Last week some friends and I were discussing, with some dismay, the announcement of Peter Murphy's cameo in the third Twilight movie. I half-jokingly posited that this film appearance and his scene in 1983's The Hunger could be read as bookends to the goth era.
Of course that's quite arguable. The roots of the modern gothic phenomenon can be traced back well into the 1970s (Joy Division, Siouxsie Sioux, H.R. Giger, etc.). And some would say the "true" goth subculture was commodified into irrelevance long before Stephenie Meyer's Mormonized vampire chronicles became a tween sensation.
But there are still creative, iconic individuals with a dedication to personal style that is essentially gothic: artificial, aristocratic, archaic, eclectic, idiosyncratic, severe, flamboyant, and depressive and/or deviant.
Maybe a mass-marketed goth subculture was bound to fail, because that collection of values is impossible to standardize. If so, then the best exemplars of this sensibility may now be operating outside the confines of the "goth scene".
I've mentioned Matt Sims in the past. Today I'll nominate Lady Gaga, on the strength of her new video, "Bad Romance" -- a Kubrickian vision that seems to unfold in an expensive, sinister, all-white spa-slash-fetish club:
Besides La Roux, there's no other contemporary popular entertainer with such a sharply honed, historically informed sense of personal style, and the ability to project it as an arresting, larger-than-life spectacle.
And while La Roux's sensibility is a kind of nostalgic, androgynous romanticism, Gaga's is more aggressive: luxurious, perverse, maybe somewhat indeterminately gendered, but erotic in a theatrical, high-camp way.
Elly Jackson's a better singer and songwriter. But Stefani Germanotta, despite her mediocre music, smashes more stylistic boundaries, and creates more intensely disturbing images of herself -- although (and, to some extent, because) she comes across as someone you'd probably never want to meet in real life.
UPDATE: I'm not the only one picking up on the gothic vibe that Gaga is putting out.
posted by Maximus |
6:32 pm EST |
2009.11.12 |
link
