Me as a Goth (part I)

Alright, you may be hard pressed to find photos of me all decked out in the gothic uniform (aside from this shot of me dressed as Robert Smith). The tight clothes, heavy make up, and Aquanet hair don’t blend well with my “built for comfort” persona. However, my commitment to the music and fascination with the scene have been true ever since I discovered that it existed some time in 1991.

That year I came across two albums that changed the way I listen to and think about music. The first being The Cure’s Disintegration. There was reserved and shy kid (could it be a goth?) who sat in front of me in English that year. We wound up working together on a lot of in class assignments due to our proximity. Slowly he came out of his shell and revealed that he was actually quite creative and dynamic, not just a wallflower. We inevitably talked about music. That’s what I do. Instead of analyzing the poetic text structure of Romeo and Juliet or discussing the political implications of Watership Down, we were often delving into discussions on music. He had an undying love for The Cure and spoke very passionately about them. At the time, all I knew was that the singer had crazy hair and that a lot of scary looking people liked them. He found what I would later come to discover. I was building up to ask him to make me a mix when, one day he came into class and told me that his parents threw out all of his Cure records because, “they were the devil’s music.” I was bummed and he was devastated. I had heard that his parents were Scary Religious and absurdly prude, but I had my doubts up until this point. Before this, I never believed him when he told me that he had been grounded for speaking out of turn at the dinner table. When I picture this kid’s home life, I can’t help but think of the neighbor from American Beauty, you know, the kid that filmed bags in the breeze.
Now I had to hear this band if for no other reason than to spite this kid’s parents. I was on a mission. Finally, I heard my first Cure song at a dance. A church dance none the less, take that parents of the goth kid that I don’t remember the name of. I pestered the DJ to play something by The Cure until he finally caved. Fascination Street came on and cleared the dance floor like a bad fart. The driving base line, chiming ethereal guitars, and nonsensical lyrics were like nothing I’d ever heard before. And where was the chorus? Just verses? No guitar solo? A four minute build up before any words come out? Can you do that in a song? All of this filled my head and intrigued me like no music had at this point in my life. I scrounged money together and bought Disintegration as soon as I had enough money. I rushed into my room at home and couldn’t wait to find out what else there was to discover on this album. I put it in the cd player and absolutely hated it. The money for a cd was hard to pull together and buying a disc was an event. Just getting to a record store was hard enough and now I was stuck with a disc that I hated, except for Fascination Street of course. I felt as if I had been duped into buying a dud. The goth kid with the nutty parents had moved away before I ever had the chance to sing the praises of that song I heard at the dance or to pass on the blame for money wasted on a lousy album.
Something kept drawing me back to it. So, every few weeks I’d pull it out and give it another listen. Each time I would be a little more familiar and a little more willing to let go of the assumptions that I had once had about what makes good music. By the time Wish rolled around in 1992, I was fully on board and committed to The Cure.

The other music discovery that changed my perceptions of music was Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine. I discover NIN at a Jesus Jones show at Toads Place in New Haven. (I know, I know, but I was 15 and it was a concert) Between acts, they would show videos of what were then college radio groups. Jane’s Addiction, Carter USM, EMF, Urban Dance Squad, Fishbone, and the like filled the screens and speakers. Eventually the video for Head Like A Hole came on and the rest of the night was second stage to the four minutes and thirteen seconds that the video occupied. The throbbing synthesizer and shredded vocals on the chorus coupled by whole persona that Trent created at the time, the shaved sides of the head with the black dreads tossed about the top, the chaos of black tape whipping around he and Richard Patrick as they tore at the E chords on their guitars as if they were trying to saw through them. The energy was overwhelming. And then when Trent gets snared by the feet at the end and is being reeled into the roof as he just thrashes about the band upside down, taking out band members and drum kits with his flailing body that is frantically grasping at everything to pull itself down, that image left me feeling like there was nothing that could possibly happen on the stage that night that would top what I had just witnessed. I was right.
Pretty Hate Machine was an instant favorite.