Gothic Literature and Rock Music

Gothic Literature tends towards extreme stylization of form- Satanists and witches are always hiding their worship and witchcraft; a sinister plot always unravels gradually towards a tremendous, destructive, harrowing climax; and a tone of forboding always permeates the whole production. I read Matthew Lewis's The Monk when an undergrad at Penn; released in 1795, it typifies this whole genre. I've been thinking, as a tangent, that there is something profoundly Gothic about rock music (past, obviously, The Cure, Bauhaus, and rock's own "Goth" sub-genre); invented, I now suspect, only to be a front for other things, run by goombas no strangers to the Draconian, exceedingly ill-starred as a composite blend of high and low art impulses, generative of false idols for a public who have been robbed of the impetus to find genuine ones, and so very dark, in its compromised position, that even Mr. Lewis's ill-fated monk might snicker at his own comparative integrity. There are things in rock music here and there worth preserving; I believe that; but the foundation was all wrong to create anything sturdy, or for rock to be hailed as a newfangled art-form over a long period of time. As clouds gather...