Goblincore

Executive Brief: My music intersects a goblincore aesthetic.

Details… 

I stumbled across a description of ‘goblincore’ as a musical genre/vibe, and I felt some sort of kinship between the portrayed examples and my music… so I naturally (and technologically) went in search of more information.^⇲

One aspect of the broader goblincore aesthetic is to find beauty beyond the confines of the conventional, valuing imperfection, often as appreciated in one’s collection of trinkets, many of which tend to be found in nature (e.g., mushrooms, slugs, moss, pieces of bark, alluring rocks, and so on… as well as their combined tableaus). Some among such items are “shinies.”

Of shinies, I have many many many.

My music often manifests my urge to give offense to xenophobic members of the dominant paradigm. That impulse — akin to the goblincore ‘contrast with fairy’ feature — is an instantiation of rebellion against the status quo, finding beauty where such people insist that only threats can exist. That is a fairly common purpose across musical genres… jazz, rock, punk, and so on.

The kids’ album (“Flip!”) counters that brainwashing, putting the lie to that contention of threat. There are similar songs that I deemed too adult for the kids’ album (“Untainted”). Other songs find beauty in rising to meet strident struggles (“Orange Peals,” “Juice”) and/or examine difficult emotional topics (“Crush,” “What If Love?,” “Perfect Woman”). The entire “Pshymmer” album is like goblin vapor.

Still, there are substantial differences.

This general goblincore contrast (with high fairy whatever) is not necessarily as active and aggressive as mine is (with the DP).^⇲

And my work isn’t particularly limited to the natural/organic, although that is included (as described in “I Surround Myself with Beauty”). So when comparing goblincore with my aesthetic, that balance of an appeal to either nature or tech is more of an overlap (and an exaggerated dichotomy, anyway), which you can also see in my puppets and costumes.

So, I suppose that I’m more like whatever a goblin might be in a more technological setting… which, as I try to think of existing narrative examples, is exceedingly niche. All of the ones that come to mind treat the goblins poorly (i.e., evil, stupid, greedy, maimed, and so on).

There are those that pose a post-apocalyptic origin (e.g., Bakshi’s “Wizards,” Brooks’ Shannara, and the Shadowrun RPG), where goblins are mutants and plague victims. 

While “Artemis Fowl” doesn’t have an apocalyptic origin, it mixes tech and fantasy, and it still portrays goblins as stupid, and needing to lick their eyeballs to keep them from drying up and falling out.

Terry Pratchett is known for coming to reject the use of goblinoids in fantasy narratives to serve the function of people whom one could enslave and wantonly slaughter without suffering pangs of conscience, rightly identifying the practice as dehumanizing despite the goblin camouflage. That built up to his novel “Snuff,” in which goblins become emancipated (with problematic elements), albeit they are still portrayed as collecting a lifetime’s worth of bodily excreta. But they do end up showing tech talents in “Raising Steam.” Still, I haven’t read those in a long while, and I don’t recall what sort of trinkets they collected, and so on, aside from the jars full of snot, fingernails, and earwax… which are decidedly organic (and fall prey to the “goblins are gross” trope).

I have heard about Hines’ books about Jig, but I’m not sure how much advanced tech is woven in. I guess that I’ll have to get around to reading it.