You, strange as angels

I’m not sure how people regard The Cure these days. When I first came across their particular combination of rock and pop and angst and eyeliner, thanks to mixtapes sent by friends abroad and anti-rock Christian TV specials (thanks, Forerunner!), they seemed cool, if a tad satanic (again, thanks, Forerunner). The first time I heard their music played live, it was by a band in my high school. I can’t quite recall what the concert was called, but I am sure it had one or more of these words in its title: Pagan, Delerium, and/or Ethereal. Inevitably, the band (whose name I have also forgotten, and whose members are probably actuaries or mechanical engineers now) played Boys Don’t Cry. a romantic and catchy wad of relentless self-pity that was an anthem for the male and lovelorn.

It’s a little horrifying to realize that The Cure has been around for 34 years now — apparently, they first formed in 1976. Commendable though their continued existence may be, lately, The Cure’s output has seemed accomplished yet less than compelling — after skimming through the last one or two albums once or twice, I have no real desire to go through them again, though they were more or less quite well done. To be fair, their earliest (and if the critics are to be believed, best), albums don’t get much play in my house either — too strange perhaps, or just simply lacking in that essential meld of happy discovery and autobiographical occurence that marks the most significant albums of our lives.

Ah, but the albums from their mid-career! I remember debating with myself whether to get 1987’s “Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me,” which was pricey because it was a double album, but which had fantastic songs that ranged from melodramatic windswept epics to small quirky stabs in the dark, with Just Like Heaven, perhaps their finest giddiest grinniest moment, in between. “Disintegration” (1989) was a big one for me, songs for sitting in the dark to, depressing and thrilling in equal measure. (Plus, it had a Spider-Man reference in it, which I relished, so rarely did my comics and music geekhoods cross over like that.) And then “Wish” in 1992, a further consolidation of their pop sensibility, which should have been at odds with their gothic atmospheres and yet proved to be exactly the right coating for their unhappy pills.

I’ve never seen the actual band themselves perform live, though when they played in Hong Kong last 2007, I experienced a kind of fractured vicarious thrill, as accounts came in from a wide range of friends who had flown there just to watch them. (Apparently they saved the crowd-pleasing hits for last.)

Periodically rumors float that some savvy concert organizer is planning to bring them over here. With the massive success of the Tears for Fears visit earlier this year, that seems more likely now than ever. One wonders about the crowd they will draw, however. Will it be mostly nostalgic thirtysomethings, as with TFF? People who are just raring to hear the opening notes of Lovesong so that they can start screaming and singing along, transported for the span of a set back to when they had less responsibilities and more time to brood over what their lives meant and whether they would ever find real love? Or has a newer mass of fans been spawned, who will see these songs as fresh and applicable to their barely-in-the-double-digits lives? One way or another, whatever its composition, I’m sure there will be a crowd.

As for myself, I’ll probably be there, though I feel like I’ve already had my Cure moment: not, as one might have expected, in high school or college, but fairly recently, when someone sat down with me and taught me how to play the first part of Friday I’m In Love on her acoustic guitar. I may never learn how to play the whole song, and I may have already forgotten what little I did learn, and I am certainly no Robert Smith (it is against my nature to get a hairstyle that looks as if it is ready to eat the rest of my head), but for a pleasant hour or so one evening, I felt a gentle collision of curiosity and delight and friendship and sympathy and love, which is really just about the most one can ask from a Cure song, or from music, for that matter.