The Cure
“"Lovesong" is a love song.”
The Cure are an an English punk, gothic, pop and mope-rock band of troglodytes that have slain brave adventurers and taken from them their rightful musical instruments. Armed with mopey black mandolins and a synthesizer that can only play one note at a time, they have sworn a quest to drown all that is interesting and good in alcohol.
Their languid, repetitive music hypnotises a susceptible portion of the population, especially those who wear black in the summer and those who believe that their poetry is not crap. It is no coincidence that these people often dream of killing themselves; The Cure have been trying to kill themselves since 1976. Unfortunately, they have only succeeded in pickling themselves, and now contain so many preservatives and formaldehyde that they can never die.
Robert Smith's hair is not of this earth.
Band History[edit | edit source]
In 1976, Robert Smith invented a cure for cancer. However, that would have made people happy. So, instead, he sang a little song. That made people sad. Robert liked that. A lot. He never wanted the sadness to end. So he hired a bunch of English alcoholics, gave them cancer, and told them as long as they stood behind him and played musical instruments very, very slowly, he would give them the antidote. He named his backing band the Easy-Cures, to remind them of what they could never have.
The band began well, with the young Smith full of hope and chinese food. Unfortunately, in 1978, Robert 'accidentally' poured the cure for cancer into a homemade curry and ate it. The formula lost, and his band quickly died, but Robert noticed no change in their playing and kept them on. Since their zombie lips were no longer capable of pronouncing the words "Easy-Cure," the late keyboardist ROFL LOLhurst shortened the name of the band to "derp duh Cure duh."
Robert was determined to once again taunt the world with a cure for cancer (or even stand to be in the same room with). At the time it was believed that music could cure cancer. But then a controversial study proved that while music cannot cure cancer, Robert Smith can cause it. This made Robert Smith permanently sad.
Smith began to drink heavily, eat heavily, and be heavy. He also dressed like a teddy bear in mourning, fucked up his lipstick, and ate an entire dump truck full of of pot pies. Although he was widely believed to be in drag, pure black potato sacks such as those worn by Robert Smith wore are unisex, and can be purchased for both men and women.
1989[edit | edit source]
In 1989, Smith realised that his best friend and co-founder of the band, ROFL Lolhurst, had been dead for eleven years. He had fallen against the keyboard when he died and his corpse was playing the same note over and over again. Robert only noticed when his gentle decomposition caused him to switch from C to C#, a note Robert had never seen and had no idea what to do with. Three albums were destroyed before Robert replaced his corpse with a drinky bird. Critics immediately hailed the evolution of his sound. Miffed, the supersentient bacteria who inhabited Tolhurst's body took legal action, angrily demanding that the Cure suck harder and more often. Robert sprayed them with pesticide, then set himself on fire in a drunken rage. Utterly outwitted, the rotting corpse formerly known as "Lol" formed a new band called "Presence" and made good on its threats, breaking all records for sucking and being crap.
After the legal battle with Tolhurst (and his concomitant self-immolation), Robert Smith was dead. Quite dead. Morrissey rejoiced, as did all right-thinking people everywhere. However, as the poets say, nothing gold can stay; Robert Smith's well-deserved death was destined not to last.
In 1999 Smith returned as a ghost, fulfilling the fantasies of his legions of awful fans, formed an all-star band actually capable of playing their instruments, and created a new cure for AIDS, built five housing projects in poor sections of England, invented two new flavors of ketchup, and made some godawful music that somehow was as bad as everything else was good. The ghost of Robert Smith said "It's bloody great. Nothing happy anywhere, ever. I wish I could burn myself to death all over again."
Smith is currently writing music for his children's school Christmas concert [4th December], Snow White, in which he will play the lead role.
He has seven children, all of whom he named himself. They are called Dipsy [she's a bit simple], Tinky-Winky [he wets the bed], Eternal Despair [she cries a lot], Resentment [he always picks fights with the other boys at school], Emptiness [he doesn't talk much], Lala, & Po [who are both alcoholics].
Major Releases[edit | edit source]
- Three Imaginary Boys (1979). Three Imaginary Boys was inspired when Smith read the back cover of Sartre's legendary classic Being and Nothingness and subsequently decided that neither he not the other two band members actually existed, but were actually a product of an LSD hallucination. It features the eerily prophetic Killing Wanky French Philosophers, which deals with the USA banning all references to French philosophy from its Humanities faculties in 2004. The lyrics forespell: Standing on a beach with a gun in my hand / I'm the stranger / Killing an Arab. Spooky. For this and other reasons this album was completely panned by critics.
