second round game
(5) cocteau twins, “blood bitch”
put out
(4) the cult, “rain”
79-62
and will play in the sweet 16

Read the essays, watch the videos, listen to the songs, feel free to argue below in the comments or tweet at us, and consider. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchvladness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on March 14.

shannon fields on “blood bitch”

What’s my worth? / There’s a fire / I’ll paint the blood bitch / The blood bitch black / Lift up your heels / You’ll see burnt soles [1]

…or, “Blooo’t Betch”, if we faithfully transcribe singer Elizabeth Fraser’s working class Scots dialect, rendering it more adorable and disarming on the page than sinister. Which makes a kind of poetic sense, because the dark matter present in these lines is ugly, authentically distressed human stuff—unapproachable by the bat-wing machineries of Gothic rock’s standard cartoon-morbidity.
Which is to say that “Blood Bitch” is not Goth. Although…strike that. The restrained monotony of the song, faltering towards drama, and the vaguely scorched and bloodied imagery, do nominate it as the most Goth song on Garlands, the debut (and most Goth) album by Cocteau Twins…who were not Goths.
Which is also to say “Blood Bitch”, which I did not choose to write about but have been assigned to advocate, is the most boring song on the most boring album by one of the most exciting and idiosyncratic post-punk bands that Goth culture ever happened to embrace.

A friend I call Mister Laurie, who grew up in the middle of the scene and wrote a book about it [2] (so he must know), said: “No bands, well, no-one of ‘significance’, openly called themselves Goth, and rightly so: genres are for followers, not leaders”.
Guitarist Robin Guthrie was not Goth. In most interviews he gleefully punctures any inflated poetic mystery surrounding the band, playing up his gregarious ‘working class bloke’ personality, cracking dad jokes. What he was, alongside Simon Raymonde (who joined a few albums into their career), was one of the era’s most inventive and accomplished producers; a prime architect of musical styles that came to be called ‘shoegaze’ and ‘dream-pop’, and whose obsessively crafted opalescent sound-sculptures would heavily stamp not only future guitar-driven music, but a great deal of the gauzy trap and R&B currently in vogue on Top 40 hip-hop radio.
“Liz” Fraser, too, was no Goth—she was a genius.

“Like so many tribes, Goth is just as importantly an act of rebellion”, Mister Laurie says. “a secession from the mainstream, from your family and your peers…It’s all tightly bound to that nobody-understands-me teenage alienation ‘phase’… a romantic and mysterious outsider was basically what we were shooting for, I think”.
Maybe the Cocteaus were Goth. For a minute.

💀

An early concert video—

—shows the band in late 1982 or early 1983; London or Amsterdam. Garlands had been released a couple of months prior, and as far as I can tell the kids onstage are doing their best to disappear. Or cope. There are no capes, death-mask makeup or fishnet sleeves to be seen (well not onstage, anyway). Fraser, barely 19 at the time, is what I can only describe as an accidentally powerful presence, wearing a Scottish tartan button-down (today you’d think ‘outdoorsy flannel from Land’s End’), her long red hair in a high Edwardian pile (far more Gibson Girl than Siouxsie Sioux). She is nervously wringing the fingers of each hand methodically, before her hands break free, seize and wave, roughly miming the motions of an arthritic, underwater clap. In most interviews she will go on to find ever less comfortable ways of saying “I'm just really afraid of being judged”—still, her physical and vocal tics make a spell-binding virtue of it.
Eyes mostly closed, her voice stutters, whirs, trills and howls like nothing else in the fledgling Punk canon, rhotic whirlwinds of bird-song. Her eyes open between lines as if to punctuate her words (are they words?), swinging between stunned emptiness and a look of concern for the audience, at times looking positively startled.
Bassist Will Hegge, just stands there—the way his bass-lines do. He’s dressed in black (but ‘regional concert band’ black, not ‘Prince of Darkness’ black), only ever looking up to glance nervously sideways at Guthrie, a stocky boy hiding beneath his hair. Bookends, they both more or less idle in their concentration. Instead of a drummer there’s a tape machine in the back (down in Liverpool, Echo & The Bunnymen would have been putting theirs up in center-stage), playing pre-recorded Roland 808 drum machine rhythms whose tempi Fraser will occasionally mark by patting the ground, then patting her stomach, then touching her face…and repeating. Strange, unpremeditated and awkward motions. There is no arch camp, no melodrama. There are no vampires to be seen. The vampires are all back at home in their living rooms in front of the telly. You have to invite them out.

When asked about first hearing Cocteau Twins, David Narcizo of Throwing Muses (4AD label-mates) wrote that he fell in love with “mainly the awkwardness of the whole package…an exhilarating mess of beautiful noise, good taste, bad taste…[Liz] either warning me about something or celebrating with me—happy on the verge of hysterical…I still do not know what their intentions (if any) were.” [3] In this he nails down one of the most defining but least discussed features of Cocteau Twins from the beginning, that opacity of intention. Even out of the gate, loosely draped in the second-hand sounds of their contemporaries, struggling to find a voice, there is something far more elusive, and far more emotionally granular—more emotionally intelligent—than what the Gothic broad brushes of “Sorrow” or “Desolation” would suggest. “Happy on the verge of hysterical”: there should be a word for it.

