The Goths Are Back

Other dimensions of the Gothic aesthetic: Kohl eyeliner, noire nail varnish and a sardonic, self-possessed demeanor that advertisers call nihilistic.

Goths are a gigantic ‘fuq-you’ to the algorithm. They’re also the recession indicator. When you start to notice more of them around the place, the economic fuqery is not far behind. It’s not that surprising. Modern Goths – as opposed to the old Germanic Goths who took down the Roman empire – emerged en masse in the early Eighties.

They came out of the energy crisis sparked by the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Every economic indicator plummeted, just as the earliest Gen Xers were leaving high school or getting ‘vocational guidance’: Uranus was in Scorpio and a British band called Bauhaus released the ur-Gothic hit single Bela Lugosi’s Dead.

A Hungarian actor, suave Libran and veteran of World War I, Lugosi could never break free of being a B-List Dracula. “I am definitely typecast,” he wrote at one point. “I am doomed to be an exponent of evil.” It’s unclear how he became a touchstone for a new generation and its disdain for the way ‘the adults’ were running things.

Additionally, the Goth aesthetic was the antithesis to the Cheryl + Christy (Tiegs and Brinkley), neon perkiness and spandex paradigm. It’s waxed and waned ever since but Goths returned prior to the 1987 stock market crash and the Global Financial Crisis.

It’s partly a scorpionic syndrome – Uranus in Scorpio, Pluto in Scorpio, Lilith in Scorpio, Scorpio South or North Node and – this year – a series of Eclipses across the Taurus-Scorpio axis. Culturally, Scorp is all about the black-hued clothes, interest in underworldly affairs, esoterica and mystique.

You could also see it as a wholesale rejection of whatever mainstream society and media is serving up; onetime fun spaces like social media are devolving into such overt advertiser vehicles that it seems like they should be paying viewers for their time and info.

And with a few exceptions, global leadership has rarely seemed so moribund or venal. Even Foreign Affairs, an august establishment magazine published since 1922, acknowledged it in a recent article, declaring that “the world is between orders; it is adrift.”