I think some of my first night club experiences were at The Kitchen Club when it was on Biscayne and 105th street(-ish). It was this dilapidated old building with dilapidated people inside. There were always fights, unusual things occuring in the parking lot. But it was real fun, stupidly fun, and it didn't feel moribund. The Kitchen Club as it exists now is the night life equivalent of jai alai, half dead but with enough of a pulse to keep it around, an old joke, Terri Schiavo with a liquor and occupancy license.
What happened? 10,000-word procrastination-driven essay inside..
There was a time when you could admit patronage of The Kitchen Club and not have old women clutch their purses in close to their wrinkled bodies; not have children flee, birds squawk loudly in the trees and fly away in a black cloud; not have police reach for their service revolvers; not have attractive women frown and look toward the bathrooms as a means of escape.
Just as The Kitchen Club has faded, so too have gothic and industrial music as defined genres of music faded and cracked, the patina of a worn boot (jeans tucked in no doubt), eyes gone dead and gray like yesterday's catch.
The days of casual recreation with industrial music are gone. Goth people have proven themselves to be some of the most lame, geeky humans to ever crawl out of the primordial soup and with that they have ruined goth as a fun part-time thing to do. Merely the association with such as a person or their genre of music is like being seen riding your Huffy with a well-known pedophile by the playground. Goth was foosball; now it is rollerblading.
What happened to The Kitchen, industrial and gothic music? It is anyone's guess. Unfortunately for you readers, I happen to be writing so I'd suggest it was the frontal assault of three separate things that occured around the same time in the late 1990s.
First electronic and dance music became extremely popular in a relatively short time frame. Remember when Power96 was almost exclusively dance music? This siphoned off a bit of the elitist quality of music imported from Europe. Bands like Cabaret Voltaire, Kraftwerk, Front242 and Bauhaus began to sound common and tired rather than eccentric, unique and foreign. Kind of like Ikea the exact second time you see it.
Second, Marilyn Manson and Hot Topic exposed the general public to goth/industrial iconography and the country groaned loudly in response. An adult who has been dressing in a semigothic fashion at work for ten years suddenly looked more like a maladjusted 15 year old doofus at the mall rather than an adult with an eccentric taste for Victorian or German style.
Third, the music's inherent character and listenability deteriorated for both internal and external reasons. Internal to the community, a lack of new material from established artists resulted in some stagnation of nightclub playlists. You can only hear Wolfsheim so many times before you want to kill yourself. (In my case, that number is precisely once.)
External musical factors also contributed to its decline. Techno and indie rock helped to undermine the sociological and stylistic/musicological basis of goth and industrial as a sound. Techno (whose universal popularity continues to increase undeterred since the 1980s) siphoned off a lot of the 1980s pop-derived sounds and notes of European minimalism and futurism, while also freshening the sound by intermixing elements of American pop, hiphop turntablism/sampling, and Afro-Caribbean percussion. Eventually everything from techno winds up in the rest of electronic music, predominantly house and trance, and the memes become wide spread. Witness the dark synth-heavy dirty electro bangers that currently control the charts in house music; are the sounds of goth and industrial not common in those arrangements?
In addition, indie rock's explosion in the 2000s served to give awkward youths a different way to express themselves and their inner vulnerability, while being more directly correlated to mainstream music and fashion and less of a "freak thing." The innate appeal of "partying like a rockstar" in a society so concerned with drug addiction, STDs and terrorism is an important factor in indie's rise in popularity. Grief and longing is no longer denoted by cheezy synth and attenuated guitar. It's denoted by a different brand of cheezy synth and attenuated guitar. With an alternative outlet for the emotional turmoil that faces teens and tweens that is more socially acceptable and culturally integrated, goth is unnecessary.
I've written too much. I must say my goodbyes to my fond memories of The Kitchen and its visual and auditory trappings. So long Bauhaus, terrible cocktails, eyeball-drying excessive fog, clove cigarettes. You will be missed. I may see a goth at the mall -- most likely working at Claire's late in their 30s -- but I will not shed a tear, no, mostly because it would mess up my makeup.