Exploring the Back Catalogue

Started by SueC, January 26, 2020, 02:58:00

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SueC

MANIPULATION, ANYONE?


Unlike most of the other tracks on this album, Wendy Time is not a lovely track to listen to, but if you're writing a tune about shameless manipulation and terrible pick-up lines, you probably don't want a lovely tune - but one that reflects the nausea-inducing scenario related.  And in that sense, the tune really fits, its unpleasantness and discord appropriate for the topic.  Although this is not a song I'd go out of my way to listen to for its aesthetic appeal, I do applaud its inclusion on this album for thematic reasons.

There's a whole swag of love-gone-wrong songs on Wish - and here's one situation that could head that way but never does, because it's nipped in the bud by the target of the manipulation, who is wise to it - which has me cheering, because so many people fall for this sort of thing.

The lyrics are pretty straightforward, just basic storytelling:



WENDY TIME

"You look like you could do with a friend," she said
"You look like you could use a hand
Someone to make you smile," she said
"Someone who can understand
Share your trouble
Comfort you
Hold you close
And I can do all of these...
I think you need me here with you"

"You look like you could do with a sister" she said
"You look like you need a girl to call your own... like...
Fabulous! Fabulous!
Call me Fabulous!"
And rubbing her hands so slow
"You stare at me all strange," she said
"Are you hungry for more?"
"I've had enough," I said
"Please leave me alone
Please go"

It doesn't touch me at all
It doesn't touch me at all

"You know that you could do with a friend," she said
"You know that you could use a word
Like feel or follow or f*ck," she said
And laughing away as she turned
"You're everything but no-one
Like the last man on earth"
"And when I die," I said
I'll leave you it all"
Door closes...
Leaves me cold

It doesn't touch me at all
It doesn't touch me at all

"You really do need a sister," she said
"You really do need a girl to call your own... like...
Wonderful! Wonderful!
Call me Wonderful!"
And running her hands so slow
"You stare at me all strange," she said
"Are you hungry for more?"
"I've had enough," I said
"Please leave me alone
Please go...
Please go"



It's interesting for a female who's seen atrocious pick-up lines and behaviour around trying to "score" from males to get a glimpse into the sordid world males may experience at the hands of females, on this theme.  It's a different flavour for sure.  What flavour ice cream would you like - vomit or abscess?  Blergh.  :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: 

The Cure, of course, explored an example of how the "other side" can look on a track called The Perfect Boy in 2008 - there's a post on that one earlier in this thread.  The male in that and the female in Wendy Time - I just don't get people like that.  I understand they exist, I've seen it myself for many years, but it continues to boggle me.  What sort of soul do you have, to be chiefly approaching the world and the beings in it in a grasping, predatory way?

Decent sexual ethics to me are primarily about crystal clarity, total honesty, clear consent, considered intention, respect and negotiation.  It doesn't matter to me how people want to go about this stuff apart from that - monogamy, polygamy, polyamory, casual sex, long-term, short-term, medium-term, hanging off the ceiling, whatever, as long as they're clear about it and not misleading a person whose aspirations are different to their own.  People make mistakes, for sure, but there's a vast difference between blundering, and setting out to deceive, even if covertly, by equivocation and half-truths.

So, like the tune or not, from the point of view of getting people to have a think about that stuff, and perhaps even discuss it with each other, songs like Wendy Time are a valuable part of the general repertoire.   :smth023

Oh and...this line makes me laugh:  "And when I die," I said / I'll leave you it all."  :lol: :rofl  :evil:

Totally perfect reply.  :smth023  It reminds me very much of Kaz Cooke's menu of perfect replies for the body police and sexual harassment in Real Gorgeous, her BS-antidote book for teenage girls:

QuoteTHEY say:  "Show us your tits!"
YOU say:  "You can always tell a bottle-fed baby!"

THEY say:  "You're fat!"
YOU say:  "I'm me-shaped!"
or - "Anything else?  Perhaps you could write it down for me so I don't forget."
or - "Why don't you grab your bottom lip and pull it over your head?"
etc etc

THEY say:  "You've got no tits."
YOU say:  "Well, they're bigger than your brain."
or - "Your fly is undone."
or - "Am I supposed to care what you think?"
etc etc

:lol: :lol: :lol:

The next track I'm looking at is Open, which also struck me as fitting under this general theme.  Before I get to the lyrics, I just have to mention how wonderful I think the music to this is.  The opening bass notes have been an earworm for me these past couple of days; every time I'm waking up, I'm hearing those notes.  Like with so many other tracks on Wish there's such lovely interplay between the different guitars... it's rare to have essentially two lead guitars plus bass in a contemporary band; let alone a third six-string guitarist, and that's one reason a lot of Cure tracks remind me of string quartet playing, in the way the instruments are interweaving, and there's depth and complexity in the music.


The drumming is fabulous on Wish (but no need to make rude and meaningless comparisons :P); the singing a real departure from previous albums and very, very effective, especially with the diverse added harmonies, including the whispered backings to Apart.

Let's have a look at the words to Open:


OPEN

I really don't know what I'm doing here
I really think I should've gone to bed tonight but...
"Just one drink
And there're some people to meet you
I think that you'll like them
I have to say we do
And I promise in less than than an hour we will honestly go...
Now why don't I just get you another
While you just say hello..."

Yeah just say hello...

So I'm clutching it tight
Another glass in my hand
And my mouth and the smiles
Moving up as I stand up
Too close and too wide
And the smiles are too bright
And I breathe in too deep
And my head's getting light
But the air is getting heavier and it's closer
And I'm starting to sway
And the hands all on my shoulders don't have names
And they won't go away
So here I go
Here I go again...

Falling into strangers
And it's only just eleven
And I'm staring like a child
Until someone slips me heaven
And I take it on my knees
Just like a thousand times before
And I get transfixed
That fixed
And I'm just looking at the floor
Just looking at the floor
Yeah I look at the floor...

And I'm starting to laugh
Like an animal in pain
And I've got blood on my hands
And I've got hands in my brain
And the first short retch
Leaves me gasping for more
And I stagger over screaming
On my way to the floor
And I'm back on my back
With the lights and the lies in my eyes
And the colour and the music's too loud
And my head's all the wrong size
So here I go
Here I go again...

Yeah I laugh and I jump
And I sing and I laugh
And I dance and I laugh
And I laugh and I laugh
And I can't seem to think
Where this is
Who I am
Why I'm keeping this going
Keep pouring it out
Keep pouring it down
Keeping it going
Keep pouring it down
And the way the rain comes down hard...
That's the way I feel inside...

I can't take it anymore
This it I've become
This is it like I get
When my life's going numb
I just keep moving my mouth
I just keep moving my feet
I say I'm loving you to death
Like I'm losing my breath
And all the smiles that I wear
And all the games that I play
And all the drinks that I mix
And I drink until I'm sick
And all the faces I make
And all the shapes that I throw
And all the people I meet
And all the words that I know
Makes me sick to the heart
Oh I feel so tired...

And the way the rain comes down hard...
That's how I feel inside...



Yeah, wow.  :1f635:  When I first listened to this song, I thought that the narrator was being manipulated by a friend/colleague/manager to do something he didn't really want to do (have a drink and talk to people instead of going to bed - knowing where it leads in this case) - but that's not clear-cut; the words in quotes may be uttered either to the narrator, or by the narrator.  Either way, soon it's just like dominoes all going down one after the other; like a chain reaction the narrator is aware of, but can't pull himself out of.  It's evocatively described in such painful detail that you can easily put yourself in the narrator's position, and shudder...

And I do really think that, substance addiction or not, these kinds of scenarios are so commonly created in the Anglo society I live in, where the social habits of a large swathe of the population can create a quicksand that people can fall into before they're really aware of what's going on, and if by then substance addiction has become a part of it, it can get hard to get out.  I do, by the way, believe people have personal responsibility and a degree of free will they can exercise, and that they can't blame the crowd or their drinking buddies once they've become aware of the trap - then it's up to that person who has had that insight to find a way out of there.  Once you wake up, you don't need to be a victim of your circumstances anymore - although some people seem to prefer to remain in whatever undesirable situation it is, as a sort of perpetual victim - and others seem to need to stay at the bottom for a while, before finally making an effort to resurface.

I'm as human as the next person and I'm acutely aware that could have been me, as well, except I've always been a social outsider in situations involving peer group pressure - the moment that starts, whether about smoking, drinking, religion, Avon, Amway or anything else people are trying to foist onto me (in all cases, usually thinking they're trying to share a good thing with me), I'm out of there.  That's been a lucky trait, I think, because I have at least two blood relatives who were alcoholics, and one of them even quite functional (and therefore in even deeper denial).  Owing to a rough childhood, I already had enough on my plate, and it was really excellent that this shiitake wasn't complicated by a substance addiction for me.

But, addictions come in all sorts of guises, some of which are even socially acceptable, and like any person, I've had struggles of my own to sort out, including with biochemical addiction to toxic relationships (my first romantic relationship, a subsequent crush, and my family of origin), which I've written about previously.  I can't tell you how good it felt to shake those particular shackles, and as regarded my family of origin, I didn't really do that completely and properly until I was diagnosed with complex PTSD in my early 40s (the graphic flashbacks were really helpful in that process, and by the way, Bloodflowers, which I chanced upon on my husband's iPod at the time, was an excellent aid with processing the raw emotions and re-building my world from the ground up).

Emotional honesty is an incredibly valuable thing.  The more we can all do this, the better - although it's often a rather rare commodity; and I think that's one of the reasons why our mass communication bards tend to get put on a pedestal - if you don't see it in the people immediately around you, but only in faraway figures, then it tends to be venerated in those figures, and you've then got essentially the same emotional process that allows cults to form.  So, to solve this problem, more of us are going to have to be emotionally honest and open, and look out for one another.  If you can't find it around you, you can try to be the change you want to see - be the kind of person who would have been helpful to know when you were going through hell yourself.  If you can be a small puzzle piece in the healing of others, you will find that your own wounds will start to heal too.  That just seems to be the way these things work.

