From Gambit Weekly, May 2000

Cured

By Michael Depp

When I was 16 years old, it was beyond the realm of my imagination that anyone could be ambivalent about The Cure. Between myself and my parents were the two opposite and only possible reactions that anyone might have to the band: religion or repugnance.

It did not surprise me that my parents hated The Cure, loathed the wistful, lolling voice of Robert Smith, the sweetly hopeless dirge of his songs. It was my mother and father’s sad loss that they could never appreciate the austere elegance of black jeans, black shirts and black high-tops seven days a week or the ghostly splendor of the band posters and photos that wallpapered my room, my notebooks, my knapsack and t-shirts.They couldn’t know the sublimity I felt from lying for hours in a darkened room, letting the mournful waves of “Disintegration” wash over me or the shiver of joy I could get, listening to “The Love Cats” or “The Caterpillar.”

My discovery of The Cure launched me into the full throes of adolescence like a rocket, and for that, my parents could never forgive them. One minute I was good-naturedly tapping my boat shoes to the sounds of Billy Joel, the next I was shuffling around in combat boots like a lethargic mortician. Gone forever were the days of pink polo shirts and pleasant conversation at the dinner table. The era of badly teased hair and sullen, perpetual withdrawal had landed on my house with a leaden thud, and the reverberations sent my parents into opposite moods of fury and exasperation.

If you were a Cure fan in those days, the time of Disintegration glory before the nagging compromises of Mixed Up or Wish set in, you can understand that to be a Cure fan was to let lead singer/songwriter Robert Smith’s angst seep into your every pore. You saw that The Cure offered more than just records. It gave you a world in which you could find refuge from shopping malls and suburbia and the beige existences of adults you knew. Cure World was a place of extremes—extreme emotions (usually despair), extreme appearances (said black attire), and extreme alienation (“LEAVE ME ALONE!” its mantra). And that’s why Cure friends became so important. Only they could understand your disaffection, what it was really like to be “hopelessly fighting the devil futility,” as Smith lamented in that Cure masterpiece, the appropriately defeatist “Untitled.”

Being a Cure fan was kind of like a preemptive strike against living. It was a precocious acceptance of all of life’s failings, a forlorn acknowledgement that meaninglessness would tear you apart and thrashing in its grasp was the only effort worth making. It was a Sisyphusian stroll up the mountain, proudly pushing up the rock of fleeting beauty. And things were made all the more gorgeously unstable by the fact that Smith was always touting the band’s imminent demise. Each successive album, he solemnly promised, would be the band’s last. In 1989, at 30 years old, he had already looked unflinchingly into the End of All Things. It was only fitting that he should look so pale.

But life in Cure World was not without its joys and playfulness. For every “One Hundred Years” there was a “Friday I’m in Love,” each “All Cats are Grey” had a silver lining of “Just Like Heaven.” Cure fans could often exhibit the proselytizing zeal of Mormons, and I was forever trying to insinuate these catchier little numbers into my parents’ unenlightened lives.

Sitting in the back seat of the family Volvo, I’d slip a strategically-made, non-Cure fan mix tape into the tape player before my father could intervene. “What’s this?” he’d ask.

“Just listen,” I’d grin, confident that once the swaggering horn section of “Close to Me” kicked in, his clenched fingers would loosen their grip on the steering wheel, and maybe even start tapping. But there was no mistaking Smith’s voice, which he’d trained his ear to recognize like enemy code. “Oh, The Disease,” he’d say, simultaneously ejecting the tape with a swiftness I could not have thought possible.

“Idiot,” I’d mutter. I can’t even say how many times we went through this routine. With each skirmish, the rift between us grew. It got worse when he retaliated with the local “soft rock favorites” station at full volume.

But if my parents couldn’t be converted, maybe my 10th grade classmates could. I took advantage of every lull in school to force my Walkman upon unsuspecting acquaintances. “Just try this, listen to how the bass line just seems to be weeping,” I’d implore, pressing play on “Faith.” “Or how about this? This is the angriest song ever written,” I’d add, quickly popping in a copy of “The Kiss,” whose torrent of hateful guitars opened The Cure’s masterwork double album, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me. Usually, they just wouldn’t get it, so I’d listen to Boys Don’t Cry’s “Jumping Someone Else’s Train” to console myself that at least I wasn’t some kind of blindly adherent pack animal. Conceding temporary defeat, I went off to join all my black-clad friends reproducing album covers in the art room.

