The Origin

          Now, to begin, what is goth and where did it come from? Did we wake up one day in the late seventies with dark lipstick and chains attached to our jeans? I'm sure most of us didn't. Like stated before, the definition of goth is very flexible and indefinite. Now, if you search the term "goth definition", upon Google, the Merriam-Webster dictionary so simply puts it as, "rock music marked by dark and morbid lyrics". 

          The time was the late 70s in England. The punk movement had been growing overused and stale, crawling towards the end of it's peak. This movement was abrasive, and violent, supporting the ideas of romanticizing Nihilism and rejecting"the man". From this, emerged a sub-category of people. With no name to brand themselves, they wore more ethereal clothing, darker makeup, and produced hollow and stark music. A notable fashion icon of the time would be Siouxsie Sioux, who began using the template of punk in order to create a more mystical sense of music. Along with that, she sported the big hair and long wings of eyeliner that many people came to emulate in the future. 

          
          As these undefinable groups began crawling out of the groundwork of the punk movement, more and more people flocked to the style of music. The fashion expanded and the music moved from loud, thrashing music, to a rhythmic, seance ode. But throughout all of this, the label of the subcategory post-punk genre was still undiscovered. Which makes the timeline as to where the term "goth" originally formed cloudy. Joshua Gunn's essay, "Gothic Music and the Inevitability of Genre" explains the development of the coined term, through "genrefication." Which he defines as the activity of genre formation and how it's inevitably going to occur. According to Gunn, this is because people long to explain music by placing it into a specifically category, they use "pragmatic schemes or ways of discussing the musical text ... [to] attempt to overcome the fluidity of music itself through a kind of linguistic filter”(34). 

          For Gunn, and for many people, the pin-pointed moment of gothic rock's genrefication just so happened to be the band Bauhaus' infamous song, "Bela Lugosi's Dead", which came out around August of 1979. It is said that a total discourse from the original derivation of a style of music is the point of official genrefication. What made the song seem so familiar to most was that, although it had the edgy sound of a punk song, there was no alteration within the music. There is very rare bashing noises, cymbals, or overall musical thrust within the anthem that was so commonly seen in songs coming from a punk background. Alexander Carpenter delves deeper into the song in his academic article,  "The “Ground Zero” of Goth: Bauhaus, “Bela Lugosi's Dead” and the Origins of Gothic Rock", where he states, "the only variety comes from the dub-inspired echo/reverb treatment the drum track receives. The main bass guitar part, equally iconic, consists of an ominously low repeating descending figure—a truncated passacaglia comprising the notes D, C-sharp, and B"(35.) This was very much so different from the music at the time, which pulls Bauhaus' "Bela" away from punk and into it's own category. 

          Carpenter explains Derek Tompkins' - the producer for the song - intentions when originally helping to produce Bauhaus' music. Music, that was "from a production standpoint, ... a virtual negative image of a pop song, so dry as to be almost brittle" (34). In the article, the song "Bela" was cited to have been recorded live, while the guitar and drums were recorded into an echo unit. Then, Daniel Ash, the guitarist for Bauhaus, added these effects in afterwards (some say it was only a singular playback of the song). Tompkins had admitted to not intruding too much with the overall production of their music, as he let the band do most of the work. Carpenter states," 'Bela

Lugosi’s Dead' owes the originality of its sound to a juvenile band that did not understand how a recording studio worked and to an engineer and producer who did not understand what the band wanted" (34). Although neither parties knew what they exactly wanted, it was still very much so different from the music at the time. Peter Murphy's monotone voice became the original gothic singer's voice archetype, in which will force any baby-bat into a swooning mess. Coincidentally, a song in which ultimately was made as a mistake also developed into a standing ten minute gothic rock anthem. "Bela Lugosi's Dead" remains a song that blasts on the loudspeakers of grunge bars and people still raise their drinks to do their side-step dance to one of the most iconic goth songs to exist. And thus, this one song itself, creates a genre coined as "gothic rock", in which we'll see grow immensely throughout the years. 

          The song "Bela Lugosi's Dead" was based on an earlier, dark vampiric film. And with this, many of their earlier followers began internalizing this vampiric style. In order to meet their audience's desires, Bauhaus began to establish their own stage personas, especially the lead singer, Peter Murphy. Carpenter notes Murphy as, "the tall, dark, and gaunt front man as both glamorous and sinister, at once the aristocratic, romantic hero and the deviant alien" (37). This conceptualization of the vampire style quickly launched Bauhaus' fanbase into "a sartorial and musical movement that was quickly out of its control and in part beyond its understanding" (37). So as the genre of music developed, the victorian-vampire-esque style evolved out of the "Bela" movement as well. Murphy himself, getting a bit caught up with his own persona, admitted, "we found ourselves playing to our reputation ... [and to] an audience which we had created through our own efforts, but ... we were a little perturbed, curious, and nicely confused—why does our audience look like this?"