It's A Goth Future

I'm still working on the topic Friend Walt posed several weeks ago, namely:

So I'm thinking that rock is moribund. I don't mean that it is "creatively exhausted", or that today's rock is "low quality"; I merely mean that it is no longer very popular. Perhaps rock is yesterday's news. I asked several teenagers about it, none of whom were particularly eager to talk to me, and I got mixed results. Some said rock was ancient history, some said it was very much a going concern.

So, what IS popular? The hard part is figuring out exactly what teens think. I can confirm that teens are reluctant to discuss music with their middle-aged elders, probably because discussing the subject is too revealing of their inner lives. I tried to get Josh here at work, who is in his 30's, to comment on my web log posting on this subject, but despite my persistent wheedling, or maybe because of it, he declined to comment. Nevertheless, we just finished a play and most of the cast members were fairly young, and it was possible to ask them, in relaxed settings, what they liked.

One cast member (age about 22) belongs to a loose collective of friends who DJ in the Bay Area, and she aspires to DJ as well. Her boyfriend DJs locally at a local pool hall/dance hall here in Sacramento. Her collective is fond of "Deep House", with its jazzy notes, horns and saxophones, and which they distinguish from "Vocal House", and several other forms of House Music. She brought a CD so everyone could hear a sample. I love House Music, but the version of House Music found on that CD is exactly that type I find to be meandering and uninteresting. Nevertheless, I'm considering a trip to her club in the near future, to see if I judged her music prematurely.

The youngest member (age 18) of our cast was very interesting. She radiates ambiguity - she likes theater, but very unlike everybody else in the cast, she is shy, studious, intense, dressing in a manner of Skater Chic colliding with Suburban Goth: in her own 'dark thirty.' Her college major is 'undeclared.' She occasionally lacked transportation, and so I offered her lifts.

After she appeared at one rehearsal wearing a smart hoody with cat's eyes emblazoned on it, and with little cat's ears poking up, I suspected she might be interested in the same sort of House Music I favored, but what I thought was fanwear associated with English DJ 'Felix Da Housecat' was actually street gear offered by "Emily the Strange". On one long trip I offered to play anything she liked in my Bag o' CD's, and I wondered what she would choose (Jessica Simpson? Sheryl Crow? Coldplay?). After going through my collection, she ultimately gave up in frustration, and sat in silence.

Conversation turned to art, and I discovered she likes painting. She spent some time in France, finding a pleasant sidewalk space where she painted from dawn till dusk, at least until authorities chased her away (her French wasn't good enough at the time for her to understand why, but it could be lack of a work permit). She also spent time in Wales.

Her identity as a Goth eventually emerged, and her love of all things Celtic and European. She spoke a little of the travails of high school, and hearing people behind her whisper "Columbine" as she walked through the halls in her black trench coat. She went through a phase where she wore only black (with the occasional splash of red), but eventually gave that up as being too limiting. She was home-schooled her last year of high school. The home-school parents cobbled together a graduation ceremony, and she talked about how strange that was: unlike the experience of most Americans, it wasn't until graduation that she met her fellow students for the first time.

Sunday night at "The Rage", a local club geared to the 21-and-under set, is Goth night, and she goes for the dancing, despite the fact that Sacramento teens are sometimes under-educated about what being a Goth is all about, and the Goth scene here has declined over the last few years (unlike the Goth scene in Paris). She has a Goth DJ friend in San Francisco who sends her the latest Goth tunes. She loves the beautiful Goth ballads, the lovely Goth Romantic songs, the German Goth bands, and most of all, the dancing. I found it interesting that she, as a female, connects romantic songs with male singers, whereas I, as a male, connect romantic songs with female singers. Go figure!

Extended dancing can lead to a trance-like state of religious ecstasy. The Sufis, for example, live to reach that state. I find that state (I call it a 'bacchanalian frenzy') is rather hard to reach, but probably it's easier to reach with practice. She gets the practice. Extended sessions, from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., with no food, no rest, and almost no fluids.

I wondered whether a song I favored would meet with her approval: "Beautiful Things" by Andain (Gabriel and Dresden mix). I figured, well, the artist name is vaguely Celtic, the mix is vaguely German, and it's Industrial House music, which she had once mentioned as something she also liked. She listened to it, and commented that even if a few breaks at the beginning of the song were too "happy" for her taste, it could probably be slipped into an extended session of Goth Dance music without stirring displeasure. So, despite our different tastes and ages, we had a point of commonality.

So the word from Sacramento is that the future of rock music is very, very dark, and that's a very, very good thing.