(3)Īvril Horner and Sue Zlosnik state that perhaps the most important question that Gothic artworks pose to their audience is 'what are you afraid of?,' (4) a query that is also encoded in symbolic language of nearly all subculture styles and one that must be addressed in the study of Goth music. Meyer reminds us, is important because it is 'the foundation on which an appreciation and evaluation of works of art must rest'. Defining the sense of a style, as Leonard B. A musicological perspective is needed to complement and augment the earlier sociological and gender studies by examining Goth's musical techniques and signification practices and determining the parameters of the style. If the music of Goth was truly part of the tradition of Gothicism then it merits the same level of study afforded to Gothic literature and film. Recognizing that Goth music was rooted in genuine Gothic aesthetics, however, only marks the beginning of an inquiry into the genre not its conclusion. The Goth adjective therefore was not simply a meaningless label created by the recording industry. (2) This scholarship has demonstrated that these groups did, in fact, use Gothic signifiers in their image, and Gothic themes in their songs. Some recent histories of Gothic art have included Goth bands in their surveys. Academic studies of the Goth subculture have been conducted by gender scholars and social scientists. Goth on the other hand became a distinct genre of music in its own right. Most subcultures such as the mods, teddy boys, and skinheads appropriated existing music, while the punks adopted and intensified a style originally from New York's musical underground. (1) Music was undoubtedly an important part of this process. Dick Hebdige, in his classic reading of subcultures maintained that the essence of these social/style movements was finding creative ways to draw attention to socio-economic problems, finding ways to say 'the right things at the right time', and embodying a mood and a defiant sensibility.

Music was an ideological touchstone, a unifying thread that articulated the values, and reinforced the visual signifiers of the style. Music played a central role in the development and spread of nearly all of the style-based subcultures that flourished in Great Britain from the late 1950s through the end of the 1980s.

Palette sans x goth sang