Dark Cabaret

Dark Cabaret is, generally speaking, a music genre you need to hear to really understand it. As the name might indicate, the genre is influenced by cabaret, more strictly speaking, Weimar-era cabaret, but it also combines said aesthetic with vaudeville, burlesque, and, oddly, goth style, while the music usually takes inspiration from Punk Rock, Goth Rock and Dark Wave, and sometimes also metal.

That's not all, though. Dark Cabaret artists mix the above music genres and aesthetics with deep and passionate vocals, dark lyrics, circus or fairground style music, and marionette and basslines and chord changes reminiscent of military brass bands. Pianos are frequently used as lead instruments and can often be accompanied by trumpets, accordions, cello, gypsy-style violins, dirty jazz horns, brass and clarinets, and some acts also experiment with acoustic and electric guitars and bass.

Cabaret proper had long associations with counter-culture and dealt with disturbing themes, as exemplified by The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, with one of its best known songs "Mack the Knife" ("Moritat von Mackie Messer") which tells the story of a murderous anti-hero, or the 1933 song "Gloomy Sunday" ("Szomorú Vasárnap") by Hungarian composer Rezso Seress. It was therefore natural that later artists drew upon it for inspiration.

A very early Ur-Example of such influences is the 1974 Nico album The End... especially in songs such as "You Forgot to Answer" and "Secret Side".

The first act to make dark cabaret music proper, (before the term originated or its foundations where set, therefore also making them an Ur-Example) are most likely The Tiger Lillies, a band formed in London in 1989 who incorporated themes of blasphemy, prostitution and bestiality in their songs, sung in a menacing style with a falsetto voice.

Seattle-based art rock band Salon Betty contributed to the genre in 1994, with their single "Last Cigarette" and their album, The Big Hair Sex Circus. In the same year, the German darkwave group Ghosting released the track "Let Me Stay" on their album Songs from Fairyland. In 1995, Rozz Williams, the former lead singer of Christian Death, took the style in a darker direction on the Triple X Records release Dream Home Heartache in collaboration with fellow Christian Death alumna Gitane Demone. The first recorded usage of the term "Dark Cabaret" was in a description of this album in a late 1990s mail-order catalog from Projekt: Darkwave.

Several songs by British goth outfit Sex Gang Children, such as "Christian Circus Joe", "Arms of Cicero", and the jazzier "Psychic Sarah" fused the cabaret style with a post-punk art-goth sound. In 1997 Rozz Williams and Eva O, recording as Shadow Project, released the album From the Heart, which included the cabaret-styled songs "Lying Deep" and "Bitter Man".

Danny Elfman's dark cabaret influence can be heard in his scores and character voices in the films The Nightmare Before Christmas, Chicago, and Corpse Bride.

In 2000 in a review of Voltaire's Almost Human, Lexicon Magazine used the descriptive term "goth cabaret".

The Trope Codifiers and Genre Popularizers are unarguably The Dresden Dolls, formed by Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione in 2000, and who once famously described themselves as "Brechtian punk cabaret" in order to avoid being labelled by the music industry and media as "goths". They would play shows in white mime style face paint, bowler hats, suits and stockings. Similarly, fan line ups outside of venues were easily identifiable from a distance with hats, black and white stripes and distinctive make up, while the band actively encouraged performance artists and the like to perform directly outside of venues whilst on tour.

As time went on, some artists departed from the initial cabaret/vaudeville/burlesque aesthetic, and instead paired the iconic music with something else. One of these artists is Emilie Autumn, who mixed Dark Cabaret with Industrial Metal and Victorian aesthetics on her album Opheliac, such music later being labelled "Victorian industrial".

And there are also some artists, such as IAMX, who only sometimes dabble in the genre.

Overall, the genre lived its golden age in the 2000s and early 2010s, but there are still some active groups and artists around.

List of Dark Cabaret artists:

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Dark Cabaret

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