And by the way, I think that emotional honesty is on the increase - there's much more of it in the younger generations than there was in my own GenX - and even some of my own generation are learning!  ;)

Why is it good that songs like Open are written?  Because they're incredibly emotionally cathartic, generally both for the person writing it, and for people listening.  Because they let us walk a mile in someone else's shoes, and this teaches us empathy, and without empathy, we're all doomed.  Because it teaches us to look at things from perspectives we've perhaps not considered before.  Because it shows us that the world is complex and has many shades of grey, and that there are no easy answers or one-size-fits-all solutions.  Because it reminds us that the most important thing of all is to love one another, as far as that is possible and advisable, and to try to be a light, and to encourage the light of others, instead of squashing it.  And because we're human, it's good to be reminded.  ♥

Hooray!  I'm now just two songs away from being able to tear the wrapper off the self-titled!  🥳
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on January 06, 2021, 06:35:45When I first listened to this song, I thought that the narrator was being manipulated by a friend/colleague/manager to do something he didn't really want to do (have a drink and talk to people instead of going to bed - knowing where it leads in this case) - but that's not clear-cut; the words in quotes may be uttered either to the narrator, or by the narrator. 

As I remember, Robert said it was about the more "sordid aspects" of what they (the band) do, i.e. they're asked to meet a lot of people.

QuoteAnd the way the rain comes down hard
That's how I feel inside...

To me, that always seemed like a "typical" Robert Smith lyric line!
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

WRAPPING UP WISH, SO I CAN TEAR THE WRAPPER OFF THE NEXT ONE

The two tracks left to consider are Friday I'm In Love and Doing The Unstuck.


I've been pretty vocal about the fact that this is not my favourite song - I really loathed this number for most of my life, chiefly because of constant oversaturation and that I don't generally like pop music, or for that matter, rap or electronic music or heavy metal or boy bands or German ooompa-ooompa Oktoberfest music, and I will turn off the radio if something like this comes on, or run screaming if I can't.  The chief way I will make an exception and undertake to listen to things from these genres is if a person I love is asking me to because it means something to them - and this included student music presentations for English class, because I did genuinely love and respect my students.  In that case I owe it to people to listen to their music, and suspend the judgement and personal tastes, and put myself in their shoes - which is actually a really good exercise.

On those occasions, all that goes to one side, and the focus is on the person who's sharing something that's important to them - it puts me in a different brain space, which turns off all these adverse reactions, and I'm glad that this is so, because I have vivid memories of my favourite music being ridiculed by my birth family, and swore never to do that to anyone else (that's after I got chucked out of Year 12 English class one afternoon for laughing at Why Can't I Be You and realising I was doing the same thing; and if only Pauline-of-the-black-spiky-hair had played the track immediately before that off the same album which was sitting there in that CD player, I'd not only have not been chucked out of the room, I'd have gone and bought the album...and instead it took me another quarter century to realise The Cure actually did other music too :lol:).

...but, it's pretty much all you'll hear on Australian popular radio, by this band - and it's one of the most played songs here, you can hear it every Friday (and run screaming), which really put me off The Cure ("OMG, not that band!").  So it was something of a surprise to me that, having turned this song off for 28 years, in the context of listening to Wish, I have no urge to turn it off at all.  Because it fits and because the rest of Wish makes me forget all of that.

Scenic detour from memory lane:  I actually remember the last time I heard Friday I'm In Love on the radio and didn't turn it off or run away screaming.  It was back in 2012, when we were building our house, and our genius carpenter was constructing the frame and roofing the place, while we were doing odd jobs in preparation for building the bale walls - the first thing on the build we were able to do ourselves.

Chris and his offsiders built this:



...while we prepped our wall build:



...and laid the very first bales:



...the first of maaaaany...



...but that was later.  Sadly we don't have a proper picture of Chris, because he was camera-shy, and because he never stood still long enough, so if we'd taken any photos of him on the sly, they'd have been blurry. :)

It was at the early stage we had Chris on the building site, and he loves music, so brought his own large portable stereo, which he ran off the generator, because this was in the days before we had an off-grid solar-electric system.  Chris didn't bother playing CDs on the building site; he tuned the radio to Mix-FM (which his young offsider always referred to as "Fogey-FM" :lol:) and blasted the site with the resulting soundwaves. 

That's when I last remember hearing Friday I'm In Love in full (and up really loud), on the radio - and I thought, "Oh no!" when it came on, but didn't say anything - we love Chris, he's a super person as well as an extremely good carpenter and roofer - and he actually started bouncing on his feet and beaming, and going, "I really like this! Do you?"  He also liked Garbage, so Brett gave him all the B-sides he had from them.

Isn't it funny how you can often go right back into a particular point of the film footage of the past, because of a song.

Back to the actual song, here's a nice link to read:  https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/the-cures-friday-im-in-love-7-things-you-didnt-know-111331/

Here's the official film clip, which I've never watched before:


Yeah.  This really doesn't recommend the band to me very much, sorry - and I'm not generally a video-clip watcher, anyway.  This is a bit like when U2, in the 90s, were allegedly being ironic about being rock stars, and doing it a little too well - this is the kind of thing that sold me the idea that The Cure were a lightweight pop outfit - as it will, if it's all you ever see.

In some ways, The Cure are like a thickly iced carrot-walnut cake - I have to take the icing off to be able to enjoy the cake.  And when all I ever saw was icing, I didn't even know there was any cake. (And though I did always like Lullaby, I thought it was a one-off. :lol:)


Next song - last one to look at:


I first came across this on Join The Dots, as an extended version, and wrote about it on this thread.  This was my brief comment at the time:

QuoteDoing The Unstuck is an odd one, to me.  Elements of it I like, others I don't.  The thing I like best about it is the music starting about 45 seconds into it, and for about a minute from there; then it crosses in and out of borderline headachy for me.  The topic isn't bad, the presentation of it just a bit Playschool though - remove the mild sexual references, and you can have preschoolers bopping along to this and singing the words.  Brett doesn't like this one at all, and when I talk about the Playschool vibe, he smiles and says, "Well, guess who is the Dark Wiggle!"   :happy

That was nearly 18 months ago, and this is one of the songs that really grew on me.  The version on Wish is very together, but my favourite bit is still the instrumental stuff from about 45 seconds into the extended version off the B-sides.  I still think this song is a bit Playschool, but not nearly as Playschool as the video to Friday I'm In Love, which I think pre-schoolers would totally adore.  My inner pre-schooler kind of doesn't; she was always dressing up as a Native American and being serious, and she's still doing that.  ;)

It's only in the last post I was looking at childlike versus childish, and I suppose we each draw our lines differently.  Having said that, becoming a fan of The Cure's more serious music has made me a little more receptive to their shinier stuff, and that's probably the reverse of how it works for many others, who maybe get lured into buying an album because of a shiny pop song from the radio, and then may get the surprise of their lives.  :lol:  :evil:

These days, I see Doing The Unstuck as something of a mental health song, and enjoy it.  Let's have a look at the words... I'm going to do a bit of annotating on this one as I go...


DOING THE UNSTUCK

It's a perfect day for letting go
For setting fire to bridges
Boats
And other dreary worlds you know

...usually we're supposed to build bridges, but sometimes it's better to burn them - at the risk of sounding like Ecclesiastes (or the Byrds)...this verse is a bit cryptic, but perhaps "boats" are another means of crossing over to another side you've decided you no longer want to visit, once you've burnt the bridge.  This might be breaking with people who are net-negative for your life, after trying other things; or distancing yourself from difficult family members, emotionally or otherwise; things like that, and yes, speaking from experience, it can be a really good idea to do something like this - go where you're loved for who you are, and where you love people for who they are, instead - breaking away from negative relationships leaves you so much more energy to do that, and can have a net-positive effect both on your own life and mental/emotional health, and on your ability to be a good person to be around, for those who do love and respect you.

...and on another level, you might be burning bridges by throwing out your TV aerial or de-programming the commercial channels from your TV, so that you don't get sucked down into wasting your life with the propaganda, brainwash and 24-hour news cycle offered by many stations, and just retain things like (in Australia) the ABC and the multicultural broadcaster SBS and indigenous channel NITV, where you can actually learn something useful.  This is again about energy, learning, etc instead of time-and-energy-sucks and treading water.

...and that's really like not going shopping hungry, but after a meal and with a list, so you're making choices with your cerebrum and none of the little tricks supermarkets employ to get you to buy the wrong stuff (which is the stuff that's rubbish for you, the community and the environment, but has high profit margins for them) are going to work.  Or, you can just stop shopping at supermarkets altogether, or at least cut it back, and find a nice greengrocer and butcher and fishmonger and farmer's market instead, and perhaps start growing some of your own food in your backyard, or in an allotment etc.

...things like this:  Thinking about your life and making choices that are better for your health, relationships, happiness etc


Let's get happy!
It's a perfect day for making out
To wake up with a smile
Without a doubt
To burst grin giggle bliss skip jump sing and shout
Let's get happy!

...after the first two lines here, we're now digging down to child level inside, because that's what children do and that's what we also can determine to do.  I've never given up skipping, for instance; I still do that.  Sometimes my husband and I impersonate kangaroos and start hopping around the dinner table together in a strange game of chasey.  Why not?  It's exactly the sort of thing I did as a kid.  It's fantastic physical exercise, it's interaction, and it releases a boatload of endorphins into your bloodstream.  Much better than being a "serious adult" all the time and going to Big Pharma for anti-depressants.  I think we need to be every age we've ever been, take the best from all of them, mix it up a bit.

"But it's much too late" you say
"For doing this now
We should have done it then"
Well it just goes to show
How wrong you can be
And how you really should know
That it's never too late
To get up and go...

