{"id":1623,"date":"2022-09-18T17:49:26","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T01:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/?p=1623"},"modified":"2022-09-18T17:49:26","modified_gmt":"2022-09-19T01:49:26","slug":"true-tales-of-eldergoth-life-finding-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/?p=1623","title":{"rendered":"True Tales of Eldergoth Life &#8211; Finding Music"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Hello Snarklings! The Lady of the Manners has decided it&#8217;s time to regale you all with some goth history. (An earlier version of this article appears on on <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patreon.com\/JillianVenters\" target=\"_blank\">The Lady of the Manners&#8217; Patreon<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Back in the Lady of the Manners&#8217; day (she says, waving a stick of clove incense around because she stopped smoking 20+ years ago), finding new goth music was <strong>hard<\/strong>, especially in the early 90s. Barely any of us were on the internet, and band websites were virtually non-existent. Which meant any or all of the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul><li>You hoped that the DJs for your local goth night, if you had a local goth club night, played new-to-you music. At which point you ran to the DJ booth and shouted over the din to get a band name, which you probably misheard thanks to the club volume, or would have forgotten by the next morning. Yes, some of us carried a pen and notebook in our lunchbox purse, but deciphering something scrawled by candles and blacklight when you were probably a bit tipsy was often an unsolvable mystery.<br \/><br \/><\/li><li>You went to the local alternative record store or Tower Records, and you flipped through Every. CD. There. Most stores didn\u2019t have a way to preview every item in stock, especially if the CD was from a small independent label, which meant most times you made your decisions based on the band name, the cover art, and the song titles. Did the cover look like an Aubrey Beardsley illustration and have song titles like <em>\u201cThe Decay of Midnight\u201d<\/em> or <em>\u201cLilies\u201d<\/em>? Then you probably (well, possibly) found a band you\u2019d like. Good luck ever finding another album by them.<br \/><br \/>While you <strong>could<\/strong> ask the clerks for musical selections, you never knew if your question and examples of bands you liked would get you a sneer and a reply of <em>\u201cYeah, those aren\u2019t goth<\/em>\u201d<em>. <\/em>But sometimes the sneering reply would be helpful, because the bands the disdainful employee then rattled off would lead you to something interesting.<br \/><br \/><\/li><li>You bought compilations because you recognized one or two bands on it, and then spent months searching for albums by the other bands. More often than not, those other bands had released one other album before they broke up, and it was only available in Germany.<br \/><br \/><\/li><li>You squinted at the ads in whatever goth zine found its way into your hands. Squinted, because the fonts used in the \u201cclassified\u201d ads section were always tiny and blurry (with an added layer of blurry if it was a photocopied zine), or the actual quarter page paid-for-ads were masterpieces of goth design that were so <strong>aesthetic<\/strong> that you were lucky if you could make out the name of the band. (The fonts used by black metal bands owe a huge stylistic debt to those goth zine ads, even if they don\u2019t know it.) The independent record labels usually had slightly more legible logo designs. <strong>Slightly<\/strong>.<br \/><br \/>If you were able to decipher the name and address, then came the step that is probably incomprehensible to The Kids Today: sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to the address in the ad to get a catalog. Or getting a money order to send the to address in order to buy a cassette without knowing what type of music you were getting. (Sometimes we wrapped actual cash money in layers and layers of paper, hoping it was well-disguised enough that someone wouldn\u2019t intercept and tear open the envelope to steal the money.) There were no order numbers. There was no way to prove you\u2019d sent off an order. You sent it off through the mail and hoped for the best. (This is how the Lady of the Manners discovered Trio Nocturna, Faith and the Muse, The Shroud, Mirabilis, and many other bands.)<br \/><br \/><\/li><li>Finally, you and your friends traded mix tapes. Sometimes it was a way to introduce them to new music, sometimes it was a subtle (not really) declaration of romantic interest, and sometimes it was a way to console your friend after a breakup, but making those mixtapes was a Serious Undertaking.<br \/><br \/>In addition to painstakingly selecting every song for maximum coolness <strong>or<\/strong> emotional impact, you spent hours creating the perfect cover &#8211; be it a drawing you made, a collage of photocopied illustrations from out-of-print books, or a photo carefully chosen and snipped from a fashion magazine &#8211; and hand-lettering the list of songs and bands. Does the Lady of the Manners frequently lament the loss of the mix tapes that were given to her Back In The Day? Please forgive her while she takes a moment to sob and dab her eyes with a black-edged handkerchief.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Let the Lady of the Manners end this installment of True Tales of Eldergoth Life on a <em>\u201cWe live in the future! It\u2019s amazing!\u201d<\/em> note: she doesn\u2019t know what sort of dark algorithm magic is behind <a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/www.music-map.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Music Map<\/a>, but she adores it, and has yet to search for a band that Music Map can\u2019t find and suggest similar music to!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>~~~<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Speak, oh other Eldergoths! How did you discover new music? Do any of you still have mixtapes of that era languishing on your shelves? (If you do, <strong>please<\/strong> leave a comment with the track list!)<a href=\"https:\/\/www.music-map.com\/\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Back in the Lady of the Manners&#8217; day (she says, waving a stick of clove incense around because she stopped smoking 20+ years ago), finding new goth music was hard, especially in the early 90s. <a href=\"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/?p=1623\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[282,1,181,211],"tags":[283,157],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1623"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1628,"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1623\/revisions\/1628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gothic-charm-school.com\/charm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}