Teen Gothic

Hi all, I am an old punk but I was around a lot of Goths around probably 1993 '94. From what I remember it was kind of the very beginning of a scene that got bigger later on in the '90s.

I'm writing a country album about my experiences and couple of the characters are goth kids. The setting is a small town, the type of place where weirdos who grew up in the surrounding rural counties would have congregated. Think college towns or tourist towns that ended up with like an LGBT community or other weirdos. I was personally in Asheville at the time but that was not at all like Asheville is today. At the time there were a very small number of weirdos/artsy types in small towns, as it was a lot harder to find subculture since there wasn't really an internet.

The folks I actually knew back in the mid '90s are no longer reachable.

Help me out with some memories: What did you do that was part of Goth subculture when you were being romantic, flirty, mysterious seductive with your significant other "back in the day"?

Was your significant other also part of the that scene? What would date night have looked like? What about if you lived together and had a date night at your place?

I dated one of these pagan goth folks for a while and we were part of a scene that was into the occult. Kinda remember a lot of tarot cards and candles and red wine but I wasn't very serious about the occult part which makes my memories kind of hazy about what my significant other was doing much of the time when we were hanging out.

We and lots of other weirdos used to go to an old cemetery, not that all surprisingly. There was some hanging out on rooftops downtown and a little bit of 'by the railroad tracks' stuff but I'm really looking for suggestions on what to make my characters do indoors on date night because it's relevant to a song. Right now I have a couple of different songs where people are messing around with tarot cards in the candle light but I can't reuse that same image for multiple songs

When I was in puberty, I always dreamed of going out and meeting people with this style in my country. As I got older and was close to entering the scene, I received warnings about the level of toxicity among groups of friends. I thought they were just exaggerations. But the truth is that I have come to realize it. Pure gossip and fighting. Toxicity over the question of whether you are a "real goth" or not and even racism. There are groups of people in their 40's and 50's and I'm also with groups of 17-20 year olds (as you know sometimes it doesn't end well).

I am still relatively new to goth in general but something that really annoys me with the recent subculture trends on social media is that people try too hard to get into them on the terms of looks but then only listen to a few bands that are considered mainstream in that community and use it to act like they’re "different" or "underground". They only care about the "aesthetic" and don’t want to be called posers but aren’t that much interested in the music itself .

That specific person acted shocked when I said I listened to The Cure, Bauhaus , TsOm ect even after two of our friends who aren’t goth at all said they knew all the bands.

I’ll admit it, in comparison to any elder goth my music taste is pretty basic.

They don’t seem to understand there is a difference between being new to a subculture and actually looking into it and bragging about a few things everyone in that community knows.

And obviously this doesnt work for just goth, it applies to a lot of other subcultures with grunge, metal genres especially lately ,ect

I noticed nostalgia is moving toward the early 2000s lately, and while it's good to explore and discuss a lot of really good goth music and positive aspects of the subculture and scene memories from this time, on the other hand, I have to say if you into the music and subculture then while it was happening, it wasn't always an easy time for everyone for the following reasons especially when compared to a certain periods in 90s and 2010s-present.

-Loads of increasing misinformation from every corner; tv shows, questionable books, and overwhelming amount of poor or mediocre internet articles. For some reason it seemed more than other periods.

-There was much more of a limit on what you could find online, in terms of music and band info and music via filesharing and video content.

-Very conservative time and lots of homophobic and vulgar language was extremely normalized and could be frequently used towards anyone that was goth.

-Lots of people conflated industrial bands with goth. Too many people appropriating goth at the same time (cybergoth, mall goths etc)

-Right after Columbine and few years after, dressing goth, depending where you lived, increased your chance of getting physically assaulted compared to other periods, labeled as a potential shooter, sent to a school therapist, totally harassed non-stop etc

-Also less easy to find DIY guides compared to today and other periods.

What do you remember?

There are tons of positive things about this period. The point here is just to have honest discussion about how things were for some people into goth.