I suppose I have some explaining to do, since this is my first post. So here’s the low down. As soon as I heard The Big Takeover was letting some of its writer’s have blogs, I knew I had to take a stab at it. So this is it- Shadowtime – a big bloody stab into the heart of Gotham City’s dark side. Anything that hovers just beyond the far reaches of the light, anything aphotic, if you will, you’ll find discussed here. Music, of course, but also film, literature, art, and anything else that fits. But don’t get the idea that I’m a goth. Or that this is a goth blog, because it certainly won’t be limited by such a fractured and misleading genre title.
There’s a major bone I have to pick with today’s genre-obsessed music scene. It’s a tragedy that many bands with a fondness for the macabre get labeled goth, industrial, psychobilly, gothabilly or something like that, which often relegates them to clubs that only those in the spooky abovementioned subcultures attend. That’s why I wanted to start Shadowtime (named, of course, after one of my favorite Siouxsie songs) to seriously talk about dark art without bringing to mind some horrible image of awkward teenagers in cakey whiteface.
So how does this tie into The Big Takeover you ask? Back in the early days of the mag you could find mention of The Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees, or Death Cult, and no way did Jack call them goth bands. (As it happens Mr. Rabid has quite a collection of early Sister’s 45s which I dream of making off with someday.) Same with The Cramps, or 45 Grave, or the Misfits, or early T.S.O.L.- nowadays many would simply say that they’re deathrock and that’s it. When Jack wrote about those groups they were just great rock ‘n’ roll bands and nothing more. They hadn’t yet been ruined by "The Great Genre Divide," as I call it. So that’s what I want to do, if I can – cover a bunch of great rock bands that also happen to have a dark element to them and forget all the genre crap.
So there’s my rant. While I’ll probably still use some silly genre terms on this blog, it’s only because they sometimes do the trick to explain what kind of music someobody’s making. Just to be clear, however, I have nothing against goths, or the goth scene. It’s really one of the coolest scenes there is. But I want to brush the metaphorical cobwebs away from the hallways that connect various sorts of "indie" or "alternative rock" with the kinds of dark and dangerous music I’m going to be discussing here. They’re all in this together, after all.
This is really the perfect timing for Shadowtime’s humble beginnings, I feel, as Halloween is drawing near. There’s all kinds of fun stuff going on in NYC this weekend, and I’ll be back soon to report on my doings with as much spookiness as humanely possible – Carpe Noctem!
