Okay ladies, before you all get your panties in a bunch and the hair starts flying from your little catfight, let me give my two cents on this subject. 
The Who rocked. Y'all better recognize. But yes, there were a lot of influential bands of the time, as well as before and after the time. Two of my favourite influential bands of all time are Black Sabbath and Steppenwolf...both bands defined the genre of heavy metal (Steppenwolf defined the phrase [Born To Be Wild] and Black Sabbath defined the music [Black Sabbath and Wicked Woman]). Tony Iommi was the only person in history to perform a pitch bend behind the nut on his guitar (he did this for the opening notes of "Ironman"). Even to this day, people still cover classic Black Sabbath tracks...they were just that damn influential.
Ah goths...little poser wanabes running around whining about how they're so depressed and life is soooooo hard and how the world won't miss them when they're gone and yadda yadda yadda bullshit left and right. Bands like NIN make their money off of these morons because they know that they'll buy the shit up without thinking twice about it...sheep to the slaughter. Yeah, your life is so hard, you Gucci-toting art school dropout...I wish they really would just all off themselves...but then we'd have no one to make fun of in threads like this. 
Real goths (read: artistically inclined, studious and serious people who live their art) are exceptionally rare. You won't notice them, because unlike the poser goths, they don't have loud mouths, whine about their rotten lives, or mope around in all black looking like death warmed over because they just spent the last 9 days locked in their bedroom without sunlight playing Trent Reznor's Greatest Hits through their massive studio-quality headphones. Real goths don't pig out on chocolate and then whine about their zit-covered face and blame it on life's cruelty.
I love this stuff.
Yup. We should note that the real problem is not "goth" --- the problem is the fashion-oriented, commercialized scene that generated out of "goth". The same thing can be said of punk, hip hop, extreme sports, skateboarding, etc. etc. When it is reduced to a fashion style, then it has been stripped of any meaningful content.
Social cliques and fashions have a long history in rock-n-roll, by the way. So "goth" is just one of many in a long line --
in fact, The Who deal with this in their lyrics!!! -- of fashionable youth cultures: teddy boys, mods, rockers, punks, skinheads, etc. Those are from Britain, you can add a bunch more if you look at U.S. pop culture (i.e. greasers, hippies, etc.) And recently (for me, anyway, you have ravers, grunge, etc.). It's lifestyle intersecting with music, I guess. There are tons of sub-genres to all of this (straight-edge- vs. crusty- vs. peace- punks).
The key thing to remember is that there was more than just fashion to all of these youth cultures (including goth!) -- there were politics, a way of looking at the world, a form of self- and group-identification, etc. etc.
The problem is when any of these youth cultures is reduced to its aesthetics.
Tonight's homework: How does all of this stuff pertain to The Who's lyrics and themes? Hint: Quadrophenia, Mods vs. Rockers.
