If ‘Wednesday’ is diet goth, ‘Disintegration’ is the full feast
You never choose your subculture, it chooses you. Whether it’s goth, skate, ska or grime culture, there’s a moment when you’re just a budding young music fan merrily going your own way.
You may be picking up records you like the cover of, or trying out the bands your best mate’s hot older brother has a poster of. Then, it happens. You come across something, whether that’s a band, film or book, that breaks through into something deeper. You might not understand it just yet, perhaps you’re a little intimidated by it, but eventually you realise that you feel understood and represented by it.
Suddenly, whatever that thing is, it’s everything. If it’s a band, it’s not just the music. It’s their entire way of being. Their look, demeanour, books they’ve read, and bands they take on tour. You immerse yourself in all of it and come out as an entirely different person. Someone drunk with the first flushes of their identity, eager to seek out a community they can call their own. Two years later, though, and you’re cringing at the very thought of it.
Because that’s always the way, isn’t it? How empowered you feel quickly becomes an embarrassment at how green you were at the time. We learn fast and develop even faster; thus, we tend to sneer at the things that shaped us. Look at the venom people save for bands like Green Day and Linkin Park. We’re currently seeing it in other forms, too, with people sneering at the recent Netflix series Wednesday for being a watered-down version of goth culture. While I won’t say that those people are wrong, I will ask what exactly they expected?
Like with those previously mentioned bands, Wednesday is clearly a starting point for teens and tweens looking to get into goth culture. Y’know, the kind of thing that executive producer Tim Burton has been making for literal decades. It’s a charming romp built around a starmaking turn from Jenna Ortega as the title character. It’s nothing groundbreaking and would probably work better as a standalone film, but what it has done is resonate. There’s a reason that its second season is getting the promotional push to end all promotional pushes; this show is having an effect on people.
How does ‘Disintegration’ by The Cure define goth culture?
While it would be easy to sneer at it (fun too!), I would push back against that instinct. We all evolve beyond the things that introduce us to the communities we call home. However, we should save a certain kind of respect for them. No one gets into a community via the most intense, obscure pieces of art related to them, and really, no one should. It’s a universal experience, and if we act like it’s not, we’re just lying to ourselves. That said, it should be a starting point.
Especially with a universe as vast as goth culture, staying in the shallow end with a work like Wednesday, while comforting, is blocking yourself off from the most exciting and life-affirming parts of an entire subculture. If it turns out that mix of darkness, sweetness, operatic drama, and good-old-fashioned devastating emotion is your thing, then I’d say the thing to move on to afterwards is one of the great gothic pop albums of our time.
The Cure’s Disintegration is one of the greatest albums of the 1980s, no matter how you look at it. It is a spectacular examination of the breadth of emotion one can find in darkness, from breathtaking love songs like ‘Pictures Of You’ to exciting stories of wild nights out on ‘Fascination Street’, all the way to the title track’s stark depiction of the way that depression and poor mental health can destroy not only one’s own life but also others.
Yes, it’s long, taxing, and at points genuinely distressing, but so are most great works of art. Disintegration also has moments of ecstatic joy, lust, fear, hatred, so much emotion painted in dark, mysterious colours. It’s precisely the kind of record made for people who’ve been attracted to the dark side of life by works like Wednesday. While we’ll always carry those introductions in a special place in our hearts, there is so much more to look forward to, and Disintegration could be the first of many.