💀

Fraser called it “dark and stifling” [4]. It was once called Grange-burn-mouth.

Which sounds like a Cocteau Twins song title but refers to the river mouth at Grange Bùrn (‘bùrn’, Scots Gaelic for “fresh water”, almost as Gothically haunted as the synonymous Dutch, ‘kill’)—later shortened to Grangemouth. Aerial images of the Cocteau’s hometown are striking. Particularly so if your mental images of Scotland’s interior involve one or more unicorns and moonlit castles in disrepair. An inhumane expanse of pipe stacks, blue gas flares erupting like wildflowers in bloom, and a shocking number of hyperboloid cooling towers (think of the giant smoking nuclear power plant towers in The Simpsons’ opening credit sequence), are under-lit with an eerie orange glow at night.
Officially founded as a town in Stirlingshire County in 1777, Grangemouth was established on wet, windy, sparsely populated Pict tribal farmlands (in “the misty guts of Scotland”, to borrow a phrase from Mister Laurie, anthropomorphically correct). These tracts of alluvial soils and peat just north of Antoine’s Wall (the northern frontier of the Roman empire) have been bounced back and forth between the Kingdoms of Scotland and Britain since the 12th century. In fact, the symbolic hero of Scottish Independence, William Wallace, was defeated here by the armies of Edward I of England in 1298’s battle of Falkirk. If you buy historian Luc Sante’s thesis in his book Low Life, moods like defeat and resignation can stick to the map for a long time, a limp dowry for each new generation. I buy it.
Over centuries, Grangemouth’s strategic adjacency to several transshipment points for major waterways between Glasgow and the North Sea saw that Stirlingshire’s resources would ping-pong between various feudal lords, landed gentry, and industrial interests. Whatever could be wrung from the land and its people: brick-making, dock-yards, whale-boiling, timber and grain trading, coal-mining and ship-building (which, abandoned by corporate interests in the 1970s, came to a halt and left a significant slice of the town jobless).
The 20th century’s turn saw Grangemouth rushing headlong into the blackened, scaly arms of the industrial revolution, importing crude through vast pipelines and establishing one of the largest petrochemical refineries in Europe. By the 1970’s, the Grangemouth that gave birth to a band called Cocteau Twins, with a population of less than 20,000, could be fairly described as more of an oil refinery and pharmaceutical plant than a town. Perhaps a decent place to earn a paycheck; less likely an inspired place to grow up. Robin Guthrie, less charitably: “It was a toilet”.

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Cocteau Twins’ debut album, Garlands, was released on September 1st, 1982. Less than a year later Guthrie complained to the press that the album was “a big stone hanging around our necks”. Unhappy with the sound and production, he said, “it was created through total naivety, we just didn't have a clue what was happening… There's a hell of a lot more power when we play live than anything we've ever done on a record." [5] On that point he was not wrong—the handful of 1982-83 bootlegs online bear ample witness. Still, we have record of Guthrie’s perfectionist complaints only because the press response and sales were significant. So hungry for newness, the post-punk era was such that even the oddest one-off outsider singles in the UK could easily sell 5,000 copies on the back of a nod from Melody Maker or John Peel before disappearing into obscurity again. Garlands made an immediate mark.

“Blood Bitch” is the first song on the first record by Cocteau Twins. Listen loudly—it’s actually kind of an introverted affair as far as angsty squalls go. The first sounds you hear are undramatic, dry Roland 808 drum machines with kicks on the quarter notes, hi-hats on the off-beats, and a single snare every third beat (a simple but actually quite unusual, and so unsettling choice). You also hear a bass guitar picking out sixteenth note patterns on a single note (E), and saturated with chorus effect, which generates miniscule differences in pitch and time, drenching the instrument in a shimmery, hollow, ringing sheen.
Guthrie’s guitar enters four short bars in, filtered through enough layers of distortion and modulation that you never quite detect any single note’s attack, only dissipation and decay. Even ascending scales come off as effectively static clusters of harmonics, rendering the natural tones, as played, spectral at best. The guitar’s entry also establishes the key as E Minor. In Western music the minor chords are triads of pitches that composers use to spell ‘BROODING DREAD’ and ‘HAUNTING SADNESS’ in letters six feet high (and, of course, deep...#GothDadJokes).
That’s what we hear, but how does it feel? Tense, mostly. Relentlessly so. There’s a touch of dread, but principally anticipation. This is a droning, static transmission—static in the sense of ‘stasis’. There is an inner forward momentum but no actual movement. Tension in the fashion that Ravel’s monomaniacal Bolero introduced to the world, via repetition to the point of concern. In actuality, those guitars are ascending much of the time: Em, to Fm, Gm, then AMaj, and an almost honky-tonk dip into E7. As guitar frequencies stretch, go out of phase and begin to pile up on themselves, they almost build Shepard-Risset tones; auditory mirages that create the sensation of hearing pitches that continuously rise (or fall) forever. The music should soar by now. But with an unflinching stoicism the bass guitar never leaves root note E, and any organic cry falls on a drum machine’s deaf ears. While you get the sense it would soar live, on record the guitar never reads as much more than a limping attempt to escape E Minor’s repressive dolefulness.