- 17 Seconds (1980). The title refers both to how long it took the band to record the album and the playing length of the album. As they had run out of money for drugs and beer one night, they decided to produce a vastly minimalist work in order to make a quick buck. The production reflects the decision. This album received the worst reviews of any Cure album so far.
- Faith (1981). This first of two "experimental" albums deals with Smith's short-lived but disastrous flirtation with fundamentalist Christianity. Uplifting songs of praise and worship such as The Holy Hour were not at all well received by the band's rapidly shrinking fan base and the band quickly abandoned the project. Faith got the worst critical reception of any Cure album yet. George Michael bought the rights to this, completely re-recorded it, changed all the music and words, and released it as his first solo album.
- Pornography (1982). This second of two "experimental" albums was even less successful than the first. To distance himself from his previous Christian stance, Smith decided for some reason to release a whole album of songs dealing with explicit sex and hardcore pornography. The album was given a triple X rating in many countries, meaning it was only available in dingy sex shops, most of which could not be less interested in obscure UK mope rock. The record subsequently sank without a trace and due to its overwhelming failure is now considered a collector's item. It is of interest to collectors and Cure completists only (should such a creature exist) as, contrary to the music, the sleeve and pictures contain absolutely no nudity, erotica, lyrics, or anything else that could brighten up the album. This album received the worst reviews the band had gotten to this date.
- Japanese Whispers (1983). Changing direction completely, the next album was sung completely in Japanese as Smith had, on an amphetamine-influenced whim, decided he was Codzilla. Hit singles included the now-legendary 私達は寝る and 歩行. However, the video for the last single 愛猫, featuring a bunch of cats abused by obviously drug-fucked band members, led to a major RSPCA investigation after Interpol found 23 dead cats (murdered execution-style) and one dead janitor (whose rictus of terror could not be concealed and made it necessary that he be buried in a closed coffin) on the set of the video. Fans took well to the Japanese angle, especially the loli and tentacle rape aspects of their new sound. Irregardless of their fans' appreciation, this was almost certainly one of their worst albums.
- Disintegration (1989). This is probably one of Smith's most terrible recordings. As he recorded this album (originally called Disinterestification), Smith suffered severe dehydration which left him completely the same but thirsty and poor. Unable to handle the shock of working for a living, Smith began to hallucinate that his body was literally disintegrating, and to prevent this covered himself in industrial-strength adhesive. Due to general stickiness, his fingers would adhere to musical instruments as he played them, giving this album its signature "no-more-than-one-note-at-a-time" sound. 'Lovesong' is either the worst sincere song ever, or sincerely the worst song ever. Disintegration was the worst-reviewed Cure album to date.
- Wild Mood Swings (1996). This album came about after a 6 year tour of Europe that the band spent smoking/snorting anything as it came. The album is notable for its completely shit sound and reliance on hissy fits. Robert Smith has said of recording the album, "I honestly can't remember a thing. I remember going out for a bit to drink after the Disintegration tour, then the record label patting me on the back for another release. I asked Lol what time it was and he said it was 1996." It is quite possibly their worst album.
The Cure may have done other albums since then, but they are so old and fat than nobody knows.
Criteria to Be Able to Listen to The Cure's Music[edit | edit source]
Not just anyone can listen to The Cure, and only dogs can truly hear them. To truly introduce The Cure's mystic musical vocabulary of catastrophic and life-threatening boredom into your life, you must fulfill these conditions:
- You must suffer from major depression, preferably baseless and self-inflicted.
- You must be an active member of the Goth subculture. You must be completely unaware that Goth is emo in worse clothes.
- You should write loads of really bad, depressing, whining, moaning poetry. This poetry must be inflicted upon high-school creative writing teachers, long-suffering parents, unsuspecting bystanders, and your soon-to-be-former friends.
- Remember your new friends, "pills," and "booze." They are the only friends you need, and the only friends you deserve.
- You must accept Robert Smith into your life and worship his hair as the one and only true God (same with Simon Gallup and Lol Tolhurst). Worshipping hair must not conflict with "existentialism" in any way that you are capable of understanding.
Formal Apology from the Author of this Article[edit | edit source]
I would like to formally apologize to everyone that I knew in high school for all the times that I made them listen to the Cure. They're really not that good.
I would especially like to apologize to my parents.