"Emo is not Goth, but they come from the same place"

Goth kids think Emo kids are posers. Emo kids... emo kids don't care what you think.

Both goth and emo come from the same adolescent urges to rebel against convention while fitting in with their peers, combined with severe mood swings that afflict all teenagers.

Goth culture is inspired by Victorian romanticism. It deals with the mood swings by affecting a supernatural air, celebrating a kind of death-within-life like the Victorian gothic horror novels. That's where it gets its name from, despite having very little to do with the Gothic architecture where the novels were set. That gothic architecture was itself a revival of a medieval Gothic church architecture, which ultimately derives from the Goth tribes. A Visigoth or Ostrogoth would have no patience with a Goth Kid and probably whack his head off with a sword.

Emo kids insist they're not copying Goth, and both the dress and music are very similar. Both, however, wear a lot of black clothing, black makeup, black hair dye, etc. It can be very hard to tell whether a boy wearing a black leather trenchcoat, long black tresses, and enough mascara that he can barely keep his lids open is Goth or Emo.

In fact there is a lot of overlap between the two cultures because Goth is so very, very broad. An emo kid would never wear a pink frilly dress with black leather suspenders, but a Goth girl would adore the irony.

Emo kids don't get irony. The name is short for "emotional", and it's their way of dealing with the mood swings, by expressing it in maudlin songs. The songs don't SOUND maudlin, because they're very loud and filled with harsh electronic sounds. In fact, it sounds exactly like the sort of harsh, beat-driven electronica favored by the goth crowds, at least to those who aren't intimately familiar with the differences.

There in fact ARE no absolute differences, because there are no solid definitions of the two groups. They're big and amorphous. Emo kids tend to be younger (it's something you usually grow out of at the end of adolesence), while goth can keep going into the 20s. In fact, the irony can be so delicious that I've seen goths much older than that.


You include the "punk" topic, and punk is yet another manifestation of the same underlying adolescent ideas. Old punks deride goths as simply copying them, and the fashion is very similar. The music is also very similar, except that punk is mostly about traditional electric instruments and goth has a strong electronic, computer-generated element.

Punks were also much more politically outrageous, while goth and emo kids are usually apolitical because apathy is their defense against... well, whatever.