DARKLY - LEILA TAYLOR

I woke-shamed the Seattle Public Library into getting this. I read somewhere online (Pitchfork?) about this book and checked the SPL website for it. They didn’t have it but this was the same day I realized how to request that the library system acquire certain titles. I believe I recommended 15 or so books, but this is the only title they’ve taken me up on.I believe this is because I wrote “there are very few books of music writing/journalism by Black female writers.” I’m not even totally sure this is true, but it seemed to do the trick. That's’ a long winded way to say that this book may sound like a gimmick (a book by a Black goth girl?!) but it’s some of the best music writing I’ve ever read. And I say that as a not-real fan of Goth music (which Taylor dates from Unknown Pleasures, an album I do love).

Another quick story: recently a friend of mine who grew up in NorCal/PNW was going on his first trip down South (his gf is from Augusta) and was asking if he should spring to stay in the haunted room in this historical hotel. I let him know: it’s the South, they’re all haunted. And this haunting and the horrors associated with American History and Black History and the ways one is allowed to process these horrors in art is the main thrust of the book. Goth is, in Taylor’s words, “anachronistic romanticism, theatrical melancholy, nocturnality, campy morbidity and color black” (she also writes, “Imagine a peacock but all black”) and gets to wrestle with morbid questions about death and evil and horror in  a way that is still somewhat silly or “theatrical”. This frivolity is not extended to Black artists and Black art, which is required to display a sort of authenticity that prevents the sort of exuberance and gaudy melodrama of Goth. Taylor calls identifies a “burden of cool” that restrains the boundaries of Black art (or Black art in the YT imagination). As a sort of mirror image of Taylor (I’m a YT man interested in Black music) I think these observations are deeply true; very few things are as tedious about the “authenticity” of a rapper or blues musician. She’s from Detroit so we get lots of talk of Midwestern/Post-Industrial horror, the segments about ruin porn are amazing. She does point out that Horrorcore, a Detroit export, connects to Goth thematically, but sadly doesn’t linger too long on where the sort of horror (which she defines with at Ann Radcliff quote as, “an unambiguous display of atrocity”) shows up in other genres (tho this book did introduce me to Drexcia and M. Lamar). I loved it. 666 Black velvet gloves.