Performing Arts and the Gothic | James Hannaham (Essay Date 1997)
JAMES HANNAHAM (ESSAY DATE 1997)
SOURCE: Hannaham, James. "Bela Lugosi's Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Either: Goth and the Glorification of Suffering in Rock Music." In Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art, edited by Christoph Grunenberg, pp. 118-92. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.
In the following essay, Hannaham delineates the themes, artists, and works associated with the Gothic in rock music.
If rock and roll is just the blues with an emphasis on adolescent sex, then Goth rock is rock and roll with death and madness. Gothic imagery and influence has skulked at the margins of rock music for decades, and indeed the blues has plenty of subject matter in common with what came to be known, in the late 1970s and early 80s, simply as "Goth." Its less-than-subtle influences streamed from the Gothic novels of the nineteenth century as well as contemporary horror films, especially...
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