While if you see a goth presenting despite the difficulty, like you say in a small town or countryside, maybe you can assume they're a true believer.
God, small towns are shitty. Anyone who romanticizes small towns or small involuntary communities of any kind must see themselves as permanently part of the dominant group.
EDIT: To bring this back to the article, I guess it's nice if the country is now a place where being goth can be about "a quiet confidence, which manifests externally as shyness" instead of being about "if I accepted the community's evaluation of me, I would have to erase myself, and I still have enough of a survival instinct to fight against that."
Also, I disagree with this part:
> In the city the vectors come from many directions, but cancel out and you remain more or less a circle. In the country you get repeated perturbation by a few vectors that deforms you into a spiky, interesting shape.”
Being interesting can be about responding to different vectors of scrutiny differently. You can respond to them all and still be interesting if you respond in a mild way to some and an extreme way to others, and you're willing to make choices when different vectors contradict each other. Otherwise, interesting people wouldn't emerge in cities, and they do.
When I rented my first apartment in NYC I needed to buy a shower curtain, and I was in a very "don't use Amazon" mode, which meant I was about to discover how little choice you really have when it comes to buying one locally. I got one home I thought I liked, but hanging it up I discovered it had totally trite _words_ on it like "Happiness" and "Sunshine" or whatever. It was so cringe and not my personality even a little, and I cursed God for saddling me with a lot of unpleasant options at that point (throw it away immediately and create waste and go through the whole rigamarole or getting a new one blah blah). But for some reason I suddenly had the thought that this was really enriching my life. It was so totally unlike me it weirdly stretched my experience in a really refreshing way. It was a low-key funny story. It does actually put you kind of in a good mood if you're not actively resenting it while showering.
Secondary cities are like that, but for your whole life. It might not be your choice, you might not have access to everything you need to sculpt your life for maximum clout or virality, but it turns out that's an insidious kind of poverty. We're better when things outside our control influence us at least a little.
Some examples of this:
- local restaurants take pretty bonkers chances with their menus and change them seasonally, so it's possible you just won't like anything at a place all winter, but then the spring menu is amazing
- there's a gas station a few blocks away from us which isn't that pleasant on paper (traffic, odors, light pollution, though we don't experience this from where we live) but for some reason it makes me super nostalgic
- we used to do a swim class with our oldest every weekend, but there really isn't one here (in English), but the music class we just found is also very fun even though we really wanted a swim class
I could go on. Maybe I'm aging, maybe it's becoming a parent, but the thought of moving back to an NYC or even a Chicago feels deeply uninspiring and exhausting. I want the weird decor/playlist choices. I want the people who only run their shop 2 days a week. The constraints big cities labor under have become too intense for them to really be surprising; they have to be so efficient they can't be robust.
Now if you want to be an artist in New York City, you have 2 options: be a full time artist but completely aligned with wealthy gallery culture (i.e., be appealing to "mainstream") or work in finance and do art on the side.
This is why NYC produces no actually interesting culture anymore.
Same is true of Berlin, CDMX, etc. such places are maximally interesting within the constraint of "must be wealthy" which necessarily excludes lots of cultural expression. They are also riding on the interestingness that was generated decades ago when the financial situation was different.
Being a seriously big city, NY must still have "home-grown" art and culture, like its hip-hop scene or the modern equivalent? Kids are still growing up in rent controlled apartments surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other kids, even if starving artists aren't arriving from the outside like they used to.
As we start building permanent structures (such as a family) we naturally start avoiding these zones of turbulence because they are challenging to navigate and we need the energy elsewhere. It's ok.
Your kid's bedroom (if your a Gen X parent).
Youth culture is now heavily social media or short content based, making it easier to reach out to large audiences while staying at home.
You can build and manage an entire community of friends just by using Discord or other similar products, so you can develop a network effect without having to be in-person.
Take a look at SoundCloud Rap, TikTok shorts, Gamer Youtube, Podcasts, ASMR, etc.
Also, a lot of us younger people had some of our most formative years during the lockdowns, which turbocharged online culture.
