Steampunk is a great subculture, but I can’t think of any way to describe how great it is without it sounding like I’m putting it down (like what if I said: it’s like larping, but without the competition!?. It’s an inherently silly subculture. It’s all about playing dress-up and make-believe, pretending that technology never progressed from steam to electric and atomic power, that we live in a world of wooden airships and clockwork prosthetics, and that for some reason, all of this has led to a dapper, nearly Victorian fashion sense, full of whalebone corsets and brass pocketwatches, handlebar mustaches, tophats, and a prevalence of brown leather. I mean, what subculture isn’t full of pretentions built around playing make-believe and dress-up? Who can argue that the goth or the rave or the rockabilly or punk scenes (or dear God, the emo scene/ scene scene), aren’t horribly silly?

But the steampunk scene is all about taking the silliest aspects of a scene, taking them to ridiculous extremes and enjoying them thoroughly without any pretentions of authenticity. If there’s one thing that’s kind of a bummer about the scene, and one thing that’s kind of a relief about steampunk parties, it’s that there’s no real steampunk music scene. It’s all just a mishmash of old timey music sung through a cone, dark cabaret, and circus tunes. Gogol Bordello, Tom Waits, Rasputina, Man Man and the Dresden Dolls all get some major play, as do old jazz singers like Billie Holliday, Cab Calloway, and Nina Simone, AS DO the groups that played with those sounds by chopping them up and adding electronic elements and their own situationist weirdness like Oingo Boingo, The Residents, and Tuxedomoon.

The biggest and best of the regular steampunk events in Chicago is the Clockwork Vaudeville, an event that features a variety of live performances: burlesque, freakshows, bands, magicians, strippers, and circus acts. Here’s a video of one of Clockwork Vaudeville’s last big cabarets, the Gearbox Fantastique.