as if they were going to be killed by an evil cabal if they dared to utter the sacred names of bands. These were the same types who would try to dictate how you behaved in clubs.
Wanted to see your favourite band play a show? Good luck! Most of the time the only way you would find out about shows was at club nights, but if you were under 18, and sometimes 21, you weren’t allowed in them. I actually went to one that let you in of you were 17 or older and another that was all ages so I was lucky when it came to that. However, that didn’t mean you would find out about all of the shows because venues were usually total shit at advertising shows unless they were some of the better known ones that also hosted metal shows. There were some ‘alternative’ weekly papers where I lived so I would find out about some of them that way, but there were two times that I accidentally saw bands because I thought it was going to be a regular club night. I saw Meat Beat Manifesto and The Call that way which looking back on it was pretty darn cool.
Well, that’s it for today. I realise that I have probably broken some hearts and crushed some dreams but the amount of misinformation about the 80’s really needs to be balanced out with a reality check. I don’t look back at that decade with rose coloured glasses, even though I lived through those years. It could be fun, but it was also really difficult. If I had the ability to go back in time to those years I wouldn’t.
I got into both punk and goth music at around the same time, and there have been years that I looked more ‘goth’ and other years that I looked more ‘punk’. Actually, I should replace the term ‘goth’ with the word ‘alternative’ since before 91 the term ‘goth’ wasn’t used in my area. No matter what I looked like I always still held the same beliefs. I heavily disliked the GOP and the Tories, thought all conservatives were assholes, and that neo-Nazi skinheads sucked and didn’t belong in either of the subcultures.
I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area back then. That area has always been known for being very left wing. However, there were some very conservative pockets, most of which were in the East Bay. This included Fremont, which back then, was mostly white and middle/upper middle class. I went to high school there and I would say that at least 80% of the students there during the 1980’s were white. I could literally count the number of African American students with only one hand. No joke. This was in stark contrast to my experience of being a child in San Francisco where most of my friends were Chinese and other people of colour.
Since I openly disliked Reagan I never fit in at all. If you weren’t conservative in the 80’s you got fucked with pretty much on a daily basis. How dare you not like Reagan, that means you’re not American!!! So, since I politically didn’t fit in it wasn’t a huge step for me to start embracing punk and what is now called goth music. I bought Beating A Dead Horse by The Sex Pistols and Specimen’s Batastrophe in 1986, That quickly pointed me into the direction of The Dead Kennedys, 7 Seconds, Gene Loves Jezebel, The Cure, U2, etc… I loved the Pistols, 7 Seconds and The Dead Kennedys because of the political messages and Specimen and Gene Loves Jezebel because the music sounded different and cool.
The outside of the punk club Gilman.
Thirty years ago I would go to Gilman, a volunteer run punk club that is still around in Berkeley, one night and then a goth/alternative club called The Twilight Zone in Alameda the next. Looking back on it there was maybe a handful of us who would do this so I never felt alone. The punk community embraced this way more than a lot of people in the emerging goth scene. There were quite a few people who called themselves goth back then who looked down their noses at anybody who didn’t dress a certain way. It didn’t matter that you loved goth music, to them everything was about how you dressed. People think there is gatekeeping going on in the subculture right now? It was ten times worse back then. I did my own thing and just ignored them. A lot of them ended up as either meth or heroin addicts so I think I ended up with the better end of the stick.
I didn’t do that much clubbing during the 90’s, I would only go to clubs maybe a couple of times of year, which I actually don’t regret too much because I avoided a massive amount of drama. During that time I saw the original line-up of Danzig and other acts such as Adam Ant so I didn’t miss everything coming out of that decade. After 2000 I moved around a lot and did some DJ work spinning everything from punk to goth, where I encountered a massive amount of sexism. Not that many people stood up and argued against it it back then because I think some people were afraid that their ‘goth’ status would be revoked. This would have never been accepted in the punk subculture. If a band said sexist crap on stage at Gilman they would be banned from playing there. People in the punk subculture would stand up for each other, while in the goth subculture twenty years ago people would work against each other, fighting for status.
Thankfully, it really feels like things have changed. Right now there are quite a few deathrock and goth rock bands who are openly political that question societal norms. I don’t feel that every single band in the goth subculture has to be political, because after all not every single punk band is political. However, along with this new awareness comes a downside. Some people, who are jealous of the success of certain bands, attempt to blacklist them by calling them racist even though there is no real proof of this. It’s petty goth subculture bullshit belittling the term and using it for self absorbed reasons. When I saw it happen to a band recently my punk side came out and I fought like hell against the witch hunters, because it was obvious that it was being lead by musicians/djs who were jealous twats. They expected me to go along with their hive mind mentality and were shook when I didn’t. Sorry kids, but the Subhumans taught me to think for myself. By the way, I have screenshots of all the shit that went down because I know that those twats are going to be the type to deny all of this within a year or two.
Think For Yourself by the Subhumans
I am very, very grateful that I never stopped listening to punk music, even when pressured to by the uber goobers at goth clubs. The music taught me that it is okay to question authority, be it a politician or a ‘leader’ in an online goth community. It also gave me the confidence to speak up when I know a situation is not what it seems. It also taught me that listening to my inner voice is more important than worrying about my social status. In the end I’d rather be able to live with myself than gain imaginary goth points. This is the reason why I have always had a foot in the punk subculture.
While I was innocently browsing Facebook today there was an ad that caught my eye. I normally call ads on there scams and report them, so I clicked onto the link and I was horrified to discover that there is a company charging over £300.00 for ready made denim battle jackets. Yep, that much money for a sewn on back patch, some studs and maybe some chains. I’m not joking, and that isn’t the worst of it. They are charging £666.00 for leather jackets with simple paintings of the Universal Monsters and some light studding.
All of this is basically the commercialization of traditionally DIY pieces of clothing. This kind of crap has been happening forever, but this site really seems to hit all of the sour notes of the most recent trend of wanting to be ‘goth’. A certain percentage of people who are curious about the goth subculture these days automatically think that it’s only about the clothing so they will drop hundreds, if not thousands, on ready made clothing that is advertised as ‘dark’ and ‘goth’. I have nothing against ready made clothes in general, and just about every single person in both the goth and punk subcultures own at least a few pieces. However, charging hundreds of pounds/dollars for a ready made jacket is really obscene because it is the one piece of clothing that has been traditionally DIY.
My peachy-keen post-apocalyptic themed jacket that is close to finished.
Before I go any further, if you are a regular reader of this blog you know that I have been working on my own jacket for months now. Since I have MS I frequently don’t have the energy to do much of anything, so I work on it when I physically feel like I can. If I can make the time to work on one, despite my medical condition, others really have no excuse. It doesn’t matter what you can and can’t paint, when you work on it yourself it becomes a part of who you are. Paint and studs can be found online for very cheap and you’ll end up with your own piece of wearable art.