When I moved to NYC my cohort was initially a lot of former SF residents, and their main reason by far for leaving was that there's more than just tech people in NYC and that's so refreshing. Some of that has to be a bubble effect, because NYC isn't tons better: you're looking at lots of people in tech and finance.
None of this is conducive to creating the kinds of environments where art thrives: low cost of housing, sufficient part-time day jobs, and weird, diverse, inspiring milieus.
I think the fix is really simple: build more housing and build more public transit to get there (more or less the Tokyo model, structurally). Unfortunately the US seems to be uniquely trash at both, so my guess is the big cities' loss is the middle cities' gain. And this is maybe healthy: big Emerald Cities domiciling a huge percentage of the professional/managerial class along with a similarly huge percentage of artists has created all kinds of cultural and political problems.
Could be a good argument for being religious.
A good example in Europe is how Berlin went from being a cheap city with loads of artistic freedom to a place where people wait in line for hours outside a club just to find out if their black leather shirt is edgy enough. They're all trying to stand out, but somehow they all end up looking the same.
Having grown up in a village of ~250, I can assure you that it's about as judgmental (and conformist) as it gets. And if you want to step it up a notch, try moving to a village of that size in the mountains.
Author's example of Newmarket is over 80k people. They just mention Tiny town goths as an idea that does exist - not something extremely common.
SLC Punk! Is a “good” movie about subculture conformity.
Although when I lived there *mumbles* years ago it seemed like a lot of the stuff was driven by kids from towns like Cohoes
Big communities are more diverse and easier to find like-minded people. Good if you want to blend in whilst being part of a subculture.
However, if the point is to stand out/be different then small, more homogenous communities present a great opportunity for those with the requisite confidence or apathy
At least when I was a teenager, the goth people were into Avril Lavigne, Marilyn Manson & other american artists.
Which was weird because, at the same time, we were taught about gothic cathedrals and churches, which were a pure European product.
Manson came later & certainly drew influence from there in addition to glam and, probably most heavily, industrial metal. Avril Lavigne was a Canadian pop star who drew from the pop-punk aesthetic. She wasn't goth at all.
> Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus and the Cure were examples of post-punk bands who shifted to dark overtones in their music, which would later spawn the gothic rock scene in the early 1980s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-punk#United_Kingdom
The later artists that you listed are not regarded by that wave as being "really" goth at all.
Meanwhile, I was saying that here (in France) and during my teens, goths where actually seen as a product of American culture.
I wasn't saying that the goth culture is coming from America, but that people who identified as goths were inspired mostly by American artists.
My peers and I certainly were not. It was mostly or entirely inspired by UK artists.
Later waves may be different, there might indeed be people inspired by Vision Video, Twin Tribes and Boy Harsher (all current US). Or by the German scene.
EDIT: the same as the above but with "emo", which is much closer to the goth all-black look I guess, but still looks compiled at the mall rather than the DIY look that goth typically implies.
"True goth" (i.e. someone associated with the original UK scene) can be found here, but you'll want to hit up an eighties night at the alt club to find it.
Then there's a lot of people who dress in black and don't particularly care about goth music, but they're still colloquially referred to as goth.
It really depends who you're around and how deep they are into music culture how these fits are interpreted and named. For the most part these days, these music subcultures blur pretty heavily and policing/being sticklers about whether or not someone is a "poser" is frowned upon. For instance, I have a friend who dresses distinctly punk, and likes to attend punk shows, but does not call herself punk just to avoid dealing with kids who are eager to establish an identity by mocking a "poser" (which, tbh, I feel like if you're over 35 the concept should be absurd).
The region is doing really nicely these days. I could easily imagine living in the area again, the people are very friendly, and Dinosaur BBQ is surprisingly delicious for upstate new york. (I hope I didn't just cop to liking a tourist trap.)
And capable of self-defence, in my experience growing up at a heavily right-wing and Catholic town. Self-proclaimed neo-fascists and groups of judgemental teens gave us trouble more than once.
And then, WOW.