Maybe my schoolmates couldn’t be immediately reconciled to the The Cure’s music, but that wasn’t going to stop me from preaching the beauty of Smith’s poetry. I diligently covered all the chalkboards of my sophomore chemistry class with the lyrics of “Lullaby,” then “Fascination Street,” then “Plainsong.” I’d meant my eloquent graffiti as a challenge to their staid New Kids on the Block existences, an awakening to the notion of their own mortality. “My, so this is what you’re listening to, is it?” smiled my patient and motherly chemistry teacher when she came into the room. “Isn’t that nice?”

And that was the biggest problem of all for Cure fans like me: no matter how hard we tried, we just didn’t get the deathly serious reaction we expected from the non-Cure world. Smith might be able to pull off those agonized expressions in photographs, but we didn’t have the advantage of blue lighting or wind machines to follow us around where we walked, lending us the appropriate dramatic effect.

Worst of all was The Hair. I know of no truly serious Cure fan who did not, at one point or other, at least attempt to emulate Smith’s hair, the black orchid of a ‘do that climbed up his scalp like vines on a trellis. Try as I might, it was my greatest shortcoming that my own thick, frizzy mop would not be coaxed into a sculpture of postpunk beauty. The sprays and gels and mousses I’d used to hold it up had a knack for betraying me at the most inopportune moments. It was many a French class when a clump would suddenly dislodge itself, the failed adhesives sprinkling onto my desk like a fragrant chemical snowfall.

The fact that Smith wore a faceful of makeup didn’t make things any easier. He looked cool, there was no question about it in my mind. But for me and my male friends, that was where we drew the line, except at concerts, where our small efforts would go unnoticed by the more outrageous Goths. Still, my underweight frame and enlarged features lent me little of Smith’s cache. Having once applied bright red lipstick crookedly across my lips (as he always did) for a concert, a middle-aged woman gave me a long, sympathetic look and said, “If you’re going to do it, do it right,” like I was some kind of failed transvestite. I wiped my lips on my overlong black sleeve and stormed off, defeated again.

This was my heyday of The Cure, that late 80s-early 90s period when fans watched their music videos again and again; when we pined for a storybook relationship like Smith had with his reclusive childhood sweetheart, Mary; when we started up bands to write Cure-like songs and guiltily played mediocre covers of our favorites. We watched Smith for clues as to how to live a life out of time, where the greatest enemy was death and the greatest enigma was love.

These were the days before The Cure voguishly truncated their name to “Cure” then went back to their original moniker. Pornography, Faith and Disintegration were still an unbroken holy trinity of despair. Beloved band members like guitarist Porl Thompson (Smith’s brother-in-law) and drummer Boris Williams (the definitive Cure drummer, no arguments accepted) hadn’t dropped ranks. Smith had yet to make the sad move of recruiting new members from among his roadies (apologies to roadie cum bandmember Perry Bamonte).

The world didn’t stop for Smith at 30, and his cataclysmic promises went unfulfilled. He continued to regroup the band in successive, watered down permutations. He made albums with unforgivable titles like Wild Mood Swings and unforgivable songs like “Sorry, Wrong Number.” He recycled his old lyrics ad naseum. He never changed his hair.

My friends and I did. Life inevitably punctures a Cure fan’s dark bubble and the outside world fills in through the holes. I still remain partial to the darker end of the color spectrum in my clothes and my outlook, but certain things you just can’t hold on to. I mean, how long can a reasonable person tell himself that “The Figurehead” is the pinnacle of Western music and really believe it?

Now The Cure are back with another lineup, another album, another tour. Smith has long promised that Bloodflowers would be the successor to the band’s darkest masterpieces. Unsurprisingly, it’s only another disappointing echo of their past haunting glory. At 40 years old, neither Smith’s preoccupations nor his means of expressing them have changed. Contemplating another decade passed in “39,” he whines, “I used to feel the fire/But the fire’s almost out/And there’s nothing left to burn.” We’ve heard that one before, and by now, I certainly agree with him.

Like so many times before, Smith is suggesting that this will be The Cure’s last stand. But this time, for me, it is. Giving them a last chance, at 26 now, I’ll try to remember why a decade ago The Cure could be so important, singing me into adolescence so intensely.

But I’ve found that I can only continue to really appreciate The Cure through the prism of nostalgia, and that’s not a view I’m too fond of holding on to. Smith once sang “I never said I would stay to the end” in his most desperate, earnest voice. But in fact, he stayed way past it.