And that’s where the voice enters, after a full minute and a half of one-sided argument between guitar and rhythm section.

Blood woman. Blood bitch. There’s a corona. A corona swelling.

At least that’s what we think she’s saying. “Blood Bitch” was not among the few lyrics Fraser allowed to be printed on the original sleeve. As an introduction to a voice that will be recognized by more than a small circle of critics as an exceptional talent, one of the great stylists of her generation, it’s inauspicious at best. Here we have a drugged soprano, bassoon-like, stretching out the words in laconic and restrained long tones colored only by a yelping, manic passagio as her voice passes the glottal break at the beginnings and endings of certain words. If you listen very closely, some lines trail with a prolonged stuttering trill, mostly breath, far-too-quietly indicating just how close she is to unhinging (on the following track, “Wax and Wane,” we get the full-voiced incarnation of the same signature technique, and it is thrilling by contrast).
Frustratingly, there is never a peak here. Even melodically, we almost never hear more than the same sequence of two notes, the first and the third of the scale—enough to affirm the song’s key, but never to question it. There are tantalizing moments where the threads come loose, but like the production of the song overall, restraint and tension win, with the promises resolution, implosion or collapse always imminent and never manifest. The closest we come to an upshift is when, over two minutes in, the entire guitar sub-mix is run through a Flanger (a carousel-like filter, as if a wah-wah pedal were to be engaged at a glacial pace). It’s an effective transition for sure, and one that feels like it means something. Like those Shephard-Risset tones, however, it gifts only an endless rising that never arrives anywhere.

💀

Two self-styled ‘Punk’ teenagers, Guthrie and Fraser met in the late 70’s: “The only excitement for a 30-mile radius is the 'Nash,'” said Fraser in 1982, “a local hotel disco where Rob was DJ…. I used to go there on my own, dance on my own and leave on my own...Yeah, very poor social skills," she says, in her typical self-scorn. "I was going there for a year and at the end of that year everyone was very drunk and Robin and I started talking. He said, 'Have you ever tried singing, why don't you come along to a rehearsal?' And I didn't know what else to do at the time, so I did.” [6] Told elsewhere, Robin liked how she looked and thought if she could sing half as well as she could dance, she’d make a cool front-person. He thought she was cute.
“’I was the sweetest punk rocker you've ever met,’ said Fraser with a giggle, describing her look as resembling Wilma Flintstone’”. She later says she saw the self-confident and sociable Guthrie “as a father figure”. They soon formed both a band and a relationship. “What brought us together was me having no ideas and opinions of my own, and him having plenty—enough for both of us”, side-lining “We were attracted to each other for the wrong reasons". [7]
More than enough books and documentaries have covered the socio-economic and political climate that back-dropped what we call the post-punk era in Great Britain. The 70’s saw 30% inflation, miner’s strikes, discontent with the political establishment, and the dawn of Thatcherism, which waged a kind of war of ideas (and riot gear) on the working class. If you were working class in the UK (and particularly if you were Scottish or Irish) chances are very good you were all sorts of fucked and hopeless. When the Sex Pistols and their horde came along they politicized and polarized creativity under the banner of ‘Punk’, like an aerosol can tossed on the fire by kids both hopeless and hopelessly bored. Punk was both hope and resignation in the same wordless howl, a “symptom of that mood of crisis, but from the very start it refused definition", wrote Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian. [8] Elevating the role of the outsider, it was a lightning rod for anger and disenfranchisement, and a near-spiritual mandate to find salvation (or at least self-worth, for many working class kids a foreign concept) in something creative and loud, the more outlandish and confrontational the better.
Lester Bangs wrote about the Pistols’ Johnny Rotten that he was an “insect buzzing atop the massed ruins of a civilization leveled by itself…on another level”, he said, “he’s just another trafficker in cheap nihilism”. [9] A young teenage Elisabeth Fraser had him tattooed on her arm. At the time, what civilization in her field of vision could have looked all that worth saving?