...there's a common objection, and a commonsense response...better late than never, etc

It's a perfect day for kiss and swell
For rip-zipping button-popping kiss and well...
There's loads of other stuff can make you yell
Let's get happy!

...there's a couple of ways to read these words, but the theme is pretty much the same.  It's clever to use a word so that different denotations of it could apply equally, as has been done here.

It's a perfect day for doing the unstuck
For dancing like you can't hear the beat
And you don't give a further thought

Hahaha.  The short pause in delivery while your mind rhymes, only to change the word.  :lol:  I've seen this before in the Cure catalogue, it just escapes me which song it was...

To things like feet
Let's get happy!

The verse as a whole is a bit like, "Dance as if nobody can see you, love as if your heart has never been broken."  It's a good thing not to be constrained by other people's judgement or by your own adverse experiences, if you can swing it.

"But it's much too late" you say
"For doing this now
We should have done it then"
Well it just goes to show
How wrong you can be
And how you really should know
That it's never too late
To get up and go...

Kick out the gloom
Kick out the blues
Tear out the pages with all the bad news

Sometimes you really can decide to do that; it's a mindset, a determination, and I think it's a good thing to keep in your repertoire...

Pull down the mirrors and pull down the walls
Tear up the stairs and tear up the floors
Oh just burn down the house!
Burn down the street!
Turn everything red and the beat is complete
With the sound of your world
Going up in the fire
It's a perfect day to throw back your head
And kiss it all goodbye!

The narrator started with the mirror here, which made me think of the tendency a lot of us have to look at ourselves critically, and so mirrors aren't necessarily loaded with positive vibes for us.  He doesn't stop there, however - he tears down the whole house and sets it on fire.  Nice metaphor, and it conveys this idea that you hear from people who have lost most of their possessions in bushfires, that as awful as that has been, they understand what's really important in life, and it's not material possessions - they're just stuff, and much of it can be replaced, should you want to.  What's really important is being alive, and the people you love.  You don't literally have to burn down your house, either - you can sell it, think of it differently, etc.  Diogenes famously went as far as living in a barrel, because he thought that people become slaves to their possessions, and there's much truth in this, and that's one of many good reasons many people are now interested in Tiny Houses.

It's a perfect day for getting wild
Forgetting all your worries
Life
And everything that makes you cry
Let's get happy!
It's a perfect day for dreams come true
For thinking big
And doing anything you want to do
Let's get happy!

Yeah, that's nice - it's important to throw the cultural conditioning and social constraints off regularly, and also our own mental ruts, more than anything, I think!  Isn't it ironic (and also handy!) that often, the way to a happier day is just a determination to make it so?

"But it's much too late" you say
"For doing this now
We should have done it then"
Well it just goes to show
How wrong you can be
And how you really should know
That it's never too late
To get up and go...

Kick out the gloom
Kick out the blues
Tear out the pages with all the bad news
Pull down the mirrors and pull down the walls
Tear up the stairs and tear up the floors
Oh just burn down the house!
Burn down the street!
Turn everything red and the dream is complete
With the sound of your world
Going up in the fire
It's a perfect day to throw back your head
And kiss it all goodbye!


Very nice!  And I still like the jangly, rolling bit of instrumental music near the start of the extended version best, musically speaking!  :)

And that's the end of looking at Wish, at least for now.  :cool
SueC is time travelling

SueC

Having wrapped up my initial tour of Wish, I can now I can go listen to the other two albums that arrived here late last year. 🥳

Just before I do, though, a quick summary of how the Cure studio albums I've listened to so far gel with me personally.  Here's a pictorial representation:


Bloodflowers

Disintegration / KMKMKM / Wish (no particular order)


The Top / Wild Mood Swings / 4:13 Dream / The Head On The Door (no particular order)




Japanese Whispers (not an album, but still)


In other words, so far, Bloodflowers is my personal favourite, followed very closely by Disintegration, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me and Wish, in no particular order. They're all albums I tend to play from start to finish, with few if any songs that I want to skip - in other words, they are albums I tend to listen to as albums, and they have many, many songs on them I really love, relate to etc etc.

The next tier for me so far contains The Top, Wild Mood Swings, 4:13 Dream, and The Head On The Door, again in no particular order.  I'm glad to have these albums in the house, and there's collectively a lot of songs on them I love, but I tend not to listen to these all the way through, just in brackets.  With Wild Mood Swings and 4:13 Dream there are at least two tracks on each that I very much dislike and therefore tend to skip altogether (see here).  While I skip two on KMKMKM as well, it's a double album.  The Head On The Door overall didn't quite gel with me the same way as a lot of the others, probably because it was distinctly 80s in flavour, but Sinking is a favourite off it.

Japanese Whispers is not an album, just something we bought a few years ago at a music store closing-down sale, and when we listened to it, we really hated most of it!  No amount of trying again made it any better.  The three tracks on it we wouldn't throw away are already on the Greatest Hits and get played live a bit, so we'd not replace this CD if it accidentally came to grief, or turned into a bat and flew away.  :-D  I think Love Cats is a very good song and The Walk isn't bad, apart from its awful bloody 80s keyboards.  Let's Go To Bed isn't our favourite, but we'd keep it mostly for historical reasons.

How would you arrange your Cure album groups?  Or do you actually number them from most favourite to least?  I can't do that - I think there's so much stuff that's equivalent in quality and appeal to me, I just put them in different tiers. :)

By the way, here's how @MAtT, an all-the-way-back fan who's listened to everything and lots of bootlegs as well, arranged his:

Quote from: MAtT on August 17, 2020, 08:49:27For me, in the grand scheme of things for me, HOTD is a lower tier Cure album. It's better than the post 2000 offerings and (maybe) WMS, it's up there with Three Imaginary Boys & Wish, but (just) below The Top. And it's nowhere near the fantastic, mature diversity of Kiss Me, the mature class of Disintegration and Bloodflowers, or the ultimate raw genius of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography.

(All subjective I know!)

His original post on that goes into more detail and is worth checking out - just click the link in the quote to go there.  :)

Five studio albums to go - and the new one in the works, for which I have great hopes, considering that the two most recent, standalone Cure songs in the public repertoire - It Can Never Be The Same and Step Into The Light (which I looked at earlier in this thread) to me are right up there with Bloodflowers. ♥

Unlike some of you who've been disappointed by the delay of the upcoming album, I like to think it's just being made even better in the meantime, and anyway, I'm still very busy working my way through albums I've not heard before!  :winking_tongue

PS:  I've just realised I've still not looked at any lyrics for KMKMKM on this open journal - that got forgotten because I was actually listening to two "new" Cure albums at the same time, I think.  Some day I may well remedy this - either by editing things into old posts, or by linking new posts to the original ones on this album.  Also of course, there's whole albums I've not written about much here because I already had them before I joined this forum 18 months ago...
SueC is time travelling

SueC

FIRST IMPRESSIONS - SELF-TITLED 2004 ALBUM

The general vibe about this album from other people had been fairly negative - including from my husband, who sampled it in a record shop when it came out but decided he didn't like the sound.  But you know what, I've just given it a spin and I like it.

Just clarifying - looking at what's been written out there, on Reddit and forums and in the music press, I get the general impression that quite a few of the original fans (or at least the most vocal ones) were never really happy again post-Wish (or some of them, post-Pornography).  The extra-whiny complaining began with Wild Mood Swings, and never really ended. Sometimes I think that some people get stuck in a perceived golden musical age of their own teenage years, possibly because that's when everything is fresh, and a lot of neural connections are being made, and people go through a lot of feelings.  Once you've grown up, you may not be quite so easy to move or inspire again, particularly if there's a tendency to nostalgia, and a dissatisfaction with the present in general.  And the problem may actually be that, and not the music.

Because Brett didn't like this album on first impressions, my expectations were at the low end, but I was pleasantly surprised.  First of all, the sound production on this one is very good - and this was not the case with 4:13 Dream, or with our copy of Disintegration.  Both sounded clipped the way MP3s sound clipped to me, and the 2008 album sadly seems to come from the bottom of a well, and not in a good way.  So, the first thing to like here:  Decent sound.

It's true that the music has a hard edge to it on this album; more on some tracks than on others.  However, I was already used to that from the back end of the 2008 album; songs I ended up making friends with, on closer examination, and after I was over the aural shock.  But there's more on this album than hard edges - there's also a lot of beauty, and a lot of maturity, and above all, a huge amount of passion.

And as is usually the case, there's lots to think about.  The lyrics are already creating a favourable impression.  That kind of mature writing, I so much prefer to a lot of what I heard on The Head On The Door, for example.  But you know, I'm in my late 40s, and not nearly as easy to impress as I was in my 20s - particularly by things that strike me as illogical, or unwise.  Writing does tend to improve with age, when people are open to learning.

Occasionally Robert Smith is a bit screamy on this record, which was one of the things that put Brett off (but he listens to Tool and I don't, go figure).  Sometimes though, the song kind of requires it - Us Or Them was already a firm favourite of mine from live recordings.  I remember when Pride (In The Name Of Love) came out a long time ago, my father was saying, "Is this guy crazy?  Why is he screaming like this?" but Bono wasn't actually screaming aggressively, and the verses were quite restrained, while the chorus carried all the pain and outrage of the subject matter (there's a world of difference between destructive aggression, and that).  I think it's the same sort of thing with Us Or Them.  Why don't we compare and contrast the two, today - considering I've already recently been drawn into the Cure vs U2 discussion on this forum, and considering that these songs are especially topical again just now.

We'll go chronologically:


There's a lot of melody in this song; it's an unusual track, and one that made my hairs stand on end when I first heard it, and still does, with its combination of rawness and dignity and all-out, unashamed passion and involvement. This has always been a favourite song of mine; and very few on that theme have come near.

