When I was a sullen teenager, while I listened to an inordinate amount of punk rock, I never called myself a "Punk" or a "Punk Rocker" simply because I had a lot of heavy metal and Pink Floyd records. While I loved metal, I never considered myself a bona fide "Metalhead," as I was a committed Devo fan and had loads of synth pop records. For the same reason I never joined a fraternity in college, I never aligned myself with any single demographic as it always seemed so narrow and exclusive (in the bad sense of the term). Also, adhering to any of these tribes involved an awful lot of tonsorial/sartorial work (some more so than others, of course). That always seemed somewhat impractical and -- frankly -- silly to me. I bought the odd bit of vintage wear at Canal Street Jeans and would maybe cut my hair differently every now and again, but it never really went beyond that. Thus, I was never a Mod. I was never a Rudeboy. I was never a Skinhead. Etc. Etc. I was simply a music head/fan/geek.
More to the point, I was never a Goth. While I proudly owned and cherished virtually every slab of vinyl in the august discographies of bands like Siouxsie & the Banshees, Bauhaus, Love & Rockets, The Sisters of Mercy, The Mission, The Cult, Theatre of Hate, The March Violets, The Fields of the Nephilim, The Cure, Alien Sex Fiend and the like -- and I did, admittedly, boast a large amount of black in my wardrobe -- I never would have called nor considered myself a proper Goth. For a start, while it became the all-encompassing umbrella term for all these bands, "Goth" was initially coined as a pejorative label by a dismissive British journalist (just like "shoegazer" a decade later). Moreover, while I was an ardent fan of these bands and their arguable movement, it struck me as an entirely Anglo/Euro phenomenon. An American "Goth" didn't make sense. Most of the bands cited above hailed from the grey, depressive hinterlands of Northern England. There was a reason the Jesus & Mary Chain dressed like they did -- they were fucking bummed out and bored of living in a grim, rainy, industrialized suburb of Glasgow. In order to be credibly "Goth," I was of the considered opinion that you had to be from the British Isles. Otherwise, you were just a poser.
There's no real reason for bringing any of this up now. I'm forty. If I still considered myself a Goth or a Punk or a New Romantic or any of these things, I would be ripe for justifiably vehement ridicule. I'm now simply an aging music head/fan/geek with an unwieldy disc collection that is perilously bordering on being rendered obsolete by the digital age and a closetful of increasingly ill-fitting band t-shirts. But today, I spotted something that affirmed the path I chose in my music-obsessing youth. Striding out of my local deli this morning came the most by-the-numbers "Goth" character as I've seen in ages. I mean, this guy -- despite being about two decades late -- had really drank the Kool-Aid. He was decked out in nothing less than black leather trousers, crushed velvet waistcoat, black knee-length boots, a large black leather coat of the kind the Terminator might sport, a face full of pancake make-up, black shades and an artfully-sprayed haystack of thick, black hair. Clutching a bottle of Snapple he stalked up University Place as if on some quest to find a nice cemetery to skulk about in. Under normal circumstances, I just smile to myself when I see these types. But today -- June 8, 2008 -- we are expecting record-breaking heat. The sidewalk is practically wilting. It's already 90 degrees as I type this, and it's not even 1 pm yet. I've written about this before , but simply put, that guy is going to die today.
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