The Post-Punk Explosion Part 5: Goth

04/07/21 • 35 min

1 Listener

On April 10, 1815, a volcano erupted in the central part of the Indonesian archipelago...Mount Tambora blew up, ejecting nearly 200 cubic kilometres of debris into the atmosphere...all that dust circled the earth, blocking out a significant amount of sunlight...

That blockage was so severe that the average temperature dropped almost a full degree...the result was that 1816 has gone down in history as “the year without a summer”...

There were food shortages and famines and outbreaks of disease...and not only was it cold, but huge storms battered much of Europe...

That summer, four artsy types were holed up at mansion called Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland...to entertain themselves on through these dark, cold, wet, rainy days, these people drank, had sex, and took opium...and they tried to outdo each other by coming up with the best horror story...

One of them, John William polidori, came up with “The Vampyre” about undead bloodsuckers 80 years before Bram Stoker wrote “Dracula”...meanwhile, 22-year-old Mary Shelley, conjured up the idea of a mad scientist who created a new being by sewing together the parts of dead people...she called her story “Frankenstein”...

These two stories—imagined during the year without a summer, caused by the biggest volcanic eruption in 1300 years—created the foundation of gothic fiction, a type of horror that endures today...novels, movies, comic books, fashion styles, and yes, music...

In fact, the music part of this equation has blown up to the both where Goth music culture is one of the biggest musical subcultures the planet has ever seen...and that explosion happened in the wake of the original punk era of the 1970s...

This is the post-punk explosion part 5: Goth...

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That blockage was so severe that the average temperature dropped almost a full degree...the result was that 1816 has gone down in history as “the year without a summer”...

There were food shortages and famines and outbreaks of disease...and not only was it cold, but huge storms battered much of Europe...

This is the post-punk explosion part 5: Goth...

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Previous Episode

The Post-Punk Explosion Part 4: Alt-Dance

Dancing is as old as the human race...not long after we started walking on two legs, we found a groove and have been moving to the music ever since...

Fast-forward several million years and we find that wherever there’s music, there’s dancing that goes along with it...okay, maybe they didn’t exactly bust a move to medieval hymns in the gothic cathedrals, but there had to be at least some swaying going on...

We can’t help but move to the music....scientists have documented connections between the aural cortex and the movement centres of our brain...the millisecond we hear music, the motor cortex lights up, indicating a relationship between music, emotion, and the need to move in time with the music...in other words, we seem to be pre-wired to dance...not dancing (or at least moving to music) is unnatural...

This caused some problems with some rock fans in the 1970s...dancing was seen as uncool, unless you were pogoing or slam-dancing to a punk band...and when disco came along—the most uncool music and scene of all—dancing was almost a crime...what were you, some disco weirdo?...

Fortunately, that moratorium on dancing did not last long...the music and music fans needed to evolve to another level...and when that happened, dancing became not just okay but it was cool once again...

This is a look at how that happened in the years immediately following the punk rock of the 1970s...it’s part four of the post-punk explosion—and it’s all about alt-dance...

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Next Episode

The Post-Punk Explosion Part 6: Ska

Every once in a while, music enters a state of flux where the direction of everything is, shall we say, undefined...we see and hear change but we’re not quite sure what it all means just yet...something is coming—but what?...

All bets are off, the rulebook has been declared invalid, and everyone is off doing their own thing...

I’ll give you an example...in mid-to-late 1950s Britain, popular music was evolving and mutating very quickly...in the midst of imported American rock’n’roll records, the skiffle craze, and various flavours of folk music, some young people rejected contemporary sounds in favour of something known as “trad jazz”...

This was a revival of something close to Dixieland jazz from New Orleans, which emerged around the same time as world war 1...that meant music made with trumpets, the trombone, clarinet, the banjo, upright bass, and drums...the new acts mined the more pure, more authentic sounds of the past, hoping to be inspired again...

And for a while, it worked...trad jazz was a thing until sometime in the 60s...everyone from pop songs to nursery rhymes were fair game for trad jazz arrangements...

I’ll give you another example—and it’s tangentially related to British trad jazz...it also has its roots in Dixieland but took a detour through the Caribbean before appearing in central Britain at the end of the 1970s...

That was also a time when the direction of music seemed undefined...on the bright side, it also meant that nothing was off-limits or out of bounds...it was the post-punk era...popular music had been shaken up by punk so much that people were more willing than ever to find new paths...

This is part 6 of the post-punk explosion...it’s the time of Ska...

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