The Cureaissance is Wrecking Me Emotionally
And I'm not even that into the Cure
I've been trying to understand my intense emotional reaction to the Cureaissance, given that I don't care all that much about the Cure.
I mean, I certainly USED to care. I bought Standing on the Beach on cassette at Open Books & Records in Miami Beach and I wore it out. We were reading The Stranger in French IV and let me assure you, with belated but heartfelt apologies, that everyone in my vicinity heard PLENTY from me about "Killing an Arab" and existentialism and the Cure that year, and I probably even referred to the book as L'Étranger to drive home that I was reading it in the original language.
But because Standing on the Beach, as a singles compilation, was essentially a survey course on the first decade of the Cure, I realized pretty fast that while I loved the early, wiry (Wire-y) songs like "Boys Don't Cry" and "Killing an Arab" and the pop onrush of "In Between Days" and "Close to You," the other stuff didn't do a lot for me. "The Lovecats" was too campy; "Charlotte Sometimes" and "The Hanging Garden" too sludgy. God knows I'm capable of dramatic turnarounds on songs, bands, entire genres, but for whatever reason, my tastes re: the Cure didn't change a lot over time. I've been happy for decades to like the songs I like and pass peacefully by the ones not meant for me. I don't listen to the albums very often and have never felt tempted to lift my fuck-arenas rule to see the band live.
So it makes no sense that just reading this New York Times interview made me tear up and make a beeline to YouTube for other new interviews where I would hear Robert Smith's speaking voice for the first time in my life, because I never before felt a burning desire to hear it.
It makes no sense except that last week, I was at Sabine in Ballard eating Turkish eggs and working on my dumb novel as a whole series of Smiths tracks played on the sound system. And I suddenly realized I hadn't expected any of it to LAST. I guess when I was a teenager I assumed every piece of culture I loved would die out in a few years, or at least the bits that were weird and specific. I didn't think the jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place would be part of the vernacular at my current, once- and still-unimaginable age. Did anyone? I mean, maybe it's just me. Over the summer, I wrote at length on Facebook about finding it surreal that Belle & Sebastian, who came to my attention via a POLKA, are world-famous in 2024. Maybe it's the only real topic I have, but I'm convinced that something strange is happening where time and music meet, and if I could only define it, I would finally be accepted into the community of scientists.
But it's not just whatever's happening with time that's making the Cureaissance wreck me. And it's not that Smith is still making art decades later, because anyone who still thinks making art is only for the young is either too dumb to care about or too young to know better. ("If I go back to how I was when I was a younger man, my plan was to keep doing this till I fall over," he says in the NYT interview. "My idea of when I fell over wasn't this old.")
I think it might be because, um, I didn't quite think he was a PERSON before, until I saw him laughing and being all chatty? It's embarrassing to still get caught up in assuming that the wailing guy with the smeared lipstick doesn't also vote or cook boneless skinless chicken breasts or get chided by dental hygienists. But then, I was also absolutely gobsmacked a few years back when Simon LeBon ranted on Twitter that the bouncy chair he was trying to put together for his grandkid was missing a part, so apparently the difference between persona and person is a lesson I must keep learning.
Or maybe it was the graceful meeting of the two that moved me? The way he sat there so naturally with, you know, the eyeshadow I suspect he's only been adding onto since about 1978--never cleaning it off, just trying to maintain a fresco engineered to fade--and talked thoughtfully about monopolistic ticket practices. I looked for the line between this Robert and that Robert and I couldn't find it and I thought oh, I wonder if this is what true integration looks like and if so, I also wonder how it feels, and if you sense the moment it clicks into place.
I bet it feels good the way that no longer having a cold feels good. And like with a cold, I bet you realize it a little while AFTER the click. One day you're convinced that this time the cough will last forever, and then two weeks later you think "Hey, I haven't coughed in days. I got well." Maybe one day Robert Smith realized he had invisibly achieved this wholeness and composure and thought "Huh. I got well." Or maybe he was always well. There must be people out there who have just always been well.
But maybe it was none of the above. Maybe it was something else entirely, because you should have seen me when I heard about the three-hour concert, live-streamed to the entire world for free. I haven't even watched it. I will probably watch some parts of it, but I don't even need to do that to feel what an act of WARMTH it is to do something like that in a world that feels comprised entirely of surcharges and convenience fees and VIP packages that mostly just provide what used to be standard for everyone. I had the same feeling at a Hoodoo Gurus concert last year when maybe thirty minutes into the show, Dave Faulkner asked the crowd "Is there anything in particular you'd like to hear?" No reasonable fan would expect a band with a catalog that large to be prepared to play absolutely ANYTHING from it. But they offered it to us anyway, out of generosity that felt even more meaningful for being so relaxed.
It would be a stretch to call the Cureaissance "relaxed." Feats like this don't just happen. And yet there's something MODEST about the way Smith walked into, and won, a showdown with Ticketmaster. "I was spoken to in a certain way by a certain individual," he says to the NYT. "And something in me was like, WHAT? You know, it was like a 'Run along, Sonny' kind of moment." I am an un-famous person who is ALSO motivated to achieve great things when told to run along. "The star: he's just like me!" I thought.
But that's not quite it either. No, what ultimately got to me--I think--was the overwhelming sense that here is a man who knows, REALLY knows, that he has enough. He may still be striving, but he's not grabbing at anything or anyone, much less at anyone's particular anything. He's calm. He's thoughtful. He finds himself a bit ridiculous. He can give to other people without keeping score. He can just...do nice things.
I guess I've been missing that kind of presence in the world, or at least in my world. I mean, I've known this for a while. A couple of years ago, I put a part of my life on hold when I realized its coldness was beginning to kill off parts of me I might really wish I'd saved, and also that the coldness had become the point. At age 21, I played slot machines on a cruise to the Bahamas and kept winning JUST enough to feel comfortable going one more round. Fortunately, my mother was funding this little endeavor, so at some point she said "You've made fifty bucks, take it and run, ATM Mom is closed." But there was no one around to tell me playing chicken with that coldness was mostly just a long, tortured attempt to convince myself that I didn't need to matter in any real way to other people. That the creeping sense of not mattering was GOOD, even, because it gave me a chance to hone my game of chicken.
The thing is, once I stopped playing chicken with self-abnegation, I realized that it isn't really that great a life skill? I've since learned basic Danish and to build things with Legos, and those both feel like more useful and extensible abilities. I don't miss the chicken. But I do miss the playfulness and optimism and generosity of spirit that allowed me to take those risks in the first place. They came from knowing I had enough, I realize now. The enoughness enabled the chicken and then the chicken ate away at the enoughness until I gave up the game.
But it turns out that enoughness refills so slowly, like one of those glitchy gas pumps that just makes you want to have a male-model gasoline fight and blow the whole fucking place to kingdom come. I've been waiting and waiting for that slightly mad glint in my eye to come back. To feel enough, uh, enoughness--enough warmth-- to be playful with the world again, really IN it. I think I could have some fun, maybe even do some good for other people. I could be GENEROUS with other people, in my own way (don't worry, I won't be playing three-hour goth concerts), if I could get back some of what I see in Robert Smith, the leader of a band I casually enjoy from time to time, whose new album I have yet to hear. And I think the emotions are here because it's dawning on me that maybe I've been looking for it in the wrong places, and that if I know which places are wrong I have a chance of finding the right ones.