The 4th annual goth/new wave/post punk music festival couldn’t have come at a darker time. Always a time machine, a great escape from the drudge of daily life to the celebrated drudge of eighties’ sounds – there’s nothing like seeing The Human League, Love and Rockets, OMD, Blancmange, Devo, Echo and the Bunnymen, Billy Idol, Siouxsie Sioux in all their nostalgic flory. While the eighties seemed gloomy then – post apocalyptic, even – that time seems so innocent in retrospect.
Cruel World allows young and older to experience better deeper music than today’s slick pop – goth twistedly more comforting than any Katy Perry or Kanye song. EMO – emotionally complex music and its fashion subculture – might look bleak. But it celebrates sadness, an important part of life that today’s youth do such a great job of ignoring. The Buddhists celebrated melancholy as something to embrace – the yin v. yang, you can’t have the light without the dark. Goth as a subculture kicked off in the Britain of the early eighties. Think Joy Division, Bauhaus, The Cure. Its acolytes celebrated (and still do) influences from 19th century Gothic fiction and horror movies. Goth fashion – a movement in L.A. that never dies (think Rick Owens) incorporates punk, post-punk, New Romantics styles (DuranDuran, Spandau Ballet, Adam Ant) – which in turn appropriated looks from Victorian, Edwardian and Belle Epoque eras.
Even the art of that period is Goth: John Everett Millais’ pre-Raphaelite paintings, particularly his Ophelia (Shakespeare’s Hamlet’s doomed love) drowning before she dies. What’s so romantic about death? Ask the Romantic Poets: Keats, Coleridge, Shelly, Byron, Wordsworth. They were the first goths. Because, despite all the black, death is the ultimate spiritual mystery humans constantly ponder.