The youngest of six children, bulimic, and already feeling abandoned by older siblings who’d left the nest, Fraser was thrown out of her house at 16 for “being a punk”, she says.
According to an Alternative Press interview in 1996, “Music provided a respite from her home life, where she was sexually abused by a brother-in-law”, with the implication of other abuses and violence at home. Home: where the vampires hang their hats. Dancing alone at the local hotel disco: less affect or cliché, more self-care, more defensive survival strategy.
"By the time you're old enough to make choices, if you believe through being told so often by your caretakers that you’re not worth a shit [and] you don't deserve a choice, then you won't even challenge that. And when you're old enough to make choices on your own, you won't know how" [10], she later said. Unsurprisingly, it would take time to find her creative footing.
But years’ later, Fraser also still gets excited thinking about the Punk scene, an extended family of misfits that liberated her, to the point the wants “run round the house!...It did change my life, it made me a better person, and believe it or not it made me much more content, I just appreciate things more than I did.” Without the thrill of music, she says “I’d be working in the Chunky Chicken factory, getting in the wages, buying a single every month or something.” [11]

More confident and self-directed than their future singer, Guthrie and Heggie had already started up an instrumental version of a band called Cocteau Twins by the time they met Fraser. The name Cocteau Twins suggests a band keen to parade their bohemian intellectual bona fides, a reference to filmmaker/writer Jean Cocteau’s book Les Enfants Terribles. But no. Cocteau Twins was rather the name of a Simple Minds song (i.e., during their early days as a manic, proggy punk band, with their Breakfast Club soundtrack histrionics still an unthinkable lifetime away). They’d all seen Simple Minds (who’d named themselves after a Bowie lyric) in Grangemouth and were inspired.

And then it all happens very quickly. Maybe because a young body’s manic current has nowhere else to go in Grangemouth, except by taking aim at yourself. Or someone else. Or having babies. Or putting heroin into your arms. Or being in a band—everyone else seemed to be finding the truth there. Or, at least, a few good laughs.
Guthrie never seems to have had a doubt or a moment’s hesitation about getting what he wanted and knew he deserved. Turned out it was the easiest thing in the world. And it had never occurred to him that they wouldn’t be larger than Grangemouth, larger than London, as big as ‘the voice of God’ (as journalist Steve Sutherland later called the Cocteau’s music). ‘Cream rises’, and all that—too young and naive to think otherwise.
They recorded (not dubbed, being without the technology to make copies) two cassette demos. They headed down to London (7-8 hours’ distance by car) to see a show (The Birthday Party, all hellfire and showmanship). Guthrie recognized radio DJ John Peel and pushed a tape into his hand (a feature on his show could change your fate overnight). After the show, as Fraser recounts “We were moseying along a bit aimlessly and then…Rob decided to wheedle us all backstage and sat himself down next to Phil [Calvert]. I was bloody terrified at the audacity of it, but Phil was genuinely interested and helpful, he gave us the address of 4AD and told us to write, and of course Rob being Rob, he did." [12] 4AD, the only record label address they had, the only label they sent a tape to (well they’d have to record another one if they did).
4AD responded. John Peel responded. It worked.

💀

Factory Records’ impresario Tony Wilson famously said, “Punk enabled you to say ‘fuck you’, but it couldn’t go any further. It was a single, venomous, two-syllable phrase of anger. Sooner or later, someone was going to say more; someone was going to want to say ‘I’m fucked.’” He was talking about Joy Division, but as a Tweet-length biography of gothic post-punk there’s hardly better. “Goth’s perennial allure”, wrote Simon Reynolds in Blender, “also has a lot to do with the way the epic music and tortured lyrics give majesty to moroseness, elevating and ennobling adolescent angst”. [13]
But Fraser agonized over what to say, her inner voice telling her “'You're shite! Go and get a day job immediately”. [14] “I didn’t feel adequate as a lyricist” she’d tell 1FM. “I get a bug for words, but I don’t know what any of them mean…”, saying that showing the world her lyrics, “I felt like I was shark-bait” she says between giggles, but in a broken voice that makes me sink inside. "A lot of the stuff I was singing about then was all metaphorical”, she says in 1995 [15]. “I guess it's back to how much personal power you feel that you have. Like, if I'm 17 and I don't even know when I'm hungry, am I tired, have I had any sleep—if you don't even know that, then how can you talk about lyrics that come from such an unconscious place?” And so we have Garlands’ lyrical impressions and evasions, from a singer maybe too uncomfortable simply finding an authentic place between the very rock, very male, very performative twin constraints of “fuck you” and “I’m fucked”.
But within a year of Garlands’ release Fraser’s lyrics, her voice, the mystery of it all, will be hotly dissected and devoured, as she begins to develop a language that poet (and Cocteau Twins fan) Sommer Browning impeccably describes “as indecipherable as desire” [16].
And then there’s the musicality: of the language and of that voice. “Blood Bitch’s” ostensible lyrics don’t stand out miles beyond the more impressionistic strands of standard Goth fare. However, the way that Fraser stretches out each phoneme almost into its own compositional vignette, you begin to sense that delivering the words is spectacularly unimportant to her. Hers is a very “trees for the forest” approach to singing, timbre over sense. Equivocating, perhaps, but why should a head-on boxing match with your demons be the only form of allowable bravery in song lyrics (while critics give filmmakers, poets and visual artists, so much room to explore)? If her peculiar enunciation can be read as a curtain behind which to hide, it was also a launch-pad to explore the wordless edges of emotions she couldn’t, or chose not to form into concrete objects, but proved uniquely equipped to emote (and which could only have been done in song). Steve Sutherland said it best in a 1985 Melody Maker: “Her lyrics …[are] not nonsense but emotion liberated from cliché. When she sings, my world moves and it means something beyond and without all the blasted, blighted baggage of linguistic nostalgia”. Referring to the decade of vocal experimentation that follows Garlands, Simon Reynolds wrote simply, “She said so much more when you couldn’t understand a word.” [17]
But it took time to get there. Fraser even left the band for about six months before finishing the recordings that became Garlands, only returning because of her blossoming romantic relationship with Guthrie. Trying to write and express within the idiom of her peers, she became exasperated: “I think it was more the lyrics I didn't have the faith in. I found it too hard” [18]. More than a mere self-confidence issue, as she told The Guardian in 2009, she came to avoid words that could pin down meaning—a story, a character, a scannable emotion—for the simple reason that “I can’t act. I can’t lie”. Whether by safety or fearlessness, Fraser ultimately took a far less codified approach, rejecting the kind of language imposed by the conventions of pop song. In order to feel safe being herself, she removed her ‘narrative self’ from the picture completely.

