#6 – The Cure

It’s sometimes unsatisfying keeping a blog. I often have the experience of speaking into a void, a bottomless pit, unsure if any response I hear is just an echo. (Can you tell I’ve been listening to The Cure a lot recently?) I can check my stats, but they tell me that the most sought-after post I’ve written was my one uncharacteristic foray into stand-up comedy, and the google query that most leads readers to my site is “golden shower kite runner” (seriously, google that and my blog entry is third!). Honestly, it can get a bit dispiriting at times.

Which is why I’m dedicating this blog entry to the five people who I know for sure read my blog regularly: Jazmine, Sara, Adam and my parents. Everyone else, start leaving comments, and I’ll try to work you in to future posts. The Fab Five, though, will be receiving direct associations with various Cure songs – in a totally non-depressing way, I swear.

Before the make-up, the Cure were just another post-punk outfit from a working class British town. Hard to imagine, I know.

First up, Mom and Dad. I love you guys. Not only did your endless love provide me with a stable and supportive childhood, but your seemingly endless record/CD collection laid the foundation for the music/pop culture obsessive I have turned into. (Making you proud?) Somehow, out of the 6,000+ musical tomes I had to choose from, I one day stumbled across Staring At the Sea, the Cure’s 1986 collection of all of their singles from 1979 to its release date. I’m not sure it’s an album you all even know you have, but a lot of those songs resonated with teenaged Carter. Mostly, it wasn’t the dark depressing early 80s stuff that became the subculture-defining material of the Cure. It was their complex, rock-oriented stuff. For example, their Albert Camus-inspired “Killing an Arab” – check out this awesome live video from 1979 before all the make-up! Robert Smith looks like a young John Cusack. And the classic from that era, “Boys Don’t Cry” – shown here in 2004; what a contrast in Smith’s appearance.

There was always an edge of melancholy in the Cure’s work as these early singles show. Up through 1982’s Pornography, Smith delved more deeply into the despairing parts of his lyrical persona. And at some point, got sick of being so down all the time. With “Let’s Go to Bed,” he turned an emotional corner. Suddenly, the synthesizers were creating peppy melodies and he was at least on the verge of some companionship. On “The Love Cats” (here in a cool later acoustic version), Smith started stretching out musically with a walking jazz bassline, brushes on the snare, piano unfiltered by synths, producing something “wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully pretty.”

The Cure, at the height of their 80s popularity and fashion sense.

By 1985, everything coalesced into their grandest statement yet in The Head on the Door, and for that we turn to Adam. Remember Lawry, Adam, with the power hour DVD? Every time I hear “Close to Me” I think of this classic video and sitting around taking a shot of beer to it and trying to replicate those awesome handclaps. It’s one of the great singles from the 80s, and is smack dab in the middle of a fantastic album. Lead track “In Between Days” is another one of those great singles (whose name I never knew the name of) that bridges the gap between melancholy, angsty lyrics and synth-driven pop music. Yet, on this album Smith also starts developing a signature sound of the Cure’s album tracks: the lengthy introductions. Check “Push” (with a 2:23 intro before the lyrics come in…on a 4:34 song) and “Sinking” (with a 2:07 intro) as examples of a band reveling in a sonic bed, creating atmospheric musical textures without concern for solos or traditional pop song conventions.

On 1987’s Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, Smith took this experimentation of sound even further. “Just Like Heaven” from that album may still be the Cure’s greatest single, and I know it was a tremendous influence on Jazmine and I when we were writing songs together, sometimes even directly emulating its structure and feel. It combines the feeling of blissful love with heartaching longing, knowing that heaven is always just like a dream. And it throws an absurdly catchy melody on top of that. But the album stretched out to encompass more dark atmospheric meanderings like “The Kiss,” “Like Cockatoos” and “The Snakepit,” and laid those songs side by side with the unabashed pop of (the curiously underrated) “The Perfect Girl,” “Why Can’t I Be You?,” and “Hot Hot Hot !!!” It’s an ambitious, sprawling, schizophrenic record showing off the diversity of the Cure’s songwriting talents.

In the wake of the Great Recession, Robert Smith has had to fire his stylist and clearly lacks the capacity to care for his own personal hygiene.

Sara, for you I have “Friday I’m in Love,” which for some reason reminds of our years of carpooling across LA County. Probably because it’s on the radio all the time out there. It was the last of the Cure’s mainstream commercial successes in 1992, and the beginning of their transition to reliable elders, putting out decent if unspectacular records for the next 20 years.

But for myself, I must keep 1989’s Disintegration. It is one of the most stunning achievements of the 1980s. A spotless, cohesive masterpiece from start to finish. As the term “disintegration” implies, when listening to it, you melt into the album’s textures. It throws its arms around you, saying “There, there. Things suck, but you’re not alone.” As a hopeless romantic, “Pictures of You” is one of my favorite songs of all time – Smith’s meditation on a love disappeared and relived through memory. The shimmering guitar matches the desperate lyrics perfectly (“If only I’d known of the right words, I could’ve held onto your heart / If only I’d know of the right words, I wouldn’t be breaking apart all my pictures of you.”). But the album keeps going. “Lovesong,” their biggest US hit, has a New Order-esque melodic bassline and is a surprisingly dour testament of love to Smith’s then-new bride. “Lullaby,” with its creepy delivery and spider imagery is somehow both entirely of the 80s and utterly timeless. The arrangement is intricate and subtle, and Smith is at his best. And album tracks like the 9-minute “The Same Deep Water as You” (complete with rain and thunder bookends) build clear emotional portraits that transcend language.

Disintegration is the reason that, despite peppy pop songs like “Friday I’m in Love” or “Just Like Heaven,” the Cure will always be synonymous with goth culture, despair, longing and angst. So many of the band’s followers identified with those feelings as teenagers, but failed to understand that this was the despair of a mature adult, grappling with universal issues of identity and longing in a mature, adult way. The legions have imitators (like My Chemical Romance) often stay situated in the teenage realm and fail to achieve the deep, raw emotional connection of The Cure, trapped forever in the superficial ennui of adolescence. The Cure’s legacy is multifarious and vast, but their output may never be replicated. They are singular icons, deserving of a place in the canon of rock history.