Still Goth After All These Years: From Death Rock to Cemetery Photography

Still Goth After All These Years: From Death Rock to Cemetery Photography

The first so-called goth record I ever listened to was Bauhaus' "Bela Lugosi's Dead." I borrowed it in a stack of records from a friend helping to turn me on to punk music in late 1984. Another one in that stack was Dead Hippie out of Los Angeles.

I was fourteen years old, sitting in my bedroom with a turntable and a pile of vinyl that would change my life. I didn't know it then, of course. I just knew that "Bela Lugosi's Dead" was unlike anything I'd ever heard—nine-plus minutes of atmospheric dread that seemed to crawl out of the speakers and lurk in the corners of the room.

I listened to both these records quite a bit on my turntable until they were ultimately replaced by more recognizable punk offerings like Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and Dead Kennedys. The darkness receded as the aggression took over. Punk was immediate, direct, angry. It made sense for a suburban kid looking for rebellion. But something about those first dark sounds stayed with me, waiting.

The Seduction

Then in 1986, after my family had moved into a new house in a new neighborhood, I met a new friend who had a treasure trove of new artists for me to explore. Dead Can Dance's "Spleen and Ideal" had just come out and thoroughly seduced me.

This wasn't like the punk records. This wasn't about rebellion or aggression. This was about beauty in darkness, about transcendence through melancholy. Lisa Gerrard's voice sounded like it came from another century, another world entirely. The music felt ancient and eternal simultaneously.

My friend introduced me to more: Siouxsie and the Banshees, Christian Death, The Cure, Joy Division, Sisters of Mercy, and others. These dark textured mourning hymns slithered deep into my soul and hid quietly for the next few years as punk and hardcore music took center stage.

I was living a double life musically. By day—or rather, at shows and with my hardcore friends—I was the straight edge kid listening to hard mosh-inspired anthems against drug and alcohol use. But alone in my room, I was drowning in the beautiful darkness of death rock, letting those mournful sounds wash over me.

The Conflict Within

I listened to some of these albums from time to time, but I was more focused on the identity I was carving out as inspired by other genres. Hardcore was my public face. Death rock was my private truth.

I remember buying Dead Can Dance's "Within the Realm of a Dying Sun" when it came out in 1987 and falling in love with it—but being conflicted over it not fitting in to the hard and fast assault of the tunes I was both listening to in bands like Agnostic Front, Youth of Today, and Warzone, and playing in my own hardcore outfits.

How do you reconcile beauty with brutality? How do you balance the contemplative with the aggressive? I was trying to be two different people, and neither felt complete without the other. The hardcore scene valued directness, conviction, righteous anger. There was no room for melancholy or introspection. You were supposed to be strong, not sorrowful.

But I was sorrowful. I had always been sorrowful, even as a child. The world felt heavy to me in ways I couldn't articulate. The death rock music gave voice to that weight.

The Transformation

Finally, in 1989, I made the definitive exodus from hardcore punk into what we called death rock, aka goth. I was all in.

I had the black loose clothing that draped like mourning cloth. The Aqua Netted Robert Smith hair that defied gravity and required industrial quantities of hairspray. Large crosses hanging from my neck—not religious symbols but markers of mortality, Victorian death imagery made wearable. And bands that reflected my solemn, tragic heart.

This wasn't a costume. This was finally allowing the outside to match the inside. The person I presented to the world was the person I actually was—melancholic, contemplative, drawn to darkness not as rebellion but as recognition of truth.

I immersed myself in the culture. I read Baudelaire and Poe. I studied Victorian mourning rituals. I haunted cemeteries, drawn to the memento mori carved in stone. I wore black in the oppressive Virginia summer heat because it wasn't about comfort—it was about truth.

What Remains

This sentiment never really disappeared, even though I lost my hair, stopped draping myself in sackcloth, and expanded my musical vocabulary far beyond those early death rock albums.

You wouldn't know I'm goth by looking at me now. I don't dress in black. I don't have the hair to style like Robert Smith even if I wanted to. I look like any other middle-aged man with a job and responsibilities. The exterior markers are gone.

But I've always had a mournful heart. I resonate with somber things. I'm painfully contemplative and—as much as it's overused today—empathetic. Those sounds just land home for me, and I'll always be subtly goth.

I still listen to Dead Can Dance. Joy Division still moves me. The Cure's "Disintegration" still feels like a perfect album. These aren't nostalgic listens—they're still speaking truths that resonate in my core.

I photograph cemeteries and have for forty years. I write about mortality and loss. I'm drawn to Victorian memorial architecture and the aesthetics of mourning. I contemplate death not morbidly but philosophically, as part of understanding what it means to be alive.

If that's not goth, what is?

What Changed, What Stayed

But it has changed vastly from what it was. What was once an expression of dark purity with Victorian-styled dress has given way to scantily clad black-haired Barbies who dress in lingerie and platform boots seeking likes and monetization on social media.

The bands can scarcely be traced to the pioneers of the genre. The sounds are not remotely what they used to be. It feels like cosplay more than the authentic expression of anguish and quest for noir spiritual embodiment that our death rock of the early eighties carried.

I don't mean this as gatekeeping. Every generation reinvents subcultures for their context. But something essential was lost in the translation. We weren't performing darkness for an audience—we were living it as spiritual practice. The music wasn't a soundtrack for content creation—it was therapy, philosophy, a way of processing the unbearable weight of existence.

Modern goth often feels superficial to me. The aesthetics without the philosophy. The look without the worldview. People wear the costume but haven't sat with the genuine darkness that inspired the music in the first place.

Ian Curtis wasn't performing depression—he was drowning in it. Rozz Williams wasn't playing at darkness—he was consumed by it. Lisa Gerrard wasn't creating content—she was channeling something ancient and true.

Still Here in the Darkness

I'm still goth because I still carry that mournful heart. I still see beauty in decay. I still find truth in darkness. I still believe that melancholy is as valid as joy, that sorrow deserves expression, that death is worth contemplating.

The clothes are gone. The hair is gone. The outward markers have all disappeared. But the core remains. The way I see the world—through a lens of beautiful darkness, where everything is temporary and therefore precious, where loss is inevitable and therefore worth acknowledging—that hasn't changed.

When I walk through Hollywood Cemetery on a November morning, photographing Victorian monuments and feeling the weight of all that accumulated loss, I'm still that kid who first heard "Bela Lugosi's Dead" and recognized something true in those dark, atmospheric sounds.

When I write about my mother's grave or my aunt's passing or the dogs I loved and lost, I'm channeling the same mournful honesty that Joy Division and Dead Can Dance taught me was not only acceptable but beautiful.

Goth was never really about the clothes or the makeup or the hair. It was about permission to be sad, to be contemplative, to acknowledge that darkness is part of the human experience and worthy of artistic expression.

I'm still goth. You just can't see it anymore.

But it's there, in every cemetery photograph, every contemplation of mortality, every moment I choose to sit with sorrow rather than flee from it.

Bela Lugosi's still dead. And I'm still here, carrying the torch for a version of goth that valued authenticity over aesthetics, depth over performance, truth over trends.

Some things don't change, even when everything else does.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​