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Originally Posted by Graveyard.Crow
You still don't quite get what I mean but you pretty much grasped the gist and I get what you're saying as well.
I just think it's not that big of a deal and if genres cause this much crap there shouldn't be so many.
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What's a shame is although genres can be a double-edged sword, it's not the genres names themselves that do the most damage.
Ever since Marilyn Manson broke and started saying goth this-and-that, there's been a major push by both the American music industry and the American media to relabel goth as "dark metal." So while you may think you see a band as taking creative liberties with the "gothic" tag, I can assure you that in most cases it is a further attempt to create a consumer market segment that has nothing to do with goth, and would rather hide the true history of goth and real goth music altogether.
I'm not sure how it is in Canada, but in America most of us who are actual goths are loathe to talk about the genre by its proper name, because the sheer mass of stupid, angsty teenagers that the music labels have created to spread their lies and their version of "goth." As you can imagine, this creates all kind of headaches when friends, co-workers, and people you casually meet ask you what you do on the weekends, or what kind of music you listen to.
It's hard enough to explain bands like Specimen and Alien Sex Fiend (although the Cure and Chameleons UK are easy). It gets exponentially worse when saying the proper name of the music you listen to invokes the image of illiterate, drug-addicted, unsanitary, loser teenagers, when instead goth should be recognized as one of the most important waves of independent music in modern music history.
By labeling themselves as "gothic," Cradle of Filth is deliberately contributing to this continued bastardization of goth music, with the only motivation being profit. It's a concept that utterly reviles me, because music should be evocative, not brain-dead. It should have an artistic value that isn't weighed by sales of t-shirts, stickers, lunch boxes, necklaces, bracelets, etc.
Bands like Cradle of Filth, Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, etc, all are nothing more than commercial ventures masquerading as art, and our view of what is good music is cheaped because of it.
