I’ve explained why music and scene expectations may not be universal when separated by time and distance, but what real relevance does this have in the big picture? In acknowledging that things aren’t universal we can see where there might be conflicts in the scene. Part of the reason there are subcultural arguments on the internet could be because things one person holds to be true or the norm may not be so in someone else’s experience. Or some people may go to an event and be unhappy the music choices don’t match their personal preferences, or be unhappy if the culture of the event is different than they expected. The question this raises is can we make everyone happy and reduce such conflicts? Should it even be the scene’s goal to keep everyone happy?

Subcultures aren’t meant to be everything to all people. They are meant to reflect the tastes and norms of a specific audience. Without some sort of guidelines there is the risk of community drifting into meaninglessness. At a certain point, the audience can be too specific to sustain itself. This comes back to the situation of how rare it is to see a purely goth event. A lot of times there needs to be a somewhat wider mix of genres, usually by including industrial, in order for nights to happen. Would it not be better to compromise a bit and pool resources together to make sure multiple groups of people have a space for their music?

To put a little bit of my own experience into this, while I like a lot of the music that gets played at clubs, I also have personal favorite subgenres and ones that I am not particularly crazy about. I particularly like a lot of 2nd wave goth rock and deathrock revival type bands. Neither of these styles seem to be all that popular in my local scene and rarely get played at clubs. On the flipside I am not particularly big into the whole minimal wave and post punk revival styles that have gotten rather popular and where a lot of the new bands are coming from. I would love to hear more of my particular favorites, but at the same time I understand that for some people the newer stuff may be their favorites. I understand that part of sharing a scene is that you sometimes need to compromise however. It certainly doesn’t hurt to be more open minded either. By giving some of the new music a shot I have actually found that some of the stuff in styles I am less crazy about is actually pretty good. At the same time though I would hate to see the music that grabs me the most fall completely by the wayside.