Friday Jukebox – Boys Don’t Cry

Glyph says:

Maybe slightly related to the OP’s subject: Robert Smith’s songs are often pretty slippery with regard to gender – one of the things that I noticed early on with The Cure was the way that the he/she/you/I pronouns in his songs often seemed “off”, or unclear, or different than I would have expected (“Icing Sugar” is a good example – “I’ll empty you, as empty as a boy can be”). I found this both disconcerting, and really intriguing.

When I bought the reissues (I got them for super-cheap at a store that was going out of business – I swear I had no intent to re-buy these albums again), the bonus discs have demo versions of a lot of the songs, just Smith and a drum machine on 4-track.

What I found interesting was that the initial demo versions of the songs were often more traditionally-gendered pop songs – a male narrator, presumably proxy for Smith, singing to a female subject.

Sometime between demo and final recording, Smith would mess with the pronouns, switching things around and creating various scenarios that were not as straightforward (pun partially intended) or typical for pop songs.

Comments on the video/band: Great video – simple concept, well-executed, the shadows of the actual band members behind the boys.

(Yes, I had this poster on my bedroom door for many years. )

I really liked this part of the Pitchfork review of the Three Imaginary Boys reissue :

as original a record as anything else to spin off from the tail end of punk. These recordings are spare and simple– just three guys in a room playing clean, clear lines and letting them ring. And yet everything snaps together like clockwork, from the ingenious songwriting to the precise performances to the decades-long thrill of Smith’s voice. This is the simplicity of punk gone suddenly complex and spooky and sneakily psychedelic

I read an interview with Britt Daniel of Spoon and he mentioned how much he’d listened to 3 IB; that made total sense to me, that skeletal economy & use of negative space in the songs, with just a touch of trippy in the production.Report