sl33pcr33p:
I was talking at rgr half asleep last night about trailer goth vs subdivision goth and I think I wanna expound on it tumblr style. There’s kind of a fucked up or even sinister dynamic to subdivision goth as a sister identity to trailer goth, in that for me and I think for most of us trailer goth is about agency. (Not that i ever lived in a trailer - we always lived in houses or duplexes and that gave us false pride and more debt . Like, no we never lived in a trailer but you did spend my life savings I worked for to keep us afloat.) Because buried in apparent petty rebellion was the truth that you were never wanted by society in the first place. Trailer goth is rejecting a society that rejected you from the get-go: because you are poor.
And there are places like Hot Topic that are synonymous with the aesthetic that bring the differences into sharp focus: who can afford to look the part and who can’t. For a long time the only clothes from Hot Topic I had were ones my friends bought me for Christmas. And I wore those shirts to DEATH. There’s the another bit: whose clothes had holes in them because they wore them out and whose clothes had holes in them because they put them there. And even access to aesthetic was not all about being able to buy clothes (because they could be stolen) but getting there. Trailer goths were lucky if both their parents had cars (mine didn’t most of the time), subdivision goths got new cars from their parents. Going to the mall at all was entirely reliant on Who Had Cars and it definitely wasn’t us. I’ll never forget when I got too tall (and too much butt) to wear my only plaid miniskirts I found at fashion bug one time for $1. Utter devastation.
So I guess I have come to resent these kids, who have grown up to become either crust fund kids (you know exactly what I’m talking about) or the girl I caught up with at a show last weekend who was complaining about money even though she doesn’t have a job and her grandparents pay her rent, as she flipped her purple hair that she confessed to me she got done at a salon last week. AT A SALON. This same girl used to take me to the mall in her new silver bug until I got grounded for like a year when my mom found my MySpace account. She bought me my first hot topic shirt for Christmas when I was 14. I made her a mixed cd in return. You know? You outta know.
The other night I was looking through my Documents folder for an old zine excerpt I wanted to post here, and instead I accidentally found a mislabeled rough draft for a different zine that never was, something that I had written when I was 25 and it was about My Formative Years. And I realized that I had been trying to write some kind of Compendium of My Formative Years ever since I was 21 and those memories started going fuzzy — all the things about high school and hanging out in parking lots, 15 of us and that one friend who had a station wagon, and how important it was that our arms were covered in cheap plastic and metal bracelets, how important it was to find the perfect pair of head-kicking boots at the Salvation Army, and all the authentic things we wrote in black marker on our jeans and canvas shoes. But also how nowadays I mock this part of myself and wonder how what was once so important is now so superficial to me.
It was important because some girl in Catholic school stole my one fancy hair barrette, because we couldn’t have new winter coats every year, because my parents and the community helped us to afford Catholic school because my mom thought it was important and was afraid we’d never learn anything in public school; because I sweat through my blouses and wore godawful saddle shoes and came home crying from being bullied every day and sometimes bruised and because I don’t remember hardly any of that but my mom says it’s true. It was important because I dressed in baggy clothes because I hated everything because everything hated me because I fell in love with my best friend and we held hands and got matching haircuts and boys threw rocks at me because they couldn’t decide if I was a dyke or a fag.
Because buried in apparent petty rebellion was the truth that you were never wanted by society in the first place. Trailer goth is rejecting a society that rejected you from the get-go: because you are poor. (sl33pcr33p)
I mean I wanted to finally romanticize those things with the looking back of being older at 21, at 25, at 28 — having these moods labelled Getting Over Punk because as I have gotten older the mantra “if you hate your job, quit” was just never a possibility, and as I’ve gotten older I don’t care about having a ~style~ or expressing my identity via fashion because who cares?, because I can’t afford it and I can’t afford to go to jail — because I used to steal from Hot Topic and I remember the first time I went to that store I was 13 and only had a few plain black t-shirts of my own and I said, oh my god it’s a store for people like me. Because it took me so many years to understand that “a store for people like me” is exactly the point, that I can purchase my identity, acquire my authentic self-expression at the mall — ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? But then also, what does it mean that a marketed style of rebellion actually helped push me into radical thought? I mean I eventually had to research what anarchy actually is because they sold circle-A patches at Hot Topic and I had to be able to explain it to my dad, you know.