Until this one, 20 years later:


Musically it's very different, but the spirit of it is the same to me. ♥

More later; have some more listening to do.
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on January 10, 2021, 11:45:45How would you arrange your Cure album groups?  Or do you actually number them from most favourite to least?  I can't do that ...

Well I don't want to number them as well. I'll try and arrange some groups below:

Disintegration, Wish, Kiss Me, Head On The Door

Faith, Seventeen Seconds, Pornography (aka the first "trilogy"!)

Bloodflowers, Wild Mood Swings, The Cure (2004), The Top

4:13 Dream, Three Imaginary Boys


(Note: I did not list "compilations" like Boys don't cry LP or Japanese Whispers or any "best of" collections or live albums.)
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

SMALL UPDATE - SELF-TITLED 2004 ALBUM

I can already tell you this much for sure - where I'd put this album in my little diagram:


Bloodflowers

Disintegration / KMKMKM / Wish / The Cure (no particular order)


The Top / Wild Mood Swings / 4:13 Dream / The Head On The Door (no particular order)


The individual tiers happen to be in the order of acquisition - not in order of preference - these are tiers that I think are about equivalent.  And since I taught for about two decades of my life, if I had to "grade" these albums, then Bloodflowers would get an A++, the next tier an A+, and the "bottom" tier - which is not so bottomy, after all - would get somewhere between an A- and a B+.  I'm prepared to concede that personal preference is making me lift Bloodflowers above the next tier by a small increment, but then a lot of this is subjective anyway.  However, I do feel that Bloodflowers is a more emotionally mature piece of work than Disintegration, and that it's musically more beautiful than the self-titled (emotional maturity I could make objective arguments for, the question of beauty I cannot).

I've had a couple more listen-throughs with the 2004 album, and it's getting better with each listen - there's so much depth there.  I don't want to skip anything, and the lyrics are excellent.  There's nothing in them that feels borrowed and regurgitated, or not well thought through.  It all feels genuine and up-front and real; the thoughts of a person who's accrued some living, and has been engaged in independent thought, without obvious deference to particular systems of belief or philosophy, but clearly informed by those things.

As I'm getting used to some of the musical hard edges, I'm also discovering a lot of loveliness, in counterpoint but also, interestingly, in the hard edges themselves.  The singing on this album is tremendous; it's so expressive, and also often so melodic, and so acrobatic, that it's breathtaking.  It's often like voice-as-instrument, and like voice-expressing-raw-emotion in the way that mere words cannot.

But this album is not emotion without thought; there's a lot of thinking that's gone on here - and I like to see both the head and the heart in music and literature and other art, not just one or the other - because the intellect without a heart is cold, and the heart without an intellect is anaemic and gullible.

This album is making me think, and it's also moving me immensely - no mean feat.  I don't need to tell you about the musical competence of these people; I think everyone here agrees on that, whether or not the band is playing a style you personally like.  But it's the heart and the intelligence in this music that I'm responding to, with this album (as with Bloodflowers).  ♥

I'll start pulling songs out of this album that are particularly jumping out at me, when I get some more time!
SueC is time travelling

SueC

AMAZING...

Here's the song that leaps out at me the most - one I'd not heard before.  There's lots of excellent tracks on the self-titled album, and as mentioned before, Us Or Them has been a longstanding favourite from live footage/audio.  But this song is breathtaking - this is going to be a lifelong favourite; and I don't as yet have words, so I'll add those later and for now, just post the song.


I've just played that on the main stereo and even Brett said he thought that was musically fantastic, and that's despite the fact that he left this CD in the shop after test-listening, when it came out.  "It wasn't Bloodflowers," he said - and I laughed, because Bloodflowers is Bloodflowers, it's a one-off, unique album, and it would be rather sad if a band just turned something unique into a formula, and played it to death.  Instead, they turned around and four years later, made something else unique that was not like any of its predecessors.  Wish and Disintegration are also unique in their own way.  Don't ask me how The Cure managed to do these changes in direction, and still sound like themselves, instead of sounding like everyone else.

I'll write more about the song when I find some words.  :)

♦ ♥ ♦

OK.  Let's start with the lyrics.


ANNIVERSARY

A year ago today we stood
Above this same awakening world
I held you...
You never wanted me to know

Another year ago today
Before this same awakening world
I held you...
I never meant to let you go

There was a moment
There always is
When time stood still
And always was this...
One endless moment
You turn in pain
And I always let you go
Over and over again...

A year ago tonight we lay
Below this same remembering sky
I kissed you...
You never wanted me to know

Another year ago tonight
Behind this same remembering sky
I kissed you...
I never meant to let you go

Another moment
There always is
As time stands still
And always is this...
One endless moment
You tell me all
And I hold you and I kiss you
And I never let you go

I never let you go...



The words make lovely standalone poetry, once again - but singing these words, and setting them to music, the way that was done here, takes all of this up to a totally different level.  It lends the words wings.  There's so much that language just can't express, but music can.  I read somewhere that Robert Smith was lamenting sometime ago never reaching the greatness of the writers he admired, but at his best he's as good as anyone I've read, and then there's the music...he's got extra dimensions to paint with, so he really needn't worry about that - this track is as deeply moving as anything I've read in literature, or heard in music.  ♥

The best works of art, whatever they are - visual, written, music - fly me out to the edge of the stratosphere, to give me both a bird's eye view of life on earth - and as part of that, my own life - and a view skyward into infinity.  I see us in our proper perspective, which is that we're tiny ants in an enormous and incredible place - the same feeling I get when I walk on the dramatic coastal cliffs of our South Coast:  I feel how small I am, and how larger than life the landscape is, the forces of nature are; how extraordinary it is that rocks and water, waves and sunlight, gravity and Rayleigh scatter, life on earth exist; and planets, and stars, and black holes, and infinite distance.  I feel how insignificant I really am in the scheme of things, whereas the arrogant, blind and emotionally destitute amongst us, with their childish me-me minds and obsession with possession and control, view us as the cream of creation and the masters of the universe, and to them the whole world, XTC put this so brilliantly, "Is biscuit-shaped / and just for me to feed my face."

My smallness, and humanity's smallness, in the scheme of things doesn't scare me, or make me feel uncomfortable - it actually comforts me.  Whatever happens to us, individually or collectively, these things that many of us like to tread underfoot will still be here a long time after we're gone.  They are bigger and more enduring and don't participate in our fantasy of human greatness.

♦ ♥ ♦

This is a song about love.  There's another incredible thing - that we fleetingly exist and can love one another.  But love is not an easy, happy-ever-after thing, not even in a long-term relationship between two people who are best friends and then some, and have many things in common, and who admire each other for good reasons, and laugh so much their faces are creasing permanently, and love one another to bits, and make adventures out of life, and love to share the road.

Because when you love, you also have to confront the deepest darkness in each of you.  The best songs about love acknowledge this, and it makes them more beautiful, because they are anchored in truth and honesty, and not in fantasy or turning a blind eye or creative editing.  And love is more real and more secure once you stop denying this, once you acknowledge there's flaws in each of you, and when you can love each other without your honeymoon glasses on.  When neither of you feel you have to be perfect in order to love and be loved; when it's enough to be works in progress; when you understand there is no love without compassion and forgiveness, for yourself too.

It's not easy to talk about these things clearly, so I want to also say what I do NOT mean by this.  I've written the above in the context of a healthy, respectful relationship, not as an excuse for abuse and bad behaviour.  I'm aware that habitually abusive people like to invoke notions like forgiveness and compassion with the people they abuse, rather than cleaning up their own act and growing some respect and empathy (if that's even possible for some of them).  Sadly, people can get sucked into these notions, which are very warped notions of what forgiveness and compassion are supposed to be;  because neither are an open invitation to use a person as a doormat, and because love also includes our responsibility to protect ourselves from other people's abuse.

There is a difference between relationships where abuse is a pattern, from one or both sides, and fundamentally healthy, respectful relationships between people who are also human and flawed, and will collide painfully with these flaws from time to time.  The difference is in the acknowledgement, the taking responsibility, and the genuine working on it.  I'd hate for people in a relationship with a habitually abusive person to think, "I need to have more love and compassion and forgiveness for them to make this better;  I need to accept them as they are and put up with it, everyone has flaws." 

Your primary responsibility is to your own mental and emotional health, and to understand where your responsibility begins and ends.  Another person's bad behaviour is not your responsibility, it is theirs; and to change that is their responsibility - you're only responsible for your own behaviour, and you're also absolutely responsible for protecting yourself from other people's bad behaviour.  You can be compassionate and forgiving, without putting yourself back in the firing line - you can decide where your own limits are, and enforce those limits - you do not have to make yourself available for abuse, or to continue to be in a relationship of any sort with a person who has a destructive pattern.  You do not have to fix people like this;  you can't - they have to do that for themselves.  We are all only responsible for our own behaviour - and absolutely responsible for our own behaviour.

It's kind of sad not being able to write about love without also getting into this stuff, but that's the reality, and one that's not sufficiently talked about.  Think about all the people sitting in relationships with abusive partners, who hear songs on the radio about the dark side of love and the flawed nature of humans, and use that to normalise their own situation, which they should be getting out of.  (Or, of course, who are listening to songs about love that promote dysfunctional patterns as "romantic" and "normal" - there's lots of songs like this, because there's unfortunately lots of people writing love songs who aren't clear on stuff like this themselves, or not yet anyway.)

After that unfortunately necessary aside, I will be returning to the fantastic song we started out with.  :)

♦ ♥ ♦

Happy love songs can be OK, but the ones with a bit of vulnerability in them tend to be more compelling, to me anyway.  Also, there's this general principle that it's often not until we are confronted with loss that we become wide awake, and fully realise what we have, instead of taking any of it for granted.  Here's a Leunig poem on the topic:


God bless this tiny little boat
And me who travels in it.
It stays afloat for years and years
And sinks within a minute.

