It's a Cruel World
Goths in Ass-Hugging Fishnets Battle Palm Trees and Nostalgia
Gary Numan Brings the Noise
Legendary Siouxsie Sioux Has Lost It
Green and black do not belong together, and the combination of the two brings almost nothing to mind but the queasy specter of sickness and death. It’s the color scheme of the awful alternate jerseys worn by the New York Jets, who are losers; gold cross-bars prudently separate the Jamaican flag’s discordant wedges of verdance and darkness. Summoning a graying army of gloom — clad in funerary black lace, heavy leather, white face-paint, and softer-core varieties of bondage gear — towards the glorious emerald basin behind the Rose Bowl results in a disquieting clash between two different phases of existence. At Cruel World, a one-day music festival held in Pasadena this past May, it felt like an entire mid-sized town’s worth of goths had been banished into a wilderness of blue skies and palm-covered mountains, as if the event were happening in the far background of a medieval depiction of the Last Judgment. Entering Cruel World, the Goldenvoice juggernaut’s annual mega-concert …