And she enthralled, Mister Laurie wrote, “Liz was the soul of the band, singing with passion, urgency and sometimes anger; that much was clear…Everyone wanted to know more about them and find out what on Earth she was so fired up about”.
The contemporary voices of authority on the Cocteau’s lyrics were wildly (and comically) diverse, and bafflingly contingent (not helped by Fraser’s general refusal to have lyric sheets printed). Myths abounded (and somehow still do):

• She makes up her own language (Ice Choir’s Kurt Feldman described it as “mermaid dialect” [19], which is actually pretty good),

• she babbles a kind of Pentecostal nonsense,

• she improvises in the puirt à beul tradition (a sort of Gaelic scat that sounds way more exciting on paper than on Youtube),

• she sings in a mixture of five Pagan languages indigenous to the British Isles,

• or, my favorite piece of anecdotal fiction (as relayed by Erik Blood), she is “schizophrenic and always sings about food” [20] (a close relative of David Byrne, then, pathologically speaking?).

However, around the release of Garlands Fraser was candid and consistent when speaking about her process. As self-deprecating as she has been in describing it, her process comes across as an impressively deliberate one, both in the compositional and literary sense. Her house was littered with notebooks and lists as she obsessively documented words. She spent hours trawling foreign language dictionaries, treating language as a ‘found sound’ source, resulting in a sort of vocal score bordering on bricolage. Think maybe Meredith Monk by way of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
“Combining words in different languages that I couldn't understand just meant I could concentrate on the sound and not get caught up in the meaning ... But it got to be more fun because I was able to make up lots of portmanteaus, literally hundreds and hundreds of words. I was really into it… And it just kept on getting bigger and bigger” [21] By comparison to even an artistically proximate contemporary like Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard, an impressive singer who came to embrace (and spiritually mythologize) the notion of improvising in a made-up language, Fraser’s performances were in turn based on very complex lyrical arrangements that take her multi-tracked vocal parts to the edges of her voice’s technical capabilities, neither intellectualizing nor mystifying it. On paper, it sounds like work. On record it sounds impossible.

The level of deliberate writing involved is less evident on Garlands, more or less a live-band capture. But by the release of 1983’s “Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops” it becomes difficult to defend the notion that music like this could ever manifest in momentary flashes of inspiration. There is beauty, grace and playfulness, as well as almost super-human feats of technical athleticism and control; rolled R’s in perfectly synchronized harmony, precise semi-tonal trills that perform pirouettes and knife kicks within the same breath. There is also scatter-shot ugliness. Broken barks and howls, words stretched and pulled as if by force (and they are) from abused glottal machinery, often multi-tracked alongside other voices whimpering, childlike, and soft. As angelic and astral as she could be, at its best Fraser’s is also a voice that can sounds as if it positively relishes in ripping itself apart.

In the 90’s, as Cocteau Twins finished their swan-song albums, Fraser, fully in ‘Recovery’ mode, will talk about a newfound personal need for lyrical clarity and personal honesty. This does not negate the fact that in the early 80’s post-punk scene, just beyond ‘fuck you’ and ‘I’m fucked’, is a small, shy teenage woman making the truly brave choice to privilege “sound rather than meaning” in her lyrics, and in her interpretative choices as a singer. For as many breathless converts as she won in the press, she also received an enormous amount of shit from the rock establishment. It was nothing if not an act of courage at that time to admit and embrace these things. However creatively anarchic post-punk may have been, rock was, and still remains a long march of self-styled messianic men (face it, they’re usually men) with so much to say; and always a writer waiting to reprint every self-important word. In that environment, to say ‘I don’t know what I mean’, and to suggest that meaning lay in the way the end results felt—animal, pre-cognitive and undeniable—was an act of fearlessness and nerve rarely seen in pop music. We only see the earliest blushes of this on Garlands, but it is there.