And so the soul in which we sail,
Unknown by years of thinking,
Is deeply felt and understood
The minute that it's sinking.



Also tying in with this is Khalil Gibran saying that the more you are carved out by sorrow, the more joy you can contain.  I like art and literature and music that goes to both sides - the pain and the bliss, the dark night of the soul and the flight on clouds - two sides of a coin, in human experience - but then, human experience is a lot more than that particular coin, too!  :)

The song Anniversary could be about a wedding anniversary or another kind of relationship anniversary.  It could be about an anniversary of something significant and/or painful happening in or outside a relationship (which is probably a spouse relationship, but doesn't have to be).  The details of that don't really matter; the imagery is more important; and it's beautiful imagery which points at the vulnerability of human beings, and the vulnerability of love itself.  There's something not being told, and eventually it is.  We don't know what that is, but the details don't matter.  The disclosure of something difficult has a tension most of us would be painfully aware of from our own experience.  People can get hurt either side; can hurt each other with the way this goes.  Can run if they get hurt, or can reach out.

When we were married a couple of years, we had some rough spots, and a wise neighbour who'd been married for decades saw that we were upset and later said to me, without knowing any details, "Forgiveness is really important for going the distance."  It was lovely of this person to come out and say this, just like that, in-between discussing the window installations we were working on at the time.  Just one sentence dropped into the general conversation like that, and a look, and, "I don't want to interfere, it's just I've been married over 30 years and this is the biggest thing I learnt and why we're still together," and then back to the conversation about window installations.  This came back to me when I heard this song, and it is very true.  Wouldn't it be great if you could never hurt each other, but that's not how it is, even if it's really important to you - because you're human and life is complicated.  You can get better at it, which is nice.  I always think that just when I've got it all worked out, I'll be 80 and needing to plan my own funeral.  :winking_tongue

It's hard to express in words why I find this song so moving; I've touched on a couple of points here that come into it, but it's also that after invoking things like vulnerability and tension and fragility and pain and sadness and compassion and personal limitations and even the brevity of life, it ends in love and acceptance.  And that sentence I just wrote is just a charcoal sketch with my left hand, of something that itself is a watercolour, and speaks so much more eloquently for itself than I can speak for it, that I sometimes wonder why I even try!

I love music like this; it's such a vivid expression of being human, and being in this universe.  ♥
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on January 11, 2021, 10:02:02Occasionally Robert Smith is a bit screamy on this record

Which is, I think, because they recorded the vocals while the band were recording their instruments (i.e. "live", with a few overdubs of course), so he had to make himself heard (as compared to those albums for which he sang in a booth with headphones on).

Quote from: SueC on January 12, 2021, 11:39:27Here's the song that leaps out at me the most - one I'd not heard before.

I like this one too and it's quite different from the others on that album, less guitar-driven, less "screamy", with more synth on it (might have to do with Perry Bamonte being composer of the music, so it has been said)!

Quote from: SueC on January 12, 2021, 11:39:27...Bloodflowers is Bloodflowers, it's a one-off, unique album, and it would be rather sad if a band just turned something unique into a formula, and played it to death.

Yep, you gotta love them for not making the same album over and over! :smth023

I've always enjoyed the fact that the Cure were "different" - not just from other bands, but also from album to album.  :cool
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Quote from: Ulrich on January 12, 2021, 15:17:50
Quote from: SueC on January 11, 2021, 10:02:02Occasionally Robert Smith is a bit screamy on this record

Which is, I think, because they recorded the vocals while the band were recording their instruments (i.e. "live", with a few overdubs of course), so he had to make himself heard (as compared to those albums for which he sang in a booth with headphones on).

Yeah, I read about that on the leaflet, and that it was recorded in a candlelit room etc etc.  Which reminded me of another favourite song of mine, which this artist did for a soundtrack and freaked out the studio personnel by turning off the lights, lighting a candle, and arranging a doll in a corner, which she proceeded to sing to:


The live recording explains some of the immediacy of the 2004 album, I think.  :cool  And as I said earlier, I think the singing on this is actually marvellous.  Screamy or not!  :)


Quote from: Ulrich on January 12, 2021, 15:17:50I like this one too and it's quite different from the others on that album, less guitar-driven, less "screamy", with more synth on it (might have to do with Perry Bamonte being composer of the music, so it has been said)!

Someone told me (I think it was here) that he also composed Trust, which is also wonderful music.  I'm not sure how all of that works, of course, because I've never seen the process, but I imagine that in such cases, mostly, one person brings is a sketch, and then everybody works on it to colour it in?

By the way, Italian trivia, because I'm part-Italian - the surname Bamonte comes from a nickname people had for someone who was such a giant he blocked out the mountain when he was coming down the road.  :lol:


...I'm going to add to the post on Anniversary above when the correct words arrive.  The words have been slightly delayed by being woken by a bat flapping in my face just after midnight last night, and then having to do a stage performance with Brett in order to let it back out into the great outdoors.  :lol:  It's so much fun living in Australia.  The critters! 🦇
SueC is time travelling

SueC

After a bat-free night, the words returned, and I completed post #97 above.  Wonderful song!  :)

I already know which song I want to get into next, but just wanted to add a little post-post (as opposed to postscript) to #97.  I was thinking about love songs with a high level of tension and vulnerability in them as is the case with Anniversary. From the overall pool of songs about love I've heard, both voluntarily and involuntarily :1f635:, over the last 35 or so years, any artist, these are in the minority.  (Mushy melodrama and hormonal hyperventilating are not the same thing as what I'm getting at here. :P)

Obviously The Cure do a fair few of these - Plainsong and If Only Tonight We Could Sleep are two obvious examples of that, to me.  I wanted to post a few examples from other artists though, that have that kind of liquifying effect on my interior, that kind of heart-stoppingness and needing to remember to breathe.

This one was written by a person in his mid-20s, which I think needs to be taken into account when you're considering the lyrics - I'm not quite sure if he's super aware at this point that we're each responsible for our own selves and that our partner is not our rescuer - like a lot of early love songs by all sorts of artists including The Cure, there's a hint of co-dependency in this one (as opposed to inter-dependency) - and considering there's a fair bit of enculturation of co-dependency (even if your own family of origin was miraculously free of it), that's unsurprising.  But putting that aside, musically and vocally, this fits the category...



A traditional song, lyrics and translation here, interpreted by Capercaillie:



Another traditional song, interpreted by Sinéad O'Connor and band, who drag it firmly into this category:



One from Nick Cave:



One from The Waterboys; Mike Scott pens a fair few like this:



When I think of more, I will add them, and reader suggestions are always welcome too.  :cool

PS: Note that the Waterboys track is over 12 minutes long. That's even longer than Watching Me Fall, or The Promise.  Of course, a song is as long as it needs to be.  Still, this little fact got Brett into At Home With The Smiths mode again.  He was going, "The new album isn't out yet."  (Assuming morose cartoon voice:)  "I'll show Mike.  I'll do a song one second longer.  Then he'll have to buy me a beer next time we're down at t'pub."
SueC is time travelling

SueC

ALL MANNER OF GRIEF



THE PROMISE

How time will heal
Make me forget
You promised me
Time will heal
Make me forget
You promised me
Love will save us all and time will heal
You promised me...

How love will save
Make me forget
You promised me
Love will save
Make me forget
You promised me
Time will heal us all and love will save
You promised me...

I trusted you
I wanted your words
Believed in you
I needed your words
Time will heal
Make me forget
And love will save us all

You promised me another wish
Another way
You promised me another dream
Another day
You promised me another time
You promised me another life

You promised me...

So I swallowed the shame and I waited
I buried the blame and I waited
Choked back years of memories
I pushed down the pain and I waited
Trying to forget...

You promised me another wish
Another way
You promised me another dream
Another day
You promised me another time
You promised me...
Another lie

Oh you promised me...
And I waited... And I waited... And I waited...

And I'm still waiting...



This song leapt out at me for a number of reasons.  One is, do you know how Charles Dickens is famous for his "nutshell portraits" of minor characters in his books?  Here's a few examples in an excerpt from Great Expectations:

Bentley Drummle, who was so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book as if its writer had done him an injury, did not take up an acquaintance in a more agreeable spirit. Heavy in figure, movement, and comprehension,—in the sluggish complexion of his face, and in the large, awkward tongue that seemed to loll about in his mouth as he himself lolled about in a room,—he was idle, proud, niggardly, reserved, and suspicious. He came of rich people down in Somersetshire, who had nursed this combination of qualities until they made the discovery that it was just of age and a blockhead. Thus, Bentley Drummle had come to Mr. Pocket when he was a head taller than that gentleman, and half a dozen heads thicker than most gentlemen.
      Startop had been spoilt by a weak mother and kept at home when he ought to have been at school, but he was devotedly attached to her, and admired her beyond measure. He had a woman's delicacy of feature, and was—"as you may see, though you never saw her," said Herbert to me—"exactly like his mother." It was but natural that I should take to him much more kindly than to Drummle, and that, even in the earliest evenings of our boating, he and I should pull homeward abreast of one another, conversing from boat to boat, while Bentley Drummle came up in our wake alone, under the overhanging banks and among the rushes. He would always creep in-shore like some uncomfortable amphibious creature, even when the tide would have sent him fast upon his way; and I always think of him as coming after us in the dark or by the back-water, when our own two boats were breaking the sunset or the moonlight in mid-stream.
      Herbert was my intimate companion and friend. I presented him with a half-share in my boat, which was the occasion of his often coming down to Hammersmith; and my possession of a half-share in his chambers often took me up to London. We used to walk between the two places at all hours. I have an affection for the road yet (though it is not so pleasant a road as it was then), formed in the impressibility of untried youth and hope.
      When I had been in Mr. Pocket's family a month or two, Mr. and Mrs. Camilla turned up. Camilla was Mr. Pocket's sister. Georgiana, whom I had seen at Miss Havisham's on the same occasion, also turned up. She was a cousin,—an indigestive single woman, who called her rigidity religion, and her liver love. These people hated me with the hatred of cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon me in my prosperity with the basest meanness. Towards Mr. Pocket, as a grown-up infant with no notion of his own interests, they showed the complacent forbearance I had heard them express. Mrs. Pocket they held in contempt; but they allowed the poor soul to have been heavily disappointed in life, because that shed a feeble reflected light upon themselves.


