What *was* "Goth"?

These are a couple of the best resources out there to answer the question.

Personally I crave a new word, or better, no word at all. I'm tired of the automatic associations and overlaps that come with the labels as they stand now. I grew tired of answering the question "Why do you wear black?" over ten years ago when I wrote this. I continue to prefer dark colours for a variety of practical and aesthetic reasons such as if all my shoes and pants are black I don't have to put a second thought to matching my pants to my shirt and tie.

A few days ago I found myself in a discussion about assumptions and labels, then along comes the latest media debacle.

Apparently, although I didn't see it myself, Global Television used a picture that was uploaded to Gothic BC (not a picture I took myself so, unfortunately, by the terms of the upload agreement I don't control the copyright) in order to play up the "freaks get ratings" card in the disappearance of Mark Rempel and Rachel Adams. The Vancouver Province (both GlobalTV and the Province are owned by CanWest Global Communications, BTW) also played up the tenuous "Goth" connection.

While I have a general human concern for their well-being and sympathize with my friends that do know them through work and other associations I don't know either of these people. I've never met either of these people. I'm a decade older than Mark and a decade and a half older than Rachel. It was only through a friend who happens to work with Rachel that I learned about this in the first place.

The last place they were seen in public was at the Infected Mushroom concert - a psytrance event - yet there is no rave scene connection being made. Is it perhaps a little too close to Hallowe'en and someone in Global Media thinks that they will sell more seasonal ad space with an old-fashioned witch hunt?

I'm tired of this. I'm tired of being called "goth" and having a whole raft of assumptions come along with it. I'm a painter, a designer, a programmer, a writer... another creative intellectual coming out of a tradition that over the years has been called Romanticism, Bohemianism, Avant Garde, Beat, and what-have-you. Twenty-five years ago it picked up the moniker "Gothic" and it stuck for a while, but there has been more and more divergence lately.

Whatever "goth" has become it is no longer what it was when I begrudgingly started to accept the term. It has been dumbed-down and the focus has shifted from the beautiful and intelligent to the vapid and sensational. I'm tired of it.