Plainsong —The Cure
#365Songs: April 12th
It’s unacceptable that I’ve gone this long into the 365 Songs project before writing about The Cure. When you fall into the inevitable rabbit hole and go back through and read and reread all 365 songs (kidding, I suppose), you’ll probably notice that I say at least five times that “insert artist here” is my favorite of all time. I do that because it’s true, of course, they’re all my favorites — a parent with multiple kids or pets does it all the time, so I can too. But for real for real, The Cure is at the top of my list of list toppers.
Disintegration is the band at their finest, a perfect return to their darker goth mood. Rather than hiding from his depression, Robert Smith grabbed those emotions at the roots and exposed the full range across the sprawling hour and 12 minute landscape. I wasn’t cool enough to understand this album when it came out, but I had a few friends whose older siblings were full-on goth — the sort of character my Mom told me to avoid. In retrospect, those goth kids were far more my people than my people were, but I was too young, too confused, too masked, too scared to fully express myself from the inside out.
Disintegration is pure Robert Smith. Disgruntled, unsettled, and overwhelmed by life, he went off on his own, ate a lot of LSD, and wrote his opus. That’s not to say The Cure’s other 12 albums aren’t also great, but this is the one I return to most often, the one I’ve explored across so many versions of myself only to discover that the music changes as I do.
I could care less about the debate over whether or not The Cure is emo or goth. They’re both, and that’s ok. It’s too dark to be emo, too emo to be dark. Like me. It’s what I love so much about this band.
Robert Smith once wrote,
“I was never a big fan of goth. I loved the subculture. I love subcultural stuff like that where people have a vision of what the world should be, how they should be. I think it can be really charming. There’s a slightly sinister edge to subculture-ism, but generally speaking, it’s a good thing. It helps people feel they belong to something at the time that they probably feel they need to belong to something. And I’d rather goths than skinheads. And I also like the fact that it represented kind of “other.” It’s a dangerous thing to look like a goth. In certain parts of England, you run the risk of a beating if you look like a goth, which I think is fucking outrageous. So in that sense, I feel a community of spirit with goths and other subcultures who choose to live an alternative lifestyle. But I wouldn’t consider myself to be a part of it.”
This idea of caring so much about how others see us, of fitting into the binaries, of showing up within arbitrary definitions…. it’s such bullshit. We do this so often now in modern life, presenting pictures of ourselves that tell stories that others want to hear rather than exposing the wounds that make us human. And that’s what’s so special about Disintegration. It’s an album of wounds, still bloody and unresolved, un-anesthetized.
“I think it’s dark and it looks like rain, “ you said
“And the wind is blowing
Like it’s the end of the world, “ you said
“And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead”
Then you smiled for a second
“I think I’m old and I’m feeling pain, “ you said
I’d happily present any and every song from this album as a stellar example of perfect music, but in the spirit of this concept I only get one, so let’s talk about the opening track, Plainsong. The mood setter, the dark hallway that takes us deep inside Smith’s pain. It’s too dark to be emo, too emo to be dark.
“And it’s all running out
Like it’s the end of the world, “ you said
“And it’s so cold, it’s like the cold if you were dead”
Then you smiled for a second
Sometimes you make me feel
Like I’m living at the edge of the world
Like I’m living at the edge of the world
“It’s just the way I smile, “ you said
I experimented with LSD and mushrooms when I was younger. I suspect my worst trip prepared me for my first, second, and eleventh panic attack, but my very best trip exposed the beauty that lives in the spaces we overlook, a reminder that what resides within and around us contains vital perspective. Perhaps that’s why psychedelics are now used to treat depression: we’re forced to scrape away the layers that hold us back.
Two lessons I learned while on LSD:
The distance between bliss and death is often just a blink of the eye.
Every bad trip begins with wind chimes; every good trip ends with wind chimes.
Plainsong is a synth-heavy song, and even though it sounds unlike anything on the album, it creates the exact runway the rest of the album requires to take off. What’s more intimate than a conversation that takes place during a storm at the end of the world?
It’s too dark to be emo, too emo to be dark.
What a weird thing to say, I know, but this song is me. The perfect theme song, every feeling too much, every moment at odds with the moment before, a perpetual dichotomy.
What a song, what an album, what a band! Now fuck off and go read my other posts.
