The Cure's Gathering Gloom

An excerpt from a San Diego City Beat article:

"There's a tired bit of conventional wisdom about how The Cure’s music resonates most strongly with teenagers. It’s not totally wrong, necessarily—a fair chunk of The Cure’s catalog is mired and darkness, angst and depression. They’re as much a brand as a band, the stadium-filling spokesband for goth, their logo scrawled onto countless Trapper Keepers, their lyrics written on the inside cover of every yearbook. As Bart Simpson once astutely observed, “making teenagers miserable is like shooting fish in a barrel,” and the band’s frontman and songwriter Robert Smith was happy to oblige, and in lipstick, eyeliner and Aquanetted hair no less.

I had my share of teenage experiences with The Cure. I impulse-bought a CD copy of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me in the summer of 1999, after hearing “Why Can’t I Be You?” on a 91X Fourth of July countdown, and had it on regular rotation between Pavement and Neutral Milk Hotel. Not long after that, a girl made me a mixtape of songs from their first three albums, which in hindsight sounds like it could have been a deleted scene from Pretty In Pink. I was introduced to The Cure much earlier than that, though, hearing “Close to Me” on my brother’s stereo, and my sister had a copy of Three Imaginary Boys on vinyl—the one where all the song titles are depicted as pictograms rather than with words. (The easiest one to decipher? “Meathook.”) "

Read the rest at their website.