"The sweetest of flowers always did have that tendency to rise from the darkest and least savoury of soils".

Goth is actually much more than what it is perceived to be, and depending on who you ask, you will get a variety of totally different opinions, many of which are valid parts of a much larger subculture, many are just total untruths. Ask six Gothic people why they are Gothic and you will get a myriad of different reasons.

Being Goth is much more than a label or description. Goth is a lifestyle and a mindset that has its roots firmly embedded both in the historical past and the present.

The Main ideal that characterizes Goth is a drive towards creativity and self-expression that seeks to reach out and ensnare its audience using our current society's deeply rooted fascination with all things dark and frightening. This act can be either subtle and seducing or nightmarishly terrifying, but it must play on what society secretly knows but can not acknowledge to itself. The mediums of self-expression and creation can be anything from a mode of dress to novels and music.

As a lifestyle, Goth is as diversified as its adherents. There really is No true stereotype or dress code as it were. Not all Goths are depressed, nor do they all wear black, listen to the same music, or employ the same modes of self-expression. This tends to make Goth-spotting a little tricky and creates part of the confusion over what it is to begin with, but this diversity also is one of the defining factors.

So how does one identify a real Goth if they are all so different? As mentioned earlier, one of Goth's defining characteristics is the need to take the underlying darkness that is in all of us and bring it into the light in such a way as we can recognize it as what it is, an integral part of all of us, for better or for worse.

To begin to understand what Goth really is, it is essential to know where it came from. It has been with us for much longer than the label it has been given. This subculture has appeared, flourished, then died, only to rise again in many eras and societies. The Goth circles have always been made up of the young sect, frustrated and bored by the parent culture. The parent cultures would usually be of the restrictive nature, highly veneered into the rigid structures of society, and intolerant of diversity in schools of art and thought.

Because of this, nearly every manifestation of this particular type of subculture was greeted with suspicion, hostility, and sometimes active aggression on the part of its parent culture. Only rarely was this brand of subculture welcomed and allowed to flourish.

Goth, as it is currently known, has its roots in Britain, Western Europe and North America during the seventies and early eighties. The subculture was, and still is, dominated by dissatisfied youth hailing from the middle classes, which were at that time just entering a new period of prosperous stability. The children of these newly wealthy were left, unlike their parents, with a strong feeling of instability and lack of identity. They were unable to reconcile the new values their society was trying to impress upon them with their newly fragile sense of self. The shackles of society were tightening and with it the restructure was separating them from their accustomed peers in both the upper and lower classes.

Responding to the confusion and theft of identity, a few of the brightest and most creative children of these newly prosperous families began to create their own social structure. Goth had reached its peak by the early 80's, divided by two factions, the Appolonian and the Dionysan. Each faction was a personification of the mixed fear and fascination the Goths felt for the darker side of their parents' legacy of materialism, elitism, and false sense of moral superiority. The difference lay in their ways of expressing their sense of alienation and abandonment.

The more Appolonian faction were mainly concerned with the artistic and philosophical facets of Goth. They were, for the most part, fairly non confrontational in their means of self-expression. They were in most cases all but obsessed with the act of creation and the appreciation of literature, art and music. A number of them attempted to legitimize their subculture in the eyes of the parent culture with very little success. Because they were regarded as harmless, if morbid dreamers, they were tolerated.

The Dionysan faction of Goth passionately embraced the more hedonistic and sometimes self-destructive facets of the movement. Their contributions to Goth were more ephemeral and less easy to define in traditional terms as creativity, but still were vibrant with the haunted, dark spirit of the counter culture. Some of the more prominent Goth musicians and thinkers belonged to this faction. Being more confrontational in their self-expression, they were regarded by the parent culture as dangerous and undesirable. Goths too wear collars, and choke chains, more for decoration than the same reasons than other lifestylers.

The modern stereotype Goth is a twisted caricature of the more Dionysan faction and captures its decadence and tendency towards self-destruction while entirely missing its subtle artistry and depth, not to mention the entire point of Goth as a whole.

A marginal percentage of the original Goth community were able to adapt to adult life remaining essentially and visibly true to themselves, while still managing to keep the income necessary to maintain the rising price of living in the style to which they had become accustomed. They had embraced the dark and dangerous style of dress and felt that the lonely, arrogant music was written just for them. The stereotypical lifestyle was adventurous and daring enough to spark their already bored and world-weary imaginations. The "kindergothen" were met by rejection and disapproval by their parent culture and the remainders of the Goth community alike with almost no exceptions. Those few original Goths who tried to embrace the new groups were usually met with cold hostility and anger by those who had already either been rejected by others or had heard of the rejection. The alienation between the Olde School and the Nu-Age was widened even more by the labels of "Poseur" and "Faux Goth" that were branded between the sides.

By the nineties, the artistry and philosophy that drove the Goth culture had been by and large replaced with attitude, posturing and dress code. The few remaining Olde School Goths and their prot�g�s had gone underground and were not a part of the NU-AGE rise of Goth, refusing to have much to do with what they considered shallow, inarticulate upstarts that paid to much attention to what the media thought was Goth. They saw the new Goth as little more than a group of image driven drug addicts that had nothing better to offer than a dress code and a bad attitude. The New School's opinions of the originals wasn't much better.

The new Age Goths are bringing fresh blood and a new outlook to Goth's grasp on the dark undercurrents of our society's imagination. After all, the sweetest of flowers always did have a tendency to rise from the darkest and least savoury of soils.

~*WHAT IS GOTHIC??*~

"The sweetest of flowers always did have that tendency to rise from the darkest and least savoury of soils".

~WHAT IS GOTHIC??~