…. to just go. Pack up everything I have. Well, maybe not everything. Just what I need, all in a cloth duffel bag, and I’ll tie the bag up and swing it onto my shoulders and just go. I am going to go and not look back, not stop, not think about anything twice, go every single place I want to go, but can’t right now because I am trying to conform to a socially generated definition of success that I didn’t have a say in generating. I am going to go to a place where nobody knows me, where nobody cares what I say or what I do, and where what is private and what is not is unambiguous.  Where there is no rat race and no one’s in a hurry to get anywhere and the people talk softly and listen well and are introspective and quiet. Most of all I don’t want to go to a place with traffic. Traffic is noisy. I don’t need background noise in my life.  And I don’t need crowds.

The first thing I am going to do once I get there is to go to a concert and listen to music. Not just any music. I want to go to a concert and listen to music where the band has a saxophone player. Not just any saxophone player. Tenor sax. I like the tone of a tenor saxophone better than I like that of other instruments. When you see a saxophonist flowing well with his head arched as high as it can possibly go and his hat (the saxophone player in my head always wears a hat) at a superbly acute angle ready to fall off his curly salt – and – pepper hair, moving from note to note as fluidly as a dolphin leaps up for a golden moment above the waves and then merges with the sea again, you think that there has to be something wrong. For one instant he makes you believe that there is no artist-medium dichotomy and that his second arm is actually from a Yamaha (in my head the maker of the saxophone is always Yamaha) assembly line. This sounds almost mystical but I can imagine every detail in my head. And after the performance is done and the rest of the band leaves and the audience disperses and it is just me and the saxophonist I am going to ask him why he does what he does. How come he managed to find something he likes to do that does not involve sending random e-mails out to random strangers that you do not even care about but where he can just focus on mastering his craft…and he is going to answer. And then I will know…

Just returned from watching the band Califone, one of Chicago’s own, play a live soundtrack to their Sundance-selected film All My Friends are Funeral Singers at Lincoln Hall. The film lives in the world of the supernatural, with superstitions lingering on the screen (e.g. It’s bad luck to say ‘pig’ on a fishing boat) followed by clips relevant to the particular lore. Most of the clips take place in the home of Zel (played by Angela Bettis), a fortune teller. Zel lives with a group of ghosts who help the business by lending their other worldly powers to call winning horses for a comical gambler (desperate and sleazy in turns), heal headaches, and channel the voices of dead loved ones. The ghosts, perpetually dressed in white, play soulful, urgent, surreal music in rooms throughout the quaintly decorated home — music that was, on this Tuesday night, played live by the band and filled the large acoustic room.

The film and music are both experimental, but keep from being overly meandering. While the film introduces many open-ended questions and artistic sequences, the character definitions are clear and there is a linear and accessible story arc, as Zel and the ghosts realize that the ghosts, who Zel embraces as family, are trapped inside the house by a legacy spell that thwarts the ghosts’ newfound desire to move on. The band members (Joe Adamik, Jim Becker, Ben Massarella, Tim Rutili) multi-tasked between multiple instruments (note the contraption of bells inside the briefcase above) and vocals. From kitschy decorations trembling dramatically atop likewise kitschy furniture, to religious overtones as two ghosts discuss their vision of heaven and hell, Califone offered a wide range of soundscapes that interacted fluently with the narrative and the film’s digetic sounds. Califone has a previous track record of performing cinematic music, having contributed live improvised soundtracks to silent films.

Afterward, the band played songs from their new album, eponymous after the film. Due to the configuration of the equipment — facing the movie screen — the band was forced to play the whole set with their backs to the audience! (The band extended a joke and their apologies.)

Califone plays again on March 10th at the same venue, this time as a concert instead of as a live soundtrack.

La Rocco, himself a Black Metal guitarist in an Indiana Jones tribute band called Sallah, sat with me in the Pub to hoarsely talk over the sound of The Cranberries and the Allman Brothers Band and make sense of the often confused subcultures of goth and metal. I want to know: I saw art made by people aren’t self-proclaimed goths, so how can theirs be gothic art? At the heart of this dilemma is a particular piece in the gallery—a poster alphabetically listing metal albums from around the world: is that goth, too? Which genre encompasses the other?

We begin by considering the two subcultures, historically concurrent and close on the sociological family tree, as a Venn diagram. “The overlap isn’t as great as you might think,” La Rocco tells me, and at the heart of that is an inter-group hostility. “Goth people are inherently sissies,” he continues, “when you were in high school, that’s why those kids were Goths.” While goth culture is an offshoot that developed from the post-punk movement across the late 1970s and 1980s, it is now defined by appearance and lifestyle or attitude rather than by musical devotion. Metal, on the other hand, is not necessarily something you can see—La Rocco, for example, is wearing a nice black shirt and a blazer that is borderline hip—but you cannot be metal if you’re not a fan of the hornsand- headbanging music genre. Black Metal is a culture-inclusive exception that will be addressed later.