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“When she [Fraser] panics, she says she feels about five years old. ‘You kind of go back to the age when you were being abused,’ she explains. Singing helps her soothe her younger self.” [22]
Trauma, especially childhood trauma, re-wires the brain so that it carries around a misleading model of the world, built from emotions and physical responses at best no longer relevant to the world around you, and at worst pretty destructive. Had Fraser’s youth been a bit less traumatic perhaps words would have been less dangerous. If the actual fucking darkness in her mind had been more ‘role-play’ than a ‘recent memory’, perhaps she’d have taken the mantle of Siouxsie and Nick Cave and sang cinematic tales of the twisted and macabre. I’m projecting. We can’t know. And no doubt plenty of victims have also found comfort and power in the well-defined Sacraments of Goth. But part of Fraser’s unique genius is located in the fearless, map-less granularity of her emotions, and the way that she chose to express them.
I’ve been re-reading How Emotions Are Made, the 2017 book by the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. It makes the un-intuitive, paradigm-shifting and scientifically compelling case that emotions are something the brain constructs. She says emotions are culturally contingent (i.e., not universal) mental constructions based on, among many other things, the concepts we build from our shared languages. I’m borrowing the concept of “emotional granularity” from her.
On emotional granularity, which she equates with “emotional intelligence”, Feldman Barrett writes, “‘Happiness’ & ‘Sadness’ are each populations of diverse instances…[a] broad brush” [23]. It has popped into my head as I wrestle with what I find persistently frustrating about Goth culture (and I should probably admit that I was a Goth-AF teenager…I’ve been there…and I’m still learning to have compassion for that teenager, wildly spinning out from childhood abuse and shame, that I was). Perhaps that’s why I so strenuously object to labeling Cocteau Twins Goth, even here on “Blood Bitch”, at their most obviously Goth-y.
While Feldman Barrett’s book doesn’t traffic in ‘self-help’, she does write a bit about ways you can game your body’s mental health systems, a fine-grained language at the center of it all: “If you could distinguish”, she says, “between…fifty shades of ‘Crappy’ (angry, aggravated, alarmed, spiteful, grumpy, remorseful, gloomy, mortified, uneasy, dread-ridden, resentful, afraid, envious, woeful, melancholy), your brain would have many more options for predicting, categorizing, and perceiving emotion.” [24] i.e., maybe you’d feel less ‘Crappy’. Cocteau Twins painted hundreds of shades of CRAPPY (and elation, bewilderment, bliss, and not forgetting ‘Happy on the verge of hysterical’).
By contrast, the Gothiest of Gothic pop culture paints with the broadest of black brushes: anachronism and nostalgia, romantic role-play—big categories as emotionally subtle as a dominatrix in her dungeon. As melodrama, that is its job. Goth likely sticks around because melodrama, as a safe ritual of emotional exorcism, works.
Nuance has never been easy to market. If Cocteau Twins hadn’t come up in the time and place they did, hadn’t wrapped their music in reverb, foggy half-light and big hair, I don’t expect that their “fifty shades of ‘Crappy’” would ever be mentioned in the same breath as the dark camp of Bauhaus or Southern Death Cult. Nor, I expect, would they have had careers. Cream doesn’t rise to the top, as a categorical rule. Darwinism hasn’t proved out in pop-culture. The post-punk era was an exceptional time, where for a minute everything was thrown at commerce’s wall, much of it sticking (although to be thereafter slowly ground down into palatable shapes). Perhaps also because of the perfect (and perfectly new) aesthetic clarity of Guthrie’s lush productions, the lack of musical abstraction, Fraser was able to get away with a level of abstraction almost never seen on pop music stages before or since. Still, Elisabeth Fraser found innumerable ways to further granulate feeling, using every conceivable tool at her disposal, in ways that we’d never heard before. The unlikely magic trick worked because those singular bits of meaning-non-meaning came from such an individual voice, and a mind with enough audacity to think that confessional narrative was not the only way to be emotionally honest in music.

“Learn the difference” recommends Feldman Barrett, “between ‘discouraged’ and ‘dejected’ versus generically ‘sad’…Pick another language and seek out its concepts for which your language has no words, like the Dutch emotion of togetherness, gezellig, and the Greek feeling of major guilt, enohi. Each word is another invitation to construct your experiences in new ways. ” That’s what the best music should do anyway: the world around you changes just a little bit more on the other side of it. I don’t have a working concept of gezellig. The Portuguese saudade is famously difficult to explain in English (but immortalized in a Love and Rockets instrumental!). However, I do share with maybe a few hundred thousand others, the emotion signified by Liz Fraser belting out “Fall I do, fallen I do lean (fall I do, fall I do) Fall I do, fallen I lean (fallen I lean)” over a bed of ambient baroque fantasy music, and I don’t know another word(s) for that feeling. That’s what Cocteau Twins created.

