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🪵 The Threshold

Goth's self-decoration is collective joy, not solitary outsider angst

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tagsja-picks, question, contrarian_or_surprising, trade, singleton, xref, category/contrarian-or-surprising
aliases@fisher_k-punk_2018, loc. 1040

2 min read

Goth’s self-decoration is collective joy, not solitary outsider angst

Evidence

Simon is right that “Painted Bird” (from the Banshees mistresspiece, A Kiss in the Dreamhouse) and the nearly contemporary “Fireworks” were “virtual manifestos for goth”, but it’s worth reflecting on how different these songs are in message and mood from the hackneyed image of the culture. Both “Painted Bird” and “Fireworks” (with its “exultant image of self-beautification as a glam gesture flashing amid the murk of mundanity”) are not maudlin, matt black or self-absorbed, but celebrations of the colourful and the collective. “WE are fireworks”, Siouxsie sings, “burning shapes into the night”, and you’d be hard pressed to find a song that crackles with so much enjoyment as this. … The Painted Bird is also about the triumph of collective joy over persecuted, isolated, individuated subjectivity. In Kosiński’s novel, the hero paints one bird and when he throws it back to its flock they don’t recognise it and therefore destroy it. But Siouxsie’s goths are not painted by another’s hand; they are “painted birds by their own design”. It is not the familiar tragic-heroic scenario in which an outsider, destined to lose, nevertheless makes a solitary stand against the conformist herd. The “dowdy flock” are to be “confounded”, but by another flock, not by an individual, and the result is not frustration, but, again, jouissance — by the end of the song, “there’s no more sorrow”. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1040

Categorization

  • QUESTION: The self-decoration-as-collective-joy reading of goth overturns the isolated-misery stereotype — worth chasing whether this distinction holds across goth’s history.
  • XREF: connects to: Goth women’s power comes from staging the refusal to be what male desire wants — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1036; Goth reconceived outsiderdom as collective, self-chosen celebration rather than solitary tragedy — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1041

Broader Connections

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