Because it's October and I'm a sucker for long-term challenges, I've set myself the task of learning about gothic rock this month. I've been listening to a different band's back catalogue each day, guided in part by this Wikipedia article and by Pitchfork's list from last year of 33 notable goth songs. Some of it's been stuff that I knew a bit, like the Cure's gothic trilogy of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. Other things were new to me, like the Birthday Party, Nick Cave's band before he started the Bad Seeds.
It's stretched my understanding of "goth" in new directions, which is a nice way of saying that I thought there'd be more talk of vampires and gravestones. Of course, it's still early in the month, and I've mostly been hearing bands from the early part of the movement.
But it's also true that the most satisfying listen so far has been Bauhaus's back catalogue. For one thing, nothing expresses the idea better than their epic song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", the bassline of which has quietly been twanging at the back of my mind more or less continuously for the last 20-odd years. And while the rest of their work doesn't necessarily hold up to that moment (for me), it does fit in with the imagery that "Bela Lugosi's Dead" brings into my head.
It may sound weird, but I respond to music that creates certain associations and images in my mind. That can be reminders of times or places or movies, or it can be imagery, almost a physical environment that I think about when I hear the music.
When I think about some of my favorite bands, I imagine a landscape. It can be an urban landscape, like when I listen to the Smiths or Joy Division, or it can be related images, like when I hear the Magnetic Fields (particularly 69 Love Songs). When I hear Bauhaus, I'm imagining graveyards at night. Not all the bands I like have this effect, and seeing it written out like that feels a little reductive, but it's probably close enough to how I respond to most music I like.
Sometimes, a band's music reminds me of other art that I like. Simon and Garfunkel, for instance, are associated indelibly in my mind with 1960s New York City, which carries with it associations of Spider-Man (who, like them, is also from Queens). Listening to Bauhaus this month has reminded me of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.
The look of Morpheus is apparently based on Bauhaus's Peter Murphy, so the connection's not as random as it seems at first. And so much of that comic drew on goth imagery, while also in its turn influencing the goths I knew in high school.
This connection to the Sandman brings this discussion around to my other big preoccupation of the last couple of years, namely re-examining all the things I liked back in high school and college. I've mentioned already how I'm rereading my old comics - well, checking out old music I liked back then, and supplementing that by exploring similar acts I didn't know about, falls squarely into that trend.
I'm not really sure why I'm dredging all that stuff up, other than the fact that I'm getting older and yet I still feel (or would like to feel) a connection to who I was back then. At the same time I'm re-evaluating music, movies, comics, books, whatever through the lens of the experiences I've had since high school.
Looking back has always been a key component of goth culture, and while it is, charitably, a stretch to call myself a "goth", I can see the appeal, especially these days. And more than that, it's exciting to be delving into a new sub-genre, which has always escaped me but has been just around the corner from what I usually listen to.
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