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26 G G G G Go o o o ot t t t th’s h’s h’s h’s h’s D D D D Dark Empire ark Empire ark Empire ark Empire ark Empire 1. Goth Cultures and Abstinence Programs Pe Pe Pe Pe Peril ril ril ril rils for the Pure s for the Pure s for the Pure s for the Pure s for the Pure In an epilogue to his history of Gothic rock and roll music and cultures, The Dark Reign of Gothic Rock, Dave Thompson speculates that because the 1990s second wave of Goth began in America, it has been characterized by a harsh, infuriated seriousness that the original movement lacked (242). Thompson seems bemused by what he perceives as an American tendency to treat rock and roll as a form of revolution. Why are American teens so humorlessly angry? What are they angry about? Donna Gaines is more illuminating on this topic. Throughout her classic study of 1980s heavy metal fans, Teenage Wasteland, Gaines insists that music cultures function as a kind of religion for young people who are denied realistic preparation for the adult world and instead are subjected to “custodial schooling” and “infantilizing rules and regulations” necessitated by society’s failure to teach the young how to protect themselves (259). This is nowhere more evident than in the dominant culture’s treatment of young people’s sexuality, to which rock and roll cultures are an obvious reaction formation. Trapped within a culture that withholds from them (by design, as I will discuss) almost all useful information about sex, and thus doomed to err in great numbers, as the United State’s appalling rate of unwanted pregnancies and venereal diseases among teens re- flects, young people form radical countercultures around their musical tastes. And this makes sense because of the nature of music. As Foucault wisely proclaimed, “One is not radical because one pronounces a few words; no, the essence of being radical is physical” (“Clari- fications on the Question of Power,” 191). Due to the physicality of human responses to music, the inescapability of feeling its strong rhythms in the body, rock music has become a stronghold of American physical resistance to conservative politics. At this point it seems necessary to stop briefly to address the usual cultural studies position, derived from the Frankfurt School, that Perils for the Pure 27 this resistance is meaningless because all popular music will inevitably be commodified and thus fuel the very capitalist system it was meant to oppose.1 Leaving aside Paul Hodkinson’s argument, discussed in the introduction, that Goth music has always been primarily distributed through small independent networks controlled by Goths themselves, one can also recognize that even the most corporately controlled rock and roll still has a somatic existence outside the marketplace, where it enters the body’s rhythms and creates feelings. Music gets inside of us. “Not only is rock music . . . an integral part of the life of many people, but it is a cultural initiator: to like rock, to like a certain kind of rock rather than another, is also a way of life, a manner of reacting; it is a whole set of tastes and attitudes,” and thus the music “offers the possibility of a relation which is intense, strong, alive . . . through which the listener affirms himself” or herself (Foucault, “Contemporary Music and Its Public,” 316). Rock and roll, with its long history of association with the rituals of youthful sexual initiation, gets inside the physical movements and postures we associate with freedom of sexual expression. As anyone looking at a rock and roll performance of any type can easily see, part of the music’s intensity comes from its self-conscious symbolism of eroticized rebellion. So the question should perhaps be not whether rock and roll is understood by its fans as rebellious, but whether it can be the vehicle for the overthrow of corporate capitalism and the system of bourgeois sexuality which serves as its foundation. To that question, I must answer that it has not yet succeeded in doing so, but this failure does not mean that we need pay no attention to the function of rock and roll as a technology of resistance for the young. Like Foucault’s, “my ethic is . . . to be respectful when something singular arises, to be intransigent when power offends against the universal ” (“Is It Useless to Revolt?” 134). And of those who...

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