Hopefully you weren't taken in by the Times article on the perseverance of goth, but in case you're not quite sure whether or not it was BS, here are a couple of the red flags that should have tipped you off: 1) It's the New York Times and it's about goths, 2) the lead-off image is from a fashion shoot we ran six years ago, 3) the writer claims San Francisco was the American epicenter of late 80s goth because Specimen lived there and Diamanda Galas played some shows, and 4) goth is not back and it never will be, never ever ever, as long as anyone reading this will ever live. We're sorry. We'd love for it to be the case. We would kill for an actual deathrock scene to spring up in the suburbs, or shit even rivet or whatever at this point, but it's not going to happen. The reason is Columbine.For starters, Harris and Klebold were pretty lousy goths. They both wore long coats with baseball caps and while I can't remember seeing any pictures of it, I wouldn't be surprised if they wore long coats with shorts. They shot up their school with Tec-9s, a hip-hop weapon. Weren't they also really into Hendrix or something? Anyways, the point here isn't that their being bad goths is what killed goth, if anything this should have been beneficial to the goth community. Two of the US's crummiest goths made the entire country genuinely afraid of the computer nerds populating the back rows of their classrooms in XL KMFDM shirts and JNCOs (whoa, lot of caps going on in that sentence). For one shining moment nobody in the world was calling their bluff. They could have taken the ball and run with it. Marilyn Manson could have gone on TV and said "Yes, this is what happens when you listen to my music. If your daughter bought a copy of Smells Like Children, she is going to kill you or someone else. It's too late to do anything about it now. Enjoy your goth riots," and then goth kids could have rioted all over the place and people would have freaked. But instead, in the same way Rob Halford killed metal by admitting that it didn't have the power to make kids "Do it," Manson just tugged on his collar and was like "Whoa, geez, don't get the wrong idea here. We're not dangerous. There are probably Krishnas more dangerous than we are." Then a bunch of smart goths wrote guest editorials for their local papers about how goth isn't really about death and darkness, but a celebration of difference or emotion or an exploration of hope or something. I forget exactly what they said, but it's what killed goth.This is why there will never be an honest-to-god goth comeback. It's not because the rest of the world saw through the facade and decided that goths weren't actually scary, it's because the goths themselves came out and said "We're not scary." Now the only way for nerds to ward off jocks is to coat themselves in as thick a layer of bodily effluvia as possible. As such.