Next Stop is the Grave

Well I did it.  I reached into my heart and/or soul and conducted out a 10 track playlist about flagrant gothery. 

I Was a Teenage Goth from InitialsBB on 8tracks Radio.

In my review, however, I realized two things: 1. This is obviously just an installment and 2. All of these artists are British except Dead Can Dance, who are Australian, and Christian Death.  Of course the British make better music in this realm.  They're just standing on a big pile of bones and angst over there.  There are American goth outfits, of course, they're just all later and suck. 

This list contains nothing but well known, well-loved hiteroos, including the excellent Bauhaus cover of Ziggy Stardust, which I actually like better than the original, although only kind of if you're going to get all heated about it.  I don't repeat any artists, which was obviously a hardship for me.  I also stay largely on track, genre-wise, which is actually totally impossible at all times and we start with punky goth, then move into more baroque eyelinery stuff and then into neo-folk with almost no attention paid to new romantic this time.  Deal with it?  Don't worry, next time there will be Marc Almond.

In which I type "sad" 17 times.

I can't believe how genuinely saddened I am that sex vampire Peter Steele has died. I had forgotten all about him. In my curiosity, I have researched what he's done with the past 10 years, and it is weak, upsetting and a waste.

This only reinforces my belief that ultra "success" is only a corrosive agent. Too much access to money, drugs, parties, women, etc. It's a false alterworld and it drives everyone (or anyone with a soul or a conscience) straight to hell. I watched a video of him from I guess a couple of years ago in which he discussed his crazed drug use, which was followed by a stay in prison and then a mental institution, and he is clearly just a shattered human being; utterly broken, and he says so. He realizes it. In the video, he seems to be on drugs and the verge of tears at the same time, talking about how he hates his family for intervening, and that the years he spent out of his mind on drugs were the best of his life - not because it was all such a gas, but because he was able to get away from himself. Maybe I should add that this ultra success must be extra damaging to someone who is depressed or emotionally unstable to begin with. I am not sure why I am finding this to be so especially upsetting, but I think I see plenty of myself in him. When asked if he is happy, he will reply, "Well...I'm less miserable!" HAH. It's a joke, and yet it's not. Outsiders to that particular condition will never understand that. In any case, I feel that having been placed in the same situation that he was, I would have crashed and burned just as badly, or worse and faster, as he did. Luckily I seem to have fewer genetic markers for addiction!

Mentally unstable, emotionally vulnerable, unabashedly counter to societal streams, and looking like a character that could only exist in literature, he was evidently unable to keep it together in the life he had created, or in society in general.

Sad sad sad sad sad.

And yeah! I did listen to Type O Negative in the 90s! I was in high school! What do you want from me! I'd do it again!

The 80s!