The genetic links between metal and goth, however, are as undeniable as a widow’s peak. Good old rebellious rock is the “missing link” that made possible the evolution of both other genres, though goth had to pass through the punk generation, and they have even intermingled in the Gothic Metal subgenre. And why shouldn’t they? They are both explicitly preoccupied with life’s darker colors. Each subculture’s monochromatic fashion and creation of self-selecting society stem from a strong impulse to break free of and oppose mainstream society.

Scandinavia is the birthplace of black metal, and Norse bands, who have been especially important in metal music, take pride in their heritage and homeland. Their music manifests the fascination with the Nordic landscape’s cold, snowy darkness and their cultural pride—or rather their cultural indignation. The sentiment that Christianity overtook Norse culture and religion like an invasive species is forefront in the attitudes of Black Metal bands, “and they’re livid,” explains La Rocco. Thus the rash of church arson inspired, if not perpetrated, by Mayhem. Thus the themes and sense of mythology and folklore that ostensibly inform death—not black—metal lyrics and style. It is not quite clear if the corpse paint and swords-and-leather regalia are meant to faithfully represent their Viking ancestors or if we should interpret these musicians as risen-from-the-dead avengers of their epoch. Are the metalheads thrashing along to their songs as concerned with history and cultural preservation? Not that I can tell, and while black metal culture demands a lifestyle choice of adherence to “evil in its most pure state,” the descriptor Euronymous so boldly coined as the principle of his own label, Deathlike Silence Productions, metal in general is the sort of thing you can love in your car, on the weekends, and in your iPod without jeopardizing your day job. As long as you cut that headbanger’s hair. In that sense, being a metal fan is a lot like being a fan of 80s music, Ludacris, or Melissa Etheridge. But I digress.

Goth culture, like metal, has many permutations within its culture, and you can also hide your underworldly tendencies from the boss if you so choose, but it is inherently more about lifestyle and less about musical taste. What began as an offshoot of 70s/80s post-punk culture in Britain spread across the pond and around the world, and now has its own manifesto, written by Canadian artist Charles Moffat two decades later. Moffat describes the Neo-Gothic movement (neo-gothic and gothic tend to be used interchangeably) as counterculture, seeking rebellion against government, mainstream society, and existing norms of sexuality and religion. There it is, the neat intersection of goth and metal. Goth and metal have influenced each other, from fashion choices to music. While Goths no longer seem to be defined by their music, goth music and its several subgenres exist and overlap on occasion with metal.

Since the surface similarities may confuse us, we must delve deeper order to apply these labels adeptly to art galleries, concerts, or people walking down the street. The politics and personalities of these two groups appear to bisect at one crucial point, that strange ethos regarding women and sex that is the line in the sand that divides so many groups and institutions. My own perception of goth culture—and mind you, I grew up in Los Angeles—is that it is a very coed collective, with perhaps a slight surplus of females. La Rocco’s estimation is that the balance of the audience at metal concerts rests at 10% female, but he doesn’t think that metal is inherently anti-woman. “Mostly it’s pro-sex,” he says, “but there is some black metal that might advocate rape.” Mayhem’s lyrics (check out darklyrics.com) don’t explicitly recommend violence against women per se, but I could never sing along to them the way I could to even explicit cuts of rap and hip-hop. There are some women in the bands, though, like Arch Enemy which is also goth music and Lacuna Coil, an Italian metal band with a female singer. I ask La Rocco about Evanescence, but apparently Evanescense : metal :: Hillary Duff : rock&roll. A lot of goth sexual imagery overlaps with sadomasochism, and indeed there is a sub-subculture known as fetish goth, but also has strong tendencies toward androgyny and Victorian aesthetics. Goth music is also known for its ambient quality rather than aggressiveness. La Rocco and I ponder whether we might posit the relationship between metal and goth as a complementary pairing between dominants and submissives, respectively.

Extremism, however, is one problem that plagues metal culture, however, but does not seem to infiltrate the goth world. Often, metal lyrics glorify warfare and violence—because they lead to evilness and death?—and over time this aesthetic has spawned or been co-opted by xenophobic and racist groups. The potent blend of anti-establishment ideas with primal aggression creates a unique ambiguity surrounding the principles of the music. The metal icons are presumably against “the Man,” but are they against democracy? Against peace? One website, www.metalheadsagainstracism.org, has confronted the problem by asking labels, bands, and metalheads to disavow the racist ideologies that have sprouted under the umbrella of metal culture. La Rocco describes the situation this way: “Despite its extreme right-wing tendencies, it’s very left wing,” pointing to the British group Napalm Death as one political example. “The skinheads are only into shitty metal.”

La Rocco and I have finished our cheap beers. As we head out of the bar so that I can hear some choice metal singles off his iPod, we run into Ralph Patrello, another local keeper of metal lore. We pose the goth-metal relationship question to Patrello, who verifies La Rocco’s theories with the pat explanation, “Your average [high school] Joe is afraid of the goth kids, but you bought your weed from the metal guys.” At the end of the day, that is what all the leather paraphernalia, red eyeliner, necromancy, and mayhem boil down to. Satisfied that the boundaries of subculture identity are as fluid, contradictory, and airborne as any, I walk out into the night, and it is oh so cold and dark in Chicago.