Up until about 60 seconds ago, everything was going normally. We had finished dinner and cleared the table, and I’d poured just a bit more wine into my glass to get me through writing this newsletter. And I started to put a few words down on a completely different subject when Spotify, in all its infinite wisdom, played “A Fragile Thing,” one of the songs off the Cure’s new album, Songs of a Lost World, and I realized I had to write something completely different.
“A Fragile Thing” is classic Cure: moody, catchy, compellingly sad and sadly romantic. The lyrics are framed as the words of an unknown woman to the singer (Robert Smith, whose voice has not failed with age), and begin with the declaration “Every time you kiss me, I could cry.” From there they cycle through the themes Cure fans hold dear, from melancholy and loneliness all the way to regret and hopelessness, anchored by the weird reality, and inevitable collapse, of actual love. “This love is my everything,” goes the last line, “but nothing you can do to change the end.”
If you have ever read even a single word of Trying!, you will probably recognize some affinities, and you will not be surprised that I love the Cure. I took Sasha and her friend Rose to see them at Madison Square Garden last year, where they played some of the songs from the new album, and when I drove back from Virginia last month, after my disappointing election experience, I played just about their entire catalog in the car. They are simply wonderful, and their mood almost always matches my mood.
But I am no longtime, die-hard fan. In fact, prior to about 2019, I barely knew them at all. If you’d pressed me to name one of their songs, I would probably have come up with “Boys Don’t Cry,” but that’s Trivial Pursuit knowledge. I didn’t know the lyrics, the tune. In high school, I was aware, vaguely, that they were popular, but for a whole bunch of reasons that I’ll get into in a minute, I didn’t, or couldn’t, pay attention. The Cure existed, but in someone else’s pop culture universe.
The Cure were hardly alone in being ignored by me. The Smiths and Morrissey, Bowie, Madonna, Sade, Prince… Prince! All existed at the very edge of my consciousness, keeping their distance from my tender eardrums.
This was, of course, my fault, not theirs. I was a messy kid who did not really know what he truly liked, and was also terrified of admitting his tastes. Bullying left its marks here: I was always small, the second smallest kid in my class, and I learned early on not to like anything that might risk further abuse. Prince, whose music I caught (and enjoyed!) on MTV, was androgynous, therefore dangerous. To admit liking him was to invite abuse—purple nurples, anyone? It would be more than two decades before I could listen to “Little Red Corvette” and allow myself to enjoy it.
Instead, I told myself I liked punk and hardcore, the faster, the louder, the angrier, the better. I wanted that aggression to surround me like a protective aura, even if very little of the music itself mattered to me (and no one who glanced at me was intimidated). For a while, my favorite band was D.R.I., or Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, the velocity of whose songs was matched only by their brevity; I can’t remember a single one of them today. Crass, The Exploited, S.O.D.—what was I doing listening to these bands that no longer mean a thing? Trying, I guess, to be someone I was not.
This is not to say I listened to nothing good, but the main factor governing what I listened to was how I listened to music. Most of it was determined by my friends, who had better taste than me and played for us Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and Smashing Pumpkins on the one hand, and De la Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Cypress Hill, and Beastie Boys on the other. Those songs are etched deep in my memory; the lyrics are encoded in my DNA.
I also listened to a ton of 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s oldies—the music of my parents’ generation—solely because I drove to and from high school and there wasn’t much else to listen to on the FM radio. Morning after morning, afternoon after afternoon, I soaked in the Baby Boomer top 40 soundtrack: Herman’s Hermits, “Crimson and Clover,” Sonny and Cher, the Big Bopper, the Doors. This actually felt a little transgressive at the time, like I might come to know the tunes better than my parents ever had. Alone in the car, though, I could listen to music that might have seemed uncool—and enjoy “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” as much as I did “Paul Revere” or “Been Caught Stealing.”
More after the jump…
In the last decade, I’ve begun to look back on my youth and wonder what I missed. Music is an easy thing to zero in on, so I’ve tried in earnest to educate myself. I began with Fluxblog, “the original mp3 blog,” which for a time put out comprehensive “albums” of every significant song from a given year. 1984 was, for me, the best of these: a year that encompassed “Material Girl,” “Jump,” and “Dancing in the Dark” as well as “Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt,” “Lorelei,” and “Drink, Fight, and Fuck.” The production style of the 1980s had come into its own—there’s a crispness to the recordings, a professional confidence in the writing and arrangements—along with a hint of the synth and hip-hop influences to come. To listen to music from 1984 is to feel like a 10-year-old discovering music for the first time, only now I’m unencumbered by the traumas that fifth-grader once faced.
What I don’t know is whether this is common. Do we all feel like we missed out on our own childhoods, and spend our adulthoods trying to figure out what that might have been like had we only been willing to take artistic and social risks? (I’m happy to believe this is just me, because, you know, I’m special.) Maybe this is simply a result of growing up in the 1980s and early ‘90s, when pop culture was everything and everywhere—and yet still existed within the shadow of the baby boomers, every one of whom seemed to have flirted with hippiedom, protested the war, and attended Woodstock and/or Altamont. Theirs seemed to be a unifying, common pop culture; mine was cliquish and hierarchical, and I was never confident of my place.
But did any of us? When I delve into the Smiths and Morrissey, trying to plug gaps in my knowledge and experience, am I replicating my (slightly) elders’ spelunking in the caves of the MC5 and the Velvet Underground, and presaging the millennials who will wonder why they skipped that Strokes show in Northampton in 2001, and what the big deal was anyway? I am indisputably a product of my time, a Gen Xer without question, fluent in the social dynamics of suburban Chicago high schools and scarred by fears of nuclear war, PCP, and AIDS. But do I really know anything of that era? Or was I too distracted by my own shit to pay attention to what was really important? Or is this whole line of questioning just another manifestation of my generation’s feeling fundamentally overlooked, even by itself?
Well, if X marks the spot, then that’s where I’m going to dig! I suppose I’m lucky to live in a time where all the cultural wallpaper of my youth is instantly accessible. When I decide to catch up on The Meat Puppets or Jesus Lizard, or hunt Spotify for Bowie’s deep cuts, no one needs to know I’m encountering them for the very first time. If there’s one thing I think everyone in Generation X learned, it’s how not to react, even when we’re roiling inside. The noncommittal, disaffected ironic shrug is our signature move. It was great practice for a lifetime of disappointment, disenchantment, and impostor syndrome.
And I got to use that move again, just now, when Sasha, who recently turned 16, walked into the room while I was working on this essay, caught a snippet of the Cocteau Twins from my speakers, and said, “Send me your playlist—I like listening to your music.”
Sure, I said, and kept on writing. I don’t know how to explain what I felt at that moment, but I’m sure there’s a song that captures it perfectly. I’ll let you know when I find it. 🪨🪨🪨