My parents never worried or got angry when I started listening to Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails and I was practically enraged over the fact that this rebelliousness didn’t phase them — the cursing and the devil and the sexuality. I once saved $30 to get floor seats to a Marilyn Manson show in 1999 and my parents probably said something about how I might as well be throwing my money in the gutter, but I defended “his work” so passionately: But he’s an ARTIST. You don’t GET IT, he is so smart and he UNDERSTANDS things. They said, he’s a good businessman, that’s for sure. File under: Times My Parents Were Right (a lot, actually).
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I started hating all of it when the stores like JCPenney’s and Sears (or Belk or Macy’s or insert-your-regional-equivalent-here) started selling the pre-ripped jeans and the distressed t-shirts and notebooks with handwritten “love you grrl!” and “rock’n’roll” on the cover already, like this was a false signifier. I mean my pants ripped from falling down, from getting beat up in a pit at a $3 punk show and from only having the one pair of pants anyway. I mean my journals were 99-cent spiral-bound notebooks that my friends wrote notes on, my friends not the shopping mall. This was important and it was important to be angry about the commodification and argue over the validity of your punk, but now even that kind of meta/ironic-rebellious attitude is A Thing and I am sort of left signifying nothing. Some girls in my class ten years younger than me were talking dismissively about the present-day 90’s “style” “comeback” and how they saw someone wearing an actual scrunchie on their wrist and I looked down at my stupid plaid skirt over torn jeans like this shameful what even is anything.
I still hate it — punk, or punk nostalgia, or punk aesthetic, or whatever — sometimes because it is still so much about access… this thing I thought I belonged to and then felt pushed out of anyway and wanted to care but it’s not cool to care and then couldn’t care but did, a little. And it’s like I used to be jealous about when people can say, I feel tomboyish today so I’m wearing this, I feel femme today so I’m wearing this, I feel sexy today so I’m wearing this, and I would wish I had the money to buy a nice dress or the time to make a nice dress (time is money is value of course) — I wondered if my tomboyish presentation is simply a function of practicality and frugality and what I would have to sacrifice (waking up even earlier than 6:30 to fix my hair?) to have more of a choice in the matter — and I would wish I could afford to get a tattoo or piercing to commemorate important events (I used to force this to be affordable but I can’t anymore and I sometimes hate tattoos now); and I would want to dye my hair on personal whims and sometimes even want to learn how to do makeup. And I would want to be able to buy records and alcohol and place large orders to zine distros and shop at the farmers market and be able to do punk right, or whatever. And then I got angry, and then I didn’t care — or I cared but I didn’t care. Or I don’t know at all.
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When my Friend was deep into his alcoholism that’s where all the money went. Sometimes it seemed to me like this completely fucked-up Zenlike existence/non-existence of simply accepting everything (as long as there was a drink of course). I would have nervous breakdowns about paying the bills or why does our backyard look so white trash (the importance of being able to pass as not-white-trash was deeply ingrained in my from my mother) or why can’t I find a dress that fits me properly or why am I always five years behind on music, etc.
Sometimes he was like this truly authentic creature who didn’t give two shits about expressing an identity, paying to get into shows, getting his guitars repaired. Like if his guitar strings broke, he would just stop playing, no big deal. I asked him, what would you look like if you didn’t have to spend all your money on alcohol? What would you wear? Would you get a haircut? Would you ever get a tattoo? Would you buy effects pedals or get your amp fixed? What kind of records would you buy if you could just shop around instead of asking me to download and burn albums? Would you buy art supplies? What if you had fancy paper instead of painting on cardboard boxes? & he said he didn’t know, really, maybe a pair of pants that were actually his size, a new amp, guitar strings, a set of colored pencils.
I mean this genuine disinterest was utterly fascinating to me. I only wish that I could not-care that hard sometimes.
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in the Interest of the Blogosphere: Posts tagged “questions” are to be considered as such, works-in-progress, rough drafts, processing, etc. And especially please note that I am not intending to discredit the validity of or shit-talk individuals who utilize fashion as a form of identity expression, okay? It is interesting to me (eg feminist makeupping) but not particularly my thing, and I’m just trying to describe how I see radical and capital get so convoluted and entangled. This shit is complex, sometimes, and like, I rarely know what the hell I’m talking about anyway.
(Source: persephonette)
