Teen Gothic

I see this complaint all over social media that goth has become mainstream, that everyone is goth now, that there’s so many goth young people etc… and it always inevitably leads to people trying to compare individuals as to who’s “more goth” based purely on appearances. But I just don’t think that’s happening at all. Maybe alternative fashion and music is on the rise, but I just don’t see that many truly goth/alternative people when I’m going about my day to day life.

That being said, I do think post punk music has been “mainstream” for a long time. Just look at the streaming statistics for popular 80’s post punk bands. But if you look for people that live and eat and breathe the goth lifestyle and who listen mostly to post punk/goth music, I still don’t think it’s that popular. It’s just all over social media because if you’re goth, you’re likely interacting with goth content.

It's a point of common knowledge among goths that the label wasn't really universally accepted or even liked by many of the seminal artists we come to consider forerunners of the genre, the most popular and well-known goth artists never took themselves under that label and often were very resentful of the term being applied. I don't think i need to belabor this point further or to list out who they were, we all know.

Which leads me to ask, who was the first musicians or band who actually openly declared themselves to be goth and proudly took it upon themselves as a moniker? I'm sorry if this is a stupid question but it's being asked sincerely. I hear so much about how this artist or that rejected the label despite being either pioneers of the genre or important to it's further development, and never about any musician who proudly claimed to be part of a nascent musical culture. Even today i feel like many musicians, wanting to be taken seriously, do not label themselves as goth because they feel it limits them creatively.

Hi! I appreciate the comments from my last post on what songs I should add. I added some songs from there. This time, I am hopefully looking for more inputs on who/what to add. I still have a lot more exploring to do!!

And as a reminder, I also have some of my other playlists that have other goth music too 🙂 if you want to check that out as well.

Recently getting more into the music and culture but have had difficulty finding a lot of it on my own. Underground/underrated/new music recommendations?