But not in “Blood Bitch”. “Blood Bitch” is straight-Goth-fire

[1] Lyrics were never officially printed for this song and many ‘official’ lyrics printed later were not sanctioned by the band. There are competing versions online.

[2] Laurie, D. (2015). Dare: How Bowie & Kraftwerk Inspired the Death of Rock ‘N’ Roll & Invented Modern Pop Music. London, UK: Something in Construction.

[3 Heim, S., The First Time I Heard Cocteau Twins…..

[4] Phoenix, Val. "Embracing Otherness". Alternative Press (January 1997)

[5] Article name not listed, Sounds Magazine (Nov 5, 1983). Retrieved from https://cocteautwins.com/html/history/history02.html

[6] O’Sullivan, E. (1995) The Independent

[7] Ibid iv

[8] No future? Punk is still the sound of youth rebellion the world over. (2012, June 1). Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/jun/01/no-future-punk-youth-rebellion

[9] Bangs, L.; ed. Marcus, G. (1987). Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. New York, NY: Vintage Books, a Div. of Random House, pp. 313-315

[10] Ibid iv

[11] Ibid v

[12] Article name not listed, Sounds Magazine (1982). Retrieved from https://cocteautwins.com/html/history/history01.html

[13] Various Artists: A Life Less Lived: The Gothic Box (Rhino), Blender 2006. (2008, March 26). Retrieved from http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2008/03/various-artists-life-less-lived-gothic.html

[14] Ibid iv

[15] Ibid iv

[16] Ibid iii

[17] 4AD: The Dozen, Director's cut, eMusic, (2008, March 26). Retrieved from http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/2013/10/4ad.html

[18] Ibid iv

[19] Ibid iii

[20] Ibid iii

[21] Jackson, Travis A. (2000). Spooning Good Singing Gum: Meaning, Association and Interpretation in Rock Music. Current Musicology, Volume No. 69 (Spring 2000), p.26

[22] BARRETT, LISA FELDMAN. HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE: the Secret Life of the Brain. p.179, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

[23] Ibid xxii, p.180

[24] Ibid xxii, p.181

Shannon Fields is a composer, music producer and horse-farmer living in Upstate New York. His music has been featured favorably in the New York Times, Pitchfork, The Village Voice, Salon.com, The New Yorker, Spin, NPR, The Guardian and other reputable purveyors of opinion. He currently fronts the band Leverage Models, whose most recent release, Whites, a benefit for the Southern Poverty Law Center, is available for purchase on all the usual platforms. A long time ago, Shannon was a lonely, angry, self-harming, black-lace wearing goth teenager growing up in Kansas City, Missouri, full of suicidal ideation and unspent melodies; he tries to go easy on goths under 25.

THE GEOGRAPHY OF GOTHNICITY: KELLY SHIRE ON “RAIN”

Take it from me: it’s hard to be a goth in L.A. I mean, in an ideal world, Goth should mean never having to put on sunblock, because the sun doesn’t shine, ever—at least not within the chill gloom of the dark within and without your head.
But in Southern California, the sun shines nearly all the time, except when it doesn’t; in late spring and early summer, chances are good you’ll wake to the thick cloud cover known as “June Gloom.” This effect happens anytime the warm interior air from the desert collides with the cold Pacific jet stream, and the resultant thick clouds roll in and blanket over the sun.
When I was in high school and my radio alarm woke me to one of these overcast mornings out my window, I’d listen to the British accent of Richard Blade, the star DJ of alternative station KROQ, squint my eyes a little, and pretend I was actually waking up in England. O England! Faraway, rainy land of Kate Bush’s Heathcliff and pale boys with black eyeliner, like my true love, The Cure’s Robert Smith.
Despite my passion for Smith and his music, I wasn’t a very successful goth, and not just because of the weather: I liked too many different kinds of music, and had neither the budget or thrift store fashion moxie to pull together a consistent Look. (My high school closet was no gravity-sucking cavern of blackness, but included white shorts and striped polo shirts.) Or maybe it was because even though it was smack-dab in the heart of the 1980s, I felt myself already late to the alternative-music scene, one of those maligned “poseurs” that my quasi-friends spoke of, a word I mispronounced in front of them, instantly outing myself as a fake.

💀

In my junior year of high school, when I was really blooming into my full sadness and trying hard to find clothes that mirrored my roiling emotions, I purchased my first-ever concert ticket, for The Cult.
I loved their first U.S. single “She Sells Sanctuary,” and bought their album Love, in preparation for the concert. The sky in late April, 1986 might well have been gloomy and chill, but it’s not the weather I remember, but the hours-long wait outside the Palladium on Sunset Blvd., dropped off early in the day by my friend Christina’s mom. We arrived early so that we’d be near the front of the line, among the first to hand over our General Seating tickets and rush the stage. I don’t remember the outfit I assembled from my closet, but remember the thrill of the bass guitar pounding in my chest and through my body, and the push and shove of bigger, male bodies as we struggled to secure a few square feet close to the stage. How my ears rang and echoed hours afterward; my temporary tinnitus a badge of honor.

