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In my experience it's actually the other way round. At least where I grew up (Southern Europe) In small towns/countryside it's really difficult to be a true min

• brettermeier 2y ago
  True also in northern europe.
• ginko 2y ago
  The example mentioned in the article was Albany, NY which has a population of about 100,000 people. So it's not exactly a small rural town where everyone knows everyone but it's also not a major metropolis like NYC.
  • darkwater 2y ago
    I grew up in a ~30k town/city, nearest bigger town was less than 100k, and while there was something more there, you had to go to bigger cities to truly be anonymous. Although in the 100k city, coming from an outside town, it was "enough" on that side. But I don't remember there being a "scene" at all (heavy metal in my case).
    • ginko 2y ago
      What can I say. I grew up in a town of ~500 people.
      • darkwater 2y ago
        I'm now living in a 2500 people town, I can understand you :)
  • jghn 2y ago
    All one had to do was go to the QE2 in Albany
    • jprd 2y ago
      This person knows Smallbany well.
      • jghn 2y ago
        Let's just say I'm familiar with steamed hams
      • TransAtlToonz 2y ago
        This is hilarious. I grew up right across the border in Massachusetts and to me growing up, Albany was the big city. Crossgates was the nice, clean, well-maintained mall with the better movie theater, (our rural one was literally decaying in front of our eyes), and I was always so jealous of the teenagers who were able to hang out there and the skateboarders dodging cops in the parking lot. The region is doing really nicely these days. I could easily imagine living in the area again, the people are very friendly, and Dinosaur BBQ is surprisingly delicious for upstate new york. (I hope I didn't just cop to liking a tourist trap.)
        • boscillator 2y ago
          I don't care if Dinosaur BBQ is a tourist trap, it's delicious and I very much miss it. I would definitely conciser moving back to the Albany area.
• debugnik 2y ago
  > unless you are really really self-confident And capable of self-defence, in my experience growing up at a heavily right-wing and Catholic town. Self-proclaimed neo-fascists and groups of judgemental teens gave us trouble more than once.
  • forgetfreeman 2y ago
    Keeping capital N Nazis from taking over show venues was a full time job on the east coast in the 80s and 90s. Half my friends had box cutter scars by the time we were 17 and all of us that had cars kept a trunk full of improvised weaponry.
• mtrovo 2y ago
  I think the author's point isn't that it's easier, it's the fact that being in an isolated, low judgmental environment allows you to express edgy ideas more uniquely without the prepackaged style you often find in big cities, where fashion brands and think tanks have heavy interests in selling you the next big thing. A good example in Europe is how Berlin went from being a cheap city with loads of artistic freedom to a place where people wait in line for hours outside a club just to find out if their black leather shirt is edgy enough. They're all trying to stand out, but somehow they all end up looking the same.
  • microtherion 2y ago
    "low judgmental environment"? You have not grown up in a rural environment, have you? Having grown up in a village of ~250, I can assure you that it's about as judgmental (and conformist) as it gets. And if you want to step it up a notch, try moving to a village of that size in the mountains.
    • viraptor 2y ago
      There's a massive spectrum between NYC and a tiny village. Almost every place you can live is in between. Why bring up such extremes when the author is talking about more common places? Author's example of Newmarket is over 80k people. They just mention Tiny town goths as an idea that does exist - not something extremely common.
      • plastic3169 2y ago
        I think parent was trying to make the point that it is not linear progression, but more bathtub curve where very small places and big cities are similar dead zones. Goth town sweet spot is in the middle.
        • FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
          I ascribe to the Rent Theory of Everything. People can afford to be weird, where they don't have to be perfect corporate people in order to pay rent.
• namaria 2y ago
  I think american suburban goths are basically teenagers readings of European urban trends
  • wiether 2y ago
    It always felt like "goth" as we see it here was a product of American culture? At least when I was a teenager, the goth people were into Avril Lavigne, Marilyn Manson & other american artists. Which was weird because, at the same time, we were taught about gothic cathedrals and churches, which were a pure European product.
    • dfxm12 2y ago
      I know goth (the subculture, which is distinct from "gothic architecture") has many meanings to many different people, but they all go through Siouxsie Sioux, Ian Curtis and that subculture in late 70s UK. It seems like that's what we're talking about here, too. Manson came later & certainly drew influence from there in addition to glam and, probably most heavily, industrial metal. Avril Lavigne was a Canadian pop star who drew from the pop-punk aesthetic. She wasn't goth at all.
      • wiether 2y ago
        Like parent comment I was talking about perception, not reality.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
      no, it comes from UK post-punk 1977-1980. > Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, Bauhaus and the Cure were examples of post-punk bands who shifted to dark overtones in their music, which would later spawn the gothic rock scene in the early 1980s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-punk#United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-punk#United_Kingdom The later artists that you listed are not regarded by that wave as being "really" goth at all.