Dickens is a master at summing up people in brief but evocative descriptions, and I think The Cure have a similar talent for summing up emotions and situations in (relatively) brief but evocative pieces of music.  The Promise is a vivid portrait of deep disappointment and grief, and it instantly took me back to the last time I'd heard someone express these emotions, to the same painful extent.  The fact that this was also on my iPod and in the garden probably helped to link the two; the brain does things like this...

I listen to a lot of podcasts, including some very unusual ones.  Some years ago one of the topics that interested me is people who were brought up in religious communities undergoing a faith crisis.  This happens to a fair few people born into serious organised religions when they start to get a higher education which exposes them to other world views.  There's a guy in America called John Dehlin who has been podcasting for years about faith crises coming out of Mormonism, and who organises support and social groups for post-Mormon and post-religious people - because one of the problems with people from tight religions losing their faith is that they then not infrequently lose their whole communities, or at least see them very differently after their crisis.

Mormonism isn't quite as bad with that as, for example, the Jehovah's Witnesses, or the Brethren, who totally shun people who cease to share the same world view.  If a Mormon gets excommunicated, it doesn't mean they can't socialise with their tribe anymore - or that they can't attend church, even - it's more like a formality.  There's no directive to shun and exclude, like in the other examples I gave - but that doesn't mean people don't change, when someone starts to question the very things they hold dear.  (And this is all really interesting because it translates to so many situations in the world in general, when people, and particularly people who grow up in "silos" of similar beliefs, have different opinions about religion or politics or other matters to which they become terribly attached emotionally and/or intellectually - often these differences aren't handled particularly constructively, as you can currently observe with the fierce ideological rift lines in the US).

But, Mormonism is a particularly good example of how you can get your heart broken losing your faith, because they've constructed a particularly wish-fulfilling afterlife.  Ordinary Christianity (and Mormonism falls within the fringes of Christianity, and leans strongly towards fundamentalism and literalness) has various portraits of the afterlife, depending on the "brand" and the imagination that got to dominate that brand, but mostly the general public gets these vague notions of an old white bearded guy on a throne and various cloven-hooved devils chasing the undeserving into a fiery hell with pitchforks, while the deserving get to sing hymns of praise forever with the white-winged angels brandishing harps.  That version of heaven, by the way, would make me run... can you imagine the tedium?

The Mormon concept of the afterlife is far more attractive - first of all, no devils with pitchforks, but levels of closeness to the light, so to speak, and people allowed to visit "down" in case they have a relative or friend residing in a lower echelon for the time being - and these levels are able to be progressed from, much like re-sitting a failed exam after more study so you can have another go at passing and going up a class.  Hell exists, but is more a self-inflicted thing; a soul in the painful realisation of the horrible things it did while in corporeal life, with all the consequences and pain for other beings completely in its face, and this is particularly sharp because of the juxtaposition to light and love and beauty, which were its other choices, and from which it can no longer hide either.

In the Mormon afterlife, you're not singing in some kind of celestial choir forever and ever, although you can do that part-time if it's something you'd enjoy (and just maybe, the music is a bit better up there).  Mormons have a concept of perpetual relationships with those closest to you - for instance, marriage isn't just for the corporeal life, but can be for the afterlife (and that's OK because they have bodies of sorts, so I suppose there can be sex of sorts as well, so you don't have to be platonic ever after with a person with whom you've been closer than that during your life on earth, 'cos that would really suck).

And additionally, Mormons have this concept of infinite progression, infinite learning ever after, which is incredibly attractive if you're inclined to nerdiness, like I am.  What's not so attractive is the idea of getting more and more power, to me anyway, because I actually don't want to be a god/goddess, nor do I want to create planets and life forms of my own in this kind of infinitely repeating, infinitely expanding pattern.  And really, with that, you're philosophically back to the same problem as with the idea of there being a God, in order to explain the existence of the universe - then you have to explain the existence of God; and it's a cop-out to say, "Oh, but God has always been there!" - why can't the universe and its preconditions have always been there, then?

Because people want a big wizard with a magic wand.  Just like a big Daddy.  I'm not being facetious; it's an inbuilt part of human psychology - we've got a brain with different levels, like the cerebrum versus the "reptile brain" - and we're pre-programmed to find patterns even when there aren't any, and to think in terms of cause and effect, which really gets in the way of thinking about the origins of the universe.  We're also tending subconsciously to look for familiar patterns, and if you look at Transactional Analysis, many people's relationship with their God is very similar to the early-life patterns of having a big all-powerful daddy who knew everything and you depended upon for your life and who could lavish you with affection or punish you for your misdeeds - and the Second Coming is really an extrapolated case of, "Wait till your father gets home!" - it's all very child-parent, thou art greater than I, and I must believe and obey or else, just like in a patriarchal, authoritarian family.  (Hippie gods are a bit more laid-back, because people create God in their own image.)

People simply have a subconscious tendency to bring their unexamined patterns up again and again in various ways, and also to project their own images on concepts of God, and on other people (which is a real problem).

What's that got to do with that Cure song?  - I'm giving necessary context for a person's story which I was immediately reminded of by The Promise, and digressing a bit because it's so much fun to take the scenic route - all sorts of things to discover there!  ;)  Hopefully, you can now imagine a little of what it's like to grow up being fed this idea that death isn't final but only like a metamorphosis from caterpillar to everlasting butterfly, and that unresolved earthly injustices will be made right in the hereafter, and that there's a perfect parent sitting up there in another marvellous dimension who's not flawed like everyone else you're encountering, and who loves you with a perfect undying love and is completely invested in your learning and progression as a person ever after, and who understands you when nobody else does, and who aches when you ache, and will comfort you now and hereafter - and to grow up believing that all the people you love and lose will be re-united with you, and that your marriage can be forever, and that you will learn and progress not just for your fourscore years or so on Earth, but infinitely after...

...and then to have it dawn on you that fourscore years or so is all you or anyone else has got, and that your life and love and learning then turns to dust, and that you'll never see the people you've lost again, and that injustices don't get righted beyond the grave, nor is there any kind of compensation for a being's agony and suffering on Earth no matter how awful its life was, and that neither your love nor love in general is forever, nor is anything in your life, and that you'll never learn every language there is and read all the worthwhile books ever written and get proficient at all the musical instruments and visual arts techniques you're attracted to, etc etc.

It is actually possible to become reconciled to these things, and to learn to live with these realities, but if you've come from that kind of wonderland-in-the-sky background, there's a hard shock at the realisation, and a lot of pain and grief to work through - as there is with any major loss, real or perceived - and it takes time.

Which brings me to the story that I was immediately reminded of when listening to The Promise.  It's this guy's story:



Eldon Kartchner grew up with Mormonism, wasn't heterosexual but was made to believe he was, got married to the person who actually was the love of his life and in her case it actually worked for him that she was female, which is not usually the case with people who mostly identify as gay - you get the impression that sometimes it doesn't matter what gender a person is, you're going to love them that way because of how you love them.  This couple had children, and then his wife Heather got cancer, and they were led to expect a miraculous recovery, but she died.  With her death, his belief system came crashing down around his ears, and the pain of that part of the story has stayed with me since I first listened to it nearly ten years ago, and came back to me the moment I heard that song - it could be written for him.  Of course it's not, strictly speaking - but then in another sense, it is; because I think songs like this are ultimately written for any situation that fits them well, and this fits oh so well.  The ache and the grief and the desolation this man went through is encapsulated in that song, and the words echo so many of his words, about his loss of belief in God, and in the entire belief system he grew up with, and how he could never see anything the same way again, not people, not the universe, everything was turned upside down, just like that and no going back, and having to work through how all of those beliefs ever got established in the first place, and what if anything you can possibly put in their empty aching place.

If anyone is interested in the particulars of his story, the long, long, harrowing four-part podcast is found here:  https://www.mormonstories.org/episodes/top-25-lgbt-themed-episodes/page/2/

...and if anyone out there does listen to his story, play the song afterwards and tell me if it's not one and the same in its raw grief and its grappling with existence.

This story also brings to mind another song, of a person grappling with their faith, at around the same life stage as Eldon Kartchner in the podcast:


I don't think this person lost it completely, but they were certainly grappling.  There's ambiguity in who the dead man is that's supposed to wake up - God, or the narrator - and I think that's an interesting ambiguity.

I personally don't care which way people go in cases like this, whether they stay with a faith of some sort or become agnostic / atheist.  Personally I'm agnostic, but I'd never want to sever someone from a benign religious world view if they find it helpful.  We're all finding our way and I don't want to look down on anyone.  Admittedly I have problems with diehard fundamentalists and with conspiracy theorists, and my patience for those things is continuing to thin, considering how much damage that does in the world - events in the US over the last few years haven't helped, and I'm thinking there has to be a limit to our tolerance.  Where to draw the line is a complex question.

♦ ♥ ♦

Let's look at a live version of The Promise:


This is such performance art - take a black black mood and situation, set it to music.  Usually with the music of this band there's a sense that all the instruments and the vocal are equally important parts of a whole; in this case it seems to me the vocals and the words take the front seat, and the instrumentation adds emphasis and drama to the human being turning himself inside out with raw emotion.

I think this works fine live as well, but this is one of those rare cases I actually prefer the studio version to the live version, with this band.  If you go back and listen again to the studio track at the start of this post, the vocal there is brimming with electricity and doing all sorts of acrobatics that can be very difficult to replicate live, because they're so one-off and coming off the emotion of the moment more than technique, I would guess.