💀

But what I remember most vividly is later, when beneath the blue light bulb that made Christina’s bedroom swim like a Goth video, we pored over our souvenir concert programs. We both homed in on how much Ian Astbury, the Cult’s lead singer, seemed to resemble L.A.’s own great Goth god. Astbury was hot, with his brooding good looks and full, sexy lips. Across the program’s slick pages, he posed and stalked, alone and with his band mates. Between the combination of his long, dark hair and his clothing of jeans, leather pants, hats, and shirtless, he seemed to court a comparison to Jim Morrison.
A few of the program’s pages had nonsensical sentences charting the band’s evolution, and near the end of one of these paragraphs came this: “...the Cult were becoming contenders, and Ian Astbury’s hair grew long and proud—part soul, part two-fingers to an alternative establishment that had grown up (grown up?) to regard them as its own. The Cult were no-one’s own. They were getting ready to break on through to everyone.”

💀

A-ha! There was Jim Morrison, peeking through with that reference to“Break On Through (To the Other Side). I knew exactly who Morrison was, knew his song catalog better than any goth band’s. Chalk it up to my cool aunt (or, in Christina’s case, a cooler older brother), who exposed us to The Doors. Or maybe because, though my mornings belonged to KROQ, my late nights were often spent across the radio dial at album rock station KMET, where DJ Jim Ladd pontificated about the Night and Darkness and LOS ANGELES, MAN before queuing up the very Gothic tales of “Riders on the Storm” or “The End.” (My teen intuition was vindicated decades later, when the surviving Doors’ band members chose Astbury to be their front man when they went on tour in 2002.)
In any case, it seemed clear enough that Astbury didn’t want to be a goth king, but secretly longed to be the Lizard King.

💀

There is a distinctly 1960s vibe in the video for “Rain,” the second single off of their album Love: after some frames of jerky film reel numbers (we’re going back in time! It’s an old TV clip!) Astbury appears in a black cap, his white shirt’s dramatic lacy cuffs and jabot springing out from a patterned red jacket, a look that feels more ‘60s Carnaby Street dandy than ‘80s New Romantic. The Cult is on a shiny, well-lit studio set (made shinier by a random bouquet of Mylar balloons), backed by a trio of fabulous Goth go-go girls, twinning in ironed-straight long black hair, red dresses, and high black boots. They literally go-go dance, all hips and thrusting elbows to the beat. The blond guitarist, Billy Duffy, windmills and shreds, performing all the right rocker moves. During the bridge, the screen fills with whirling, colorful psychedelic lights, then cuts to the shadowy outline of a woman’s body dancing behind a screen. Before Astbury sings a single word, the camera focuses on the lower half of his face, and he licks the microphone. Later in the video, he proceeds to not only run his pink tongue up the mic’s silver head, but wraps his thick lips around it, strings of spit flying. “Hot sticky scenes, you know what I mean” he growls. As Morrison sang, the men don’t know, but the little girls understand.

💀

An internet search of the song reveals that “Rain” may be based on a traditional Hopi rain dance, which to me sounds directly inspired by Jim Morrison’s famous origin story claiming that, while a teenage spectator at a car accident in the desert, he absorbed the spirit of the old Native man who died at the scene, but not before locking eyes and transferring his soul into young Morrison.
“Like the desert sun that burns my skin,” Astbury sings. Here, finally, was a semi-goth British  band singing about a landscape I could relate to, as opposed to, say, Kate Bush’s wild and windy moors. I wondered if Ian Astbury and his pale skin knew anything about actual desert heat when he wrote his song; had he driven across the Southwest in the summer, as I had in the backseat of my parent’s station wagon without working A/C? (Also, for a very long time, I thought he was singing “hot sticky seats” which conjures a different visual altogether.)
Here comes the rain, here she comes again, Astbury sings over and over. That tongue, that mic in his mouth, the aloof dancers in thick black eyeliner thrusting against the beat. The Cult’s use of vaguely Native American symbols and feathers on their concert program and concert tee, the fringed black leather jacket Astbury donned for the video of their first single, “She Sells Sanctuary”: all of it combined into a vibe that felt something like sexy Goth-Americana. I might never get to the British Isles, but here was a look for a California girl ready for a Jim Morrison redux, here was a sound for days when the clouds covered the unrelenting sun, and the weather finally matched my gloomy teenage soul.
I love the rain!, I love the rain! Astbury screams over and over near the song’s end. No matter his influences and aspirations, if this isn’t a Goth call to arms, I’m not sure what is.

Kelly Shire still owns her cool aunt’s original copy of The Doors’ first album. A native of Southern California, she grew up in Whittier and Pico Rivera, and holds an MFA from California State University, Long Beach. She recently wrote about the The Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers for the online project The RS 500. Other music-themed essays have appeared in Under the Gum Tree, Full Grown People, The Museum of Americana, and other journals. When not working at a high school library, she’s writing a family memoir. You can find her at www.kellyshire.com.