2 Comments on “Episode 149: Regard the Shards”

1. Josie M. Mar 6th 2015 6:18 pm #

   Given his hardcore scene background, I bet Ryan From The Past would get really mad at how Ryan From The Present keeps using “emo” as an attitudinal rather than genre descriptor.

   Josie From The Past (aka Joey) was, if not a full-fledged goth (because I couldn’t afford the accouterments), at least more involved with that scene than Ryan or Matt, as I did in fact encounter this band and album as a teenager, though my route to Siouxie was not from the Sex Pistols but chronologically in the opposite direction. Right now I only own one Siouxie album on vinyl, and that’s their 1984 album Hyena, which features Robert Smith from The Cure on lead guitar. And the Cure were the band that got me into this kind of music in the first place, in part because they actually had a pretty-good new album come out when I was in high school.

   So, I would probably agree that yes, a lot of the “goth subculture” starts with the exact combination of elements on this album, which is to say, with the precise combination of melancholic Romanticism (including the Brontës as much as Shelley, Poe, or Bram Stoker), existentialism, proto-hipster aloofness, and elaborate makeup. And the gender points were right on too, though you took longer to get to them than I might have, given that apart from music what appealed to me about goth was that it was kind of a safe way of playing with my gender presentation while still keeping one foot in the closet.

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   • Matthew Wrather OTI Staff Mar 7th 2015 1:20 pm #

     We should do The Cure. Though given that the year 1980 is such a treasure-trove, it will probably be 2 or 3 “historical” quarters from now and it will probably be their mid- to late-80s stuff.

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