A Quote by Diane Birch

I just think the fact that I was told not to be curious about the dark side, and it was such a religious-heavy upbringing made me interested in goth culture. — © Diane Birch
I just think the fact that I was told not to be curious about the dark side, and it was such a religious-heavy upbringing made me interested in goth culture.
Goth culture, as mired in the past as it is, even it goes through changes, so Goth when I was growing up is not what it is now. When I think of Goth culture as it is at the moment I think of mall culture.
The interesting thing about the religious component, for me, is that Jesus hardly mentions sex at all. He's pretty interested in the poor, he's pretty interested in selling your worldly goods and storing up riches in heaven. However, religious fundamentalists have made it all about sex, and that's like saying, "Look at the sex and we're just not going to talk about what you may be doing in a financial way that is sinful."
I'm interested in people. I'm curious about people, and of course we're curious about people whose work we respond to. So I'm not saying that I don't understand fascination with other people. But as it's dealt with in this American, modern-day culture, I find it not just boring but actually sort of destructive, really.
I wouldn't be in a huge hurry to go back to Kansas. It was just bizarre. There's a lot of very, very heavy set people who believe in whatever they were told, because they didn't seem to get out very much or be interested in leaving where they were. They just didn't seem that curious, and I find that a little hard to deal with.
I have a lot of alter-egos: I would love to be a back-up singer for someone someday. I have an electronic side-project. I have a '90s grunge side project; I have a piano project... I have this industrial, goth-electronic song, super creepy sounding, just really dark and dreary.
I don't know whether I have ideas all the time. I think I'm curious about things all the time; I think I'm always curious, and I think I'm always interested in whatever passes by, and I know I tend to think about things, and I tend to talk about things, and sometimes that takes root and gives me something to chase.
I grew up in a very religious family, so that was never going to leave me. I just accepted it over the years. Although I'm not religious myself, it is so much a part of me. It's a part of my history, a part of my tradition and my culture, so I don't want to just throw it away and leave it behind, because it's made me who I am today.
[About being a teenager] Like, at first it's fine and you think you have a dark side - it's exciting - and then you realise the dark side wins every time.
My wife is very interested in fashion. I am absolutely not. I couldn't give a toss. Fashion is a perfectly valid thing to be interested in. I'm just not particularly interested in pop culture. I think I am more interested in things that have a settled permanence about them.
I wrote an episode for 'thirtysomething,' and a producer said, 'That's really good, but what is it about? What does it say about you? What questions are you asking yourself?' I had never thought about that. This comment changed who I was, because it made me look at my own soul, the dark corners in my soul, and accept that dark side.
Teenagers are very dark, I think. That's all the goth and emo stuff. They're experiencing a lot of stuff that adults experience, but in a much more raw way. It's that extremity that I'm interested in, to be able to go down so far and come up so quickly.
Actually, the original nickname that I was told - it scared me to death - was Heavy G. I think the last thing you want to be known as is Heavy anything. No offense to Heavy D - rest his soul. Worked for him, wasn't really my bag.
What does interest me is how difficult my culture seems to find it to look the dark side of life directly in the eye. It seems to me that if we look back at mediaeval culture, for example, we see a society which faces the reality of death and pain and limitation, because it has to. Our society, which is progressive and technological and seems to have a slightly fanatical utopian edge to it, gets very uncomfortable when anybody highlights the dark side of humanity, or the world we have built, or what we are doing to the rest of life on Earth.
I was curious because I hadn't really known anyone to do just that, so I would stop in on his sessions with his rapper friends, and then one day, I told Astro Raw "I'm looking to sing. He told me to try it out and then we made 'Treat Me Like Fire' and everything started."
My mum was too busy raising four of us to encourage my hopes. But I'm glad I had the upbringing I did. It made me a worrier and a thoughtful, curious person.
People come up to me at conventions and say, 'I was such an outcast, I felt like such a geek, and when I saw you, you made me feel like such a normal person.' It's my favorite thing to hear, because that's how I felt when I was a kid. If Goth would've been around, I would've definitely been Goth. But there wasn't such a thing, so I was just weird.
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