In a small town pre-internet (I can't speak to now), goth could be a way of outwardly embracing an invisible social fact. When people felt rejected and excluded, some conformed and abased themselves to get back into the social good graces of the in-crowd, and others burned their bridges to show their defiance. Goth was one flavor of the latter.
God, small towns are shitty. Anyone who romanticizes small towns or small involuntary communities of any kind must see themselves as permanently part of the dominant group.
EDIT: To bring this back to the article, I guess it's nice if the country is now a place where being goth can be about "a quiet confidence, which manifests externally as shyness" instead of being about "if I accepted the community's evaluation of me, I would have to erase myself, and I still have enough of a survival instinct to fight against that."
Also, I disagree with this part:
> In the city the vectors come from many directions, but cancel out and you remain more or less a circle. In the country you get repeated perturbation by a few vectors that deforms you into a spiky, interesting shape.”
Being interesting can be about responding to different vectors of scrutiny differently. You can respond to them all and still be interesting if you respond in a mild way to some and an extreme way to others, and you're willing to make choices when different vectors contradict each other. Otherwise, interesting people wouldn't emerge in cities, and they do.
God, small towns are shitty. Anyone who romanticizes small towns or small involuntary communities of any kind must see themselves as permanently part of the dominant group.
EDIT: To bring this back to the article, I guess it's nice if the country is now a place where being goth can be about "a quiet confidence, which manifests externally as shyness" instead of being about "if I accepted the community's evaluation of me, I would have to erase myself, and I still have enough of a survival instinct to fight against that."
Also, I disagree with this part:
> In the city the vectors come from many directions, but cancel out and you remain more or less a circle. In the country you get repeated perturbation by a few vectors that deforms you into a spiky, interesting shape.”
Being interesting can be about responding to different vectors of scrutiny differently. You can respond to them all and still be interesting if you respond in a mild way to some and an extreme way to others, and you're willing to make choices when different vectors contradict each other. Otherwise, interesting people wouldn't emerge in cities, and they do.