Post by mummifiedstalin on Sept 30, 2010 10:32:34 GMT -5
I had a nostalgic morning, listening to a bunch of the stuff I liked when I was about 2 decades younger. And I was a MASSIVE Cure fan. The odd thing, though, is that I listened to very little other stuff that your typical Cure fan would like. I had a couple Siouxsie and the Banshees albums, but that was about as far down that late 80's/early 90's MTV's "120 Minutes" route that I went. The rest was a lot of classical and acoustic traditional stuff.
So help me out, folks. Why did I like the Cure so much? I wasn't particularly melodramatic. I never went "goth" (even though I don't think that the Cure itself was particularly gothic) although I hung out with all those people. I joined the poetry club and got unofficially kicked out because I'd laugh at all the people who wrote "Woe is me and the world is against me" poetry that most high school people liked. (I was into Shakespeare and John Ashbery, for some reason.) And I never had ultra-dramatic, overly emotional fits in my adolescence.
But those are all the things you're supposed to go through if you like the Cure, right?
Part of it, I think, was the relentless weirdness of their early lyrics, before Robert Smith started writing the kind of songs that people expected of him. I mean, does anyone know what the hell is going on in the almost purely surrealistic stream of consciousness that makes up most of Pornography?
Then there was the weird e.e.cummings style lyrics of The Top, as in "Banafishbones":
There's also the self-consciously anti-pop-yet-meant-to-sell stuff like "Let's Go to Bed":
Musically, they're pretty straightforward. Simple guitar riffs and repetitive chord progressions get amp'd and over-produced in order to create "atmospheric music." They made a habit of crafting 8 minute long songs with minimal chord changes. And Smith doesn't really sing. He sometimes just whines, yells, and deliberately tries to bend his pronunciation in weird ways.
So what is it about the Cure? I may have to do an Atari/MJ-style album-by-album commentary in order to scratch this itch. Join me, won't we?
So help me out, folks. Why did I like the Cure so much? I wasn't particularly melodramatic. I never went "goth" (even though I don't think that the Cure itself was particularly gothic) although I hung out with all those people. I joined the poetry club and got unofficially kicked out because I'd laugh at all the people who wrote "Woe is me and the world is against me" poetry that most high school people liked. (I was into Shakespeare and John Ashbery, for some reason.) And I never had ultra-dramatic, overly emotional fits in my adolescence.
But those are all the things you're supposed to go through if you like the Cure, right?
Part of it, I think, was the relentless weirdness of their early lyrics, before Robert Smith started writing the kind of songs that people expected of him. I mean, does anyone know what the hell is going on in the almost purely surrealistic stream of consciousness that makes up most of Pornography?
Then there was the weird e.e.cummings style lyrics of The Top, as in "Banafishbones":
There's also the self-consciously anti-pop-yet-meant-to-sell stuff like "Let's Go to Bed":
Musically, they're pretty straightforward. Simple guitar riffs and repetitive chord progressions get amp'd and over-produced in order to create "atmospheric music." They made a habit of crafting 8 minute long songs with minimal chord changes. And Smith doesn't really sing. He sometimes just whines, yells, and deliberately tries to bend his pronunciation in weird ways.
So what is it about the Cure? I may have to do an Atari/MJ-style album-by-album commentary in order to scratch this itch. Join me, won't we?