      • JKCalhoun 2y ago
• smoe 2y ago
  Where I grew up in Switzerland, I'd say the most authentic subcultures were in the secondary cities. A couple of tens of thousands of people in population. Big enough to have minority communities, but still small enough to not get mainstreamed to the same degree as in the "big" cities
  • camgunz 2y ago
    100%. Lately I'm kind of obsessed with cities "in the middle". I don't really know what the definition is exactly, maybe like "you have a pretty big train station" or something, but yeah something where you get all or most of the benefits of a city without the bonkers downsides of "world cities". I think there's a lot to be said about housing costs for sure--probably the main issue but I think it's downstream of a lot of liberal culture that was very OK with building a wall between the and poor people while their housing values skyrocket--but what TFA calls out is also a pretty succinct way to say what I think a lot of people are nibbling at the edges of: there's a single Airbnb/Instagram aesthetic everyone's pursuing and the mechanisms we have for honing whatever we're doing to more perfectly match that aesthetic are so powerful they're blanding things faster than we can create a backlash. When I rented my first apartment in NYC I needed to buy a shower curtain, and I was in a very "don't use Amazon" mode, which meant I was about to discover how little choice you really have when it comes to buying one locally. I got one home I thought I liked, but hanging it up I discovered it had totally trite _words_ on it like "Happiness" and "Sunshine" or whatever. It was so cringe and not my personality even a little, and I cursed God for saddling me with a lot of unpleasant options at that point (throw it away immediately and create waste and go through the whole rigamarole or getting a new one blah blah). But for some reason I suddenly had the thought that this was really enriching my life. It was so totally unlike me it weirdly stretched my experience in a really refreshing way. It was a low-key funny story. It does actually put you kind of in a good mood if you're not actively resenting it while showering. Secondary cities are like that, but for your whole life. It might not be your choice, you might not have access to everything you need to sculpt your life for maximum clout or virality, but it turns out that's an insidious kind of poverty. We're better when things outside our control influence us at least a little. Some examples of this: - local restaurants take pretty bonkers chances with their menus and change them seasonally, so it's possible you just won't like anything at a place all winter, but then the spring menu is amazing - there's a gas station a few blocks away from us which isn't that pleasant on paper (traffic, odors, light pollution, though we don't experience this from where we live) but for some reason it makes me super nostalgic - we used to do a swim class with our oldest every weekend, but there really isn't one here (in English), but the music class we just found is also very fun even though we really wanted a swim class I could go on. Maybe I'm aging, maybe it's becoming a parent, but the thought of moving back to an NYC or even a Chicago feels deeply uninspiring and exhausting. I want the weird decor/playlist choices. I want the people who only run their shop 2 days a week. The constraints big cities labor under have become too intense for them to really be surprising; they have to be so efficient they can't be robust.
• rsynnott 2y ago
  Albany isn't a particularly small town; it's a city with a million people in its metro area (though the city itself is only ~100k, so it's not a particularly big city).
• dfxm12 2y ago
  It is clear from the article that the joke calls into question whether these folks downtown truly are "goth" (or insert counter/sub culture here) or are just into the fashion/aesthetic, which, depending on the time and place, may have been particularly trendy. The next season, maybe these folks are wearing bell bottoms. While if you see a goth presenting despite the difficulty, like you say in a small town or countryside, maybe you can assume they're a true believer.
  • dkarl 2y ago
    In a small town pre-internet (I can't speak to now), goth could be a way of outwardly embracing an invisible social fact. When people felt rejected and excluded, some conformed and abased themselves to get back into the social good graces of the in-crowd, and others burned their bridges to show their defiance. Goth was one flavor of the latter. God, small towns are shitty. Anyone who romanticizes small towns or small involuntary communities of any kind must see themselves as permanently part of the dominant group. EDIT: To bring this back to the article, I guess it's nice if the country is now a place where being goth can be about "a quiet confidence, which manifests externally as shyness" instead of being about "if I accepted the community's evaluation of me, I would have to erase myself, and I still have enough of a survival instinct to fight against that." Also, I disagree with this part: > In the city the vectors come from many directions, but cancel out and you remain more or less a circle. In the country you get repeated perturbation by a few vectors that deforms you into a spiky, interesting shape.” Being interesting can be about responding to different vectors of scrutiny differently. You can respond to them all and still be interesting if you respond in a mild way to some and an extreme way to others, and you're willing to make choices when different vectors contradict each other. Otherwise, interesting people wouldn't emerge in cities, and they do.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  • maldusiecle 2y ago
    Yes, but it's nonsense to equate identity with difficulty. The goth scene originated in a London nightclub, for goodness' sake (the Batcave). There are goths in every big city, and in a lot of cases they move to places _where the scene is_ so that they can participate.
• drweevil 2y ago
  >"unless you are really really self-confident." And then, WOW.