There's a few songs like this in my collection... here's one, by another band, where the vocal in live versions I've heard of this track has actually ended up disappointing:


...as is the case for Pride (In The Name Of Love), A Sort Of Homecoming and the title track off the same album - very hard to do vocals like that consistently live (and that's probably why Bono never sang like that on a studio album again), but the studio tracks, and the studio vocals, are scintillating, and still make me feel like I'm on the top of a rollercoaster and about to drop. ♥

♦ ♥ ♦

I want to come back to the lyrics of The Promise before finishing, because I've chiefly written about a story the song took me back to, rather than the song itself.  The song would fit so many scenarios - it would fit Eldon and Heather Kartchner's story to a T, but so much else as well. 

Because the lyrics are so far up in this post, I'll "reprint" them and do a little annotating - however, not in the traditional sense where you're specifically looking at language and literary techniques etc, but more as free-flowing thoughts in response:


THE PROMISE

How time will heal
Make me forget
You promised me
Time will heal
Make me forget
You promised me
Love will save us all and time will heal
You promised me...


Something unspecified and terrible has happened to the narrator, and someone else has made promises about things getting better down the track.  Which of you hasn't done that, when you've had a friend down a black hole who can see nothing but pitch blackness and pain?  I know that's one of the things I do, apart from sitting with and acknowledging the feeling - something we generally have to train and remind ourselves to do, because there's this instinct to try to stop other people expressing such feelings and to try to cheer them up instantly - but you can't cut this stuff off, it will only go underground and it's actually good for a person to be able to talk about it to someone else, and to air the despair; otherwise they're alone with it.  So, sometimes to be a friend means to sit in their darkness with them together, and to let them get some of this horrible stuff out of themselves, instead of instantly trying to switch on the light.

Brett still has overwhelming instincts to "fix" things, and I do to a lesser degree (these days), instead of sitting with this stuff - but allowing someone to express such difficult feelings is priority number one - unless the house is on fire.  Obviously, there are many times when we have difficulties with things when it can be helpful to hear various strategies that we may not have come across before, that other people have tried - and remember, what may work really well for you may not work at all for someone else - or to be reminded of things we can try under the circumstances.  But while we can support, we can't and shouldn't attempt to "rescue" or "fix" etc - the person we're supporting is in charge of what they're going to do.

So, the most important thing is to hear and acknowledge a person.  Only after we've done this, and if they want it, we can brainstorm next steps, strategies etc with them - and we can share any insights we might have to offer.

Sometimes, a situation isn't "fixable" anyway - like when someone has died, or someone has a terminal illness.  Then the best you can do is come to terms.  It's amazing though how many people who lose a person they love or who get a terminal diagnosis find that people they thought were friends just disappear from their lives.  This is usually because they are "fixers" and unfixable situations make them extremely uncomfortable.  They think, "There's nothing I can do," but that's only true for the loss or the terminal illness and not at all true in other ways.  A friend with terminal cancer was saying to me, "They don't even have to talk about the cancer to me.  We could just talk about our hobbies, do things together."  But many people tend to avoid this stuff, whether by avoiding affected people or by frantically avoiding mentioning it if they can bring themselves to socialise with affected people (as if you can make it go away by putting your head in the sand).

In my circle of journalling friends, there's a huge amount of support around loss - of people, of animals, and just general loss.  These people don't avoid, they actively seek you out when they know you're confronting something tough.  We all do that for each other, and we've all had loss (because most of us have animals and they tend to be short-lived compared to us; and because most of us have by now lost people we know, and people in our families).  It's quite amazing to see it in action.  When we had to put down a 34-year-old, much-loved horse a couple of years ago, I had backup from the moment I began thinking about having to make this decision - both at home, from my husband, and from these amazing people.  We all hate having to make decisions like this, but we make them because in the end, it's how you can best serve an animal you love - when you can physically see the road ending, you can give them a quick out instead of letting them die by inches.

They all knew what day the veterinarian was coming, and on the day I found "thinking of you" messages in the morning - and photos of fields of flowers, etc.  This time around, I was able to for once leave things in the competent hands of the veterinarian and my husband, and wasn't personally needed - the horse was having his morning nap and already comfortable with the vet, plus my husband was feeding him peaches.  So this time around, I don't have memories I can't erase and which the horse didn't need me to have.  Brett came in five minutes later and just hugged me, nothing needed to be said.  And later on, my friends sent me another flood of supportive messages.

Good support is a marvellous thing and helps you see the bigger picture, and other people.  Also, it continues to set an example of what to do when it's another person's turn for grief, so that it becomes the natural response, instead of something you're feeling your way with.


How love will save
Make me forget
You promised me
Love will save
Make me forget
You promised me
Time will heal us all and love will save
You promised me...


...and it's this sort of thing that can backfire, even though often it's true... like I said, generally after someone has shared something really terrible, I've reassured before parting, "But it won't always be this dark or feel this bad; gradually these things get better" - and usually that's true, and I think in the vast majority of cases it's good to offer some hope.  For instance, when loner students from emotionally difficult home backgrounds have told me how sad it is that they feel alone in this world and how they're trying to make friends, I could always say to them that I was in that situation myself in the past (when newly arrived in Australia as a middle schooler; and later when I went to university; and to a lesser extent when I travelled and lived in different places), and that I'd hate to go back to my teens and 20s, but that gradually, a core set of friends I didn't lose to geography or differences started to accumulate, and now I don't feel like this - so my message was, "It's hardest when you're young, it gets better when you get older" - which for many reasons besides this was my experience, and the experience of a lot of my own friends (but isn't going to be everyone's experience).


I trusted you
I wanted your words
Believed in you
I needed your words
Time will heal
Make me forget
And love will save us all


...and in this case, it clearly didn't work out that way.  I'm assuming this is a human-human situation, but at the start of this post I discussed it as also fitting a religious loss of faith scenario - because the emotions are the same.  I think one of the reasons people are attracted to religion is because it offers "fixes" for the unfixable:  Death, inevitable suffering, injustices that aren't getting addressed on this planet, plus prolonged loneliness that's for various reasons difficult to get out of for many people - things like this.  So if you think these things are now "fixed" with your new world view, but then you lose your faith down the track, you have to mourn the crash back to reality, and come to terms all over again.

These words would make equal sense being spoken to a friend who promised things would get better and then they didn't, as they would to a person who took the Gospel of John literally speaking them in despair (and like a sort of aside) to the God they've stopped believing in.


You promised me another wish
Another way
You promised me another dream
Another day
You promised me another time
You promised me another life


Is anyone else noticing that we've come across some of this imagery before?  On Bloodflowers, in various songs; for example, in Out Of This World.  A lot of this is also central imagery in Christianity and other religions - because it's so central to the human struggle with life.


You promised me...

So I swallowed the shame and I waited
I buried the blame and I waited
Choked back years of memories
I pushed down the pain and I waited
Trying to forget...

You promised me another wish
Another way
You promised me another dream
Another day
You promised me another time
You promised me...
Another lie

Oh you promised me...
And I waited... And I waited... And I waited...

And I'm still waiting...



Yeah, that's tough.

Imagine if it's not like this:



But, I've always loved these sorts of reflections - here's more Leunig...


When the Heart

When the heart
Is cut or cracked or broken,
Do not clutch it;
Let the wound lie open.
Let the wind
From the good old sea blow in
To bathe the wound with salt,
And let it sting.
Let a stray dog lick it,
Let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell,
And let it ring.


What's the Use

What's the use of this little hand;
What's the use of this little eye;
What's the use of this little mouth
When all the world is broken?
Make a cake with this little hand;
Make a tear with this little eye;
Make a word with this little mouth
When all the world is broken.


Peace

Peace is my drug;
It stops the pain.
In safe reflecting rooms
Or in a lane,
Or in a park,
I will lie
And have some peace
And get high.
If it's pure
And there's a lot of it about
I overdose
And pass out
And dream of peace:
My favourite thing
When nobody wants me
And nothing's happening.



Also I'm reminded of this little excerpt from Miss Smilla's Feeling For Snow:

QuoteYOU CAN TRY TO COVER UP depression in various ways. You can listen to Bach's compositions for the organ in Our Saviour's Church. You can arrange a line of good cheer in powder form on a pocket mirror with a razor blade and ingest it with a straw. You can call for help. For instance, by telephone, so that you know who's listening.

That's the European method. Hoping to work your way out of problems through action.

I take the Greenlandic way. It consists of walking into yourself in the dark mood. Putting your defeat under a microscope and dwelling on the sight.

When things are really bad - like now - I picture a black tunnel in front of me. I go up to it. I strip off my nice clothes, my underwear, my hard hat, my Danish passport, and then I walk into the dark.

I know that a train is coming. A lead-lined diesel transporting strontium-90. I go to meet it.

This I can do because I'm thirty-seven years old. I know that inside the tunnel, underneath the wheels, down beneath the sleepers, there is a little spot of light.

It's the morning of Christmas Eve. For several days I've been gradually withdrawing from the world. Now I'm preparing for the final descent. Which has to come. (...)

I've prepared myself by not eating breakfast. That expedites the confrontation. I've locked the door. I sit down in the big chair. And invoke the bad mood: Here sits Smilla. Starving. In debt. The morning of Christmas Eve. While other people have their families, their sweethearts, their blue-eared starlings. While other people have each other.

It proves effective. I'm already standing in front of the tunnel. Ageing. A failure. Abandoned.

The doorbell rings. It's the mechanic. I can tell by the way he rings the bell. Cautiously, tentatively, as if the bell were screwed right into the skull of an old woman he doesn't want to disturb. I haven't seen him since the funeral. Haven't wanted to think about him.

I go out and disconnect the mechanism. I sit down again.

