Goth treated death as the hidden truth at the core of rock music

Evidence

Goth morbidity arose in part from a Schopenhauerian scorn for organic life: from goth’s perspective, death was the truth of sexuality. Sexuality was what the ceaseless cycle of birth-reproduction-death (as icily surveyed by Siouxsie on Dreamhouse’s “Circle Line”) needed in order to perpetuate itself. Death was simultaneously outside this circuit and what it was really about. Affirming sexuality meant affirming the world, whereas goth set itself, in Houllebecq’s marvellous phrase, against the world and against life. … But goth suspected that rock was that always and essentially a death trip. This was the gambit of the Birthday Party, who hunted rock’s mythology back to the fetid, voodoo-stalked crossroads and swamplands of the delta blues. After all, isn’t blues the clearest possible demonstration of the discrepancy between desire and enjoyment, and therefore of the validity of the theory of the death drive? The blues juju — or jou-jou — relies upon the enjoyment of desires that cannot be satisfied. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1058

Categorization

• XREF: The Lacanian distinction between desire and jouissance (the impossibility of satisfying desire) maps onto this reading of the blues — connects to Fisher’s broader k-punk project on the death drive. — connects to: 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celebration rather than solitary tragedy — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1041
• DEFINE: The pun linking ‘juju’ to ‘jou-jou’ (jouissance) crystallizes the argument that desire structurally cannot be satisfied.

Broader Connections

• Goth reconceived outsiderdom as collective, self-chosen celebration rather than solitary tragedy #complicates (0.75) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1041