-writing of consciousness-

aka an Intro to this page (sorta):

Goth.

What is it? It’s a fashion style, or at least that’s how i first discovered in in early-mid 2000s. I’ve seen people online claim it is first and foremost a music genre, and has roots in music. While i can see that it’s very interlinked to specific musical styles, or more specifically, I can see how people who listen to the Cure a lot and look up to Robert Smith and his artistic talent would want to dress up in similar way. So, I can’t deny that the goth fashion is as intertwined to the subculture as the music. I always felt a bit off when people online were like ‚goth is a MUSICAL style, not an aesthetic!!1‘ because, when i was a teenager online looking up goth stuff, i don’t remember that people writing that the music was that integral to the subculture as it is now, or at least not with the same fervor as today. I mean, I remember blogs and pages that went into the different substyles of the fashion, the clothing and accessories that one would put on oneself. There were goth dress up flash games, pages for the sole purpose of showing off the pageowners’ collection of gothic pixel dollz, hell, there were even blogs and pages discussing the goth lifestyle(s).

For the longest time, I simply wasn’t into the music, no matter what I listened to. I simply wasn’t into rock music. At all. The only rock band that I can say I actually like, both now and in the past, is malice mizer. It’s the only rock music that I would willingly put on my ipad nano (rip) and listen to repeatedly, and I watched every single malice mizer music video that I could find on youtube in the late 2000s. I was also reeaally into Lolita fashion at the time, and kinda got into malice mizer because, Mana-sama (one of the frontmen) has a Gothic Lolita brand, and me wanting to devour anything that was remotely related to Lolita fashion of course checked out his music (Moi dix Mois) but it was a little too heavy for me at the time, but really wanting to get into music that was related to Lolita fashion I of course checked out malice mizer and voila, I’m addicted. I prefer the Gackt era of the music, though Klaha’s voice I really like and don’t get the hate. I actually don’t like Tetsu’s voice that much, but that’s just my limited musical taste. Also my fav song of theirs is Illuminati, which isn’t the most rockiest song they’ve made and kinda shows that I’m more into synthier sounds. I don’t even like Gackt’s post malice mizer music that much, only got into it a little bit by association and also because Gackt is an interesting person (or character. Not as in fictional one).

Wait, I’m writing about the goth culture, not visual kei. Where was I? Oh, right.

Then, just very recently, as in just last year (it’s jan 2025 now when I’m writing this) I was working and needed some new music and ended up trying listening to the Cure. And to my surprise, I actually recognised a lot of the songs. One of them was used in a skyr commercial in Iceland in the 2000s (the intro to Close to Me), and I also had been listening to them indirectly at work before that! I ended up listening most of their discography (that’s available on spotify) and well, honestly, why haven’t I gotten into their music much earlier? Why in the mid-2020s and not in the 2000s, when I was a much younger person with a fascination for the goth subculture?

But yeah, the fashion.

I wonder, if a person with white face, heavy black eyeliner, black lips, hair that’s dyed black and/or red and/or in a neon color, and is wearing (mostly) black clothing with accessories with motifs that will be discussed elsewhere on the site – would you say this person is dressed in a gothic fashion? What if this person that I just visually described trusts you enough to share their headphones to listen to their music, and you’d hear, say, something like Britney Spears or Vengaboys? (Hey, I’m old, idk who or what is popular today! Cut me some slack…) would you still consider that person goth? or gothic? Regardless what your answer is, I’d say that there is a gothic style in fashion, a goth fashion. Or like, in the late 20th and early 21st century, there is a specific way to dress to be considered gothic in a visual way.

I’m more into the visuals of goth than the music itself, though I can’t deny the influence goth music (the Cure, Siouxie and the Banshees, etc) has on the subculture and even kickstarted it.

So when I discuss goth on this site, it’s first and foremost the fashion and the visual. There will be a page dedicated to the music. I will also make a page about what I can find about the gothic stuff online on the old web (on the wayback machine).