Internally I begin to invoke the images from the second time I ran away and Moritz came to get me in Thule. We were standing on the uncovered cement apron that you walk on for the last twenty metres out to the plane. My aunt was whimpering. I took as many deep breaths as I could. I thought this might be a way to take the clear, dry, somehow sweet air back to Denmark with me.

Someone is knocking on my door. It's Juliane. She gets down on her knees and calls through the letter box. "Smilla, I'm making fish ball batter!"

"Leave me alone!"

She's offended. "I'll tip it in through your letter box."

Right before we climbed the stairs into the plane, my aunt gave me a pair of kamiks to wear indoors. The beadwork alone had taken her a month.

The phone rings.

"There's something I'd like to talk to you about." It's Elsa Lübing's voice.

"I'm sorry," I say. "Tell it to somebody else. Cast not thy pearls before swine."

I pull out the phone jack. I'm starting to feel rather attracted to the thought of Ravn's isolation cell. This is the kind of day when you can't rule out the possibility of someone knocking on your windows. On the fifth floor.

Someone knocks on my window. Outside stands a green man. I open the window.

"I'm the window cleaner. I just wanted to warn you, so you don't go and take off your clothes."

He gives me a big smile. As if he were cleaning the windows by putting one pane at a time into his mouth.

"What the hell do you mean? Are you implying that you don't want to see me nude?"

His smile fades. He pushes a button, and the platform he's standing on takes him out of reach.

"I don't want my windows cleaned," I shout after him. "At my age I can barely see out of them, anyway!"

(Peter Hoeg, 1992)

And thusly will I conclude this post, if a post like this can ever be said to be concluded...
SueC is time travelling

SueC

Construction notice:  Post #101 has been substantially added to - especially for my niche audience of insomniac Cure fans who like going on long meanders.  :angel

Looking below, it's a pristine bit of cyberspace, just asking to be filled, so may as well have a think about another song!


OPENING TRACK


I think this is a terrific album opener - heart on the sleeve, in your face, setting the tone and preparing you for what is to come.

When I first started listening to this song, while doing stuff in the garden (i.e. not analytically, just in the background), every time it came on I was thinking about people getting lost in other people's lives, even imaginary people's lives, like in daytime American TV soap operas, which were always blaring in the background when I was growing up, with their horrible lobotomising soundtracks that paralyse thinking.  I hated these things, still do, and was always running away from them - outdoors miles away, or into my room to put headphones on and listen to something that facilitated, rather than paralysed, thinking.

I think part of the loathing and part of my adult perception of these kinds of shows being anti-human, anti-thought, anti-creativity, anti-love (by presenting a hideous hollow thing they falsely bestow the tag of love upon) can't help but trace back to having a mother who spent hours every day in front of them and was never available to talk to because of it (probably like the smartphone in many modern childhoods playing out now).  Even when I was pre-school age, it was always, "Wait, I'm watching TV!" and in Australia, that became, "Wait until there's a commercial break!" which was never muted, so I then had to compete with blaring jingles and people yelling about products, which often made me give up, and when older, mute the bloody thing myself if I was determined to have a conversation (not that you can have much of one in such circumstances).  The TV seemed to always be on, morning to near-midnight, and even most meals were either in front of the thing, or with it running loudly in the background when people were at the table.  (Needless to say, this is not something that happens in the home my husband and I made - the TV is rarely on here, and we have actual conversations - and if the TV is on, it's more often than not both of us watching something together.)

But I think that the content of such shows is itself sufficient to feel this way.  I spent my childhood watching an adult be caught up in the confected melodrama of shallow characters in what I think of as anti-relationships in a materialistic la-la-land.  There's such a world of difference between that and good drama:  Daytime soap is soma, is anaesthesia to the things that are precious about being alive and being human - while good drama makes you think, and think things you've not thought before, and see differently, and learn, and empathise with others.

So when the lyrics to Lost were first starting to filter through to me, I thought about people who get caught up in depictions of other people doing things instead of living their own lives - people who never develop complex inner lives for themselves, and who avoid actually relating to other people - kind of like the characters they follow, be they soap characters or mindless modern celebrities.  And if you think I'm judgemental here, what I actually am is sad, because of the state of the planet, society and mental/emotional health, and because I've seen for myself how this goes in a family, and because the collective microcosms of what happens in dysfunctional families directly give rise to the dysfunctional macrocosm of greater society.  And my point is, some types of activities, art, drama, literature etc counter dysfunction, while others enable and promote it.  One of the reasons I didn't end up in the gutter, or forever repeating the cycle of my family of origin, is because I was exposed to literature, music and art that showed me different ways to be.  It helped me find myself, who I was, who I am becoming - instead of arresting my development.

The Cure fits into that category for me, which is why I'm writing about it.  I think a lot of their stuff promotes reflection and empathy, in a world that's in desperate need of these things.  For the space that I'm going through the back catalogue, I've ceased paper journalling and am doing my writing here instead.  So it's going to be personal, and not everyone's cup of tea, but it's also something you're not going to find on every street corner.  I'm not doing standard music reviews, or getting into the technical nitty-gritties of the music - I'm just journalling one human being's response to it, and the tracks I've always enjoyed going on when journalling about anything are lived experience, vicarious experience, intertextual stuff (I think of and go into other works that the one I'm looking at reminds me of), human relationships, and philosophy.

Clearly, the lyrics to Lost go many more places than the first place they took me, and I'll go to some of them (and if others were to chime in, which they are most welcome to in this thread, we'd collectively go to many more places).  I'm going to start with the other album opener that I was reminded of by this one - another heartfelt, thought-provoking performance with the vocal as the centrepoint:


Like Lost, this song set the scene for the rest of the album - raw, thoughtful, heart-on-your-sleeve tours de force from start to finish.

♦ ♥ ♦

It's stone fruit season, so the first two buckets of nectarines and plums came in last night.  Since we don't have rumens, we're unable to eat all of that fresh, so the best fruit goes in the fridge, and the rest gets made into things:  Stewed nectarines (future nectarine crumbles) and concentrated plum spread (great on pancakes, waffles, toast, in yoghurt), and the first plum cake of the season (German recipe, brioche type base, plum quarters arranged on top and generously sprinkled with cinnamon - eat with custard or cream).

Of course, when you're slicing up stone fruit, you need musical accompaniment - so this morning I asked Brett, "Would you mind if I put on the self-titled?"  He said, "It's not something I personally particularly want to hear, but I don't mind if you put it on."  So I compromised and went to play the opening track only.  Of course, the CD player is having its roughly annual conniptions at the moment, and started skipping towards the end of the track, and once it does that, you won't get sense out of it for at least another hour or until you've shaken it vigorously in exactly the right manner.  (If this wasn't an intermittent problem, we'd have replaced the item, but it mostly behaves and it still responds to being shaken.  It's probably dust in the works somewhere.)

While the CD player was actually working, we figured out why I like the opening track and Brett doesn't (and this also applies to most, but not all, of the rest of the album).  It comes down to the fact that I'm very lyrics-driven and he's not.  When the lyrics engage me, and the music fits them, I'm happy, even if I'd not listen to the music on its own.  Brett is more focused on the instrumental side and if that doesn't work for him, he doesn't care what the lyrics are one way or the other.  He finds a lot of the music on this album harsh, and this turns him off - paradoxically, considering he listens to Tool and other music like that, which is at least as harsh, and indeed, too harsh for me to want to listen to.

So why, I asked him, does he like other people's harsh music but not The Cure's, and would he like it if he didn't know it was The Cure?  He said that it's a different style of music to the harsh music he likes - that e.g. Tool is very mathematical, has interesting changes in time signature, and works with a limited palette of instruments.  (Can you credit that my atheist husband has just been theatrically apologising to "the gods" for confusing palette with palate?  When I pointed that out to him, he said, "I'm repenting to St Oxford, god of the English dictionary and brother to St Roget, patron deity of synonyms and antonyms..." and went on to expound at length but I omit it for brevity.  :angel)

♦ ♥ ♦

Now let's look at the actual lyrics of the opening track to The Cure's 2004 album, and go some other places:


LOST

I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I can't find myself
In the head of this stranger in love
Holding on giving up
To another under faded setting sun

And I wonder where I am...
Could she run away with him?
So happy and so young
And I stare
As I sing in the lost voice of a stranger in love
Out of time letting go
In another world that spins around for fun

And I wonder where I am...
Could he ever ask her why?
So happy and so young
And I stare... but...

I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I can't find myself

In the heart of this stranger in love
Giving up holding on
To this other under faded setting sun

And I'm not sure where I am...
Would he really turn away?
So happy and so young
And I stare
As I play out the passion of a stranger in love
Letting go of the time
In this other world that spins around for one

And I'm not sure where I am...
Would she know it was a lie?
So happy and so young
And I stare... but...

I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I can't find myself

In the soul of this stranger in love
No control over one
To the other under faded setting sun

And I don't know where I am...
Should he beg her to forgive?
So happy and so young
And I stare...
As I live out the story of a stranger in love
Waking up going on
In the other world that spins around undone
And I don't know where I am...
Should she really say goodbye?
So happy and so young
And I stare... but...

I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I can't find myself
I got lost in someone else



Reading through these words, you get the sense of someone in midlife looking back, but what is the love story they are getting lost it?  You could imagine this fitting a scenario of comparing one's own life to that of another person's, perhaps in a story, or in a film or play or drama, or even a story imagined for other people.  But the possible reading that strikes me the most is that this person is looking back at their own story, and that the stranger is the younger version of themselves.

It would fit various things, but I wondered what would it be like to sing songs you wrote 30 years ago - in one way it might be like looking at old photo albums, but the way we are "inside" does shift over time. Some things stay the same, or very close - but other things we grow out of. In my 30s looking back at my early 20s I was very aware that I was progressing in ways that were really important, emotionally - I'd had a rough start and had to straighten so many things out, and to my chagrin, you couldn't always just think yourself out of trouble - and in my case, what I thought and what I felt were often quite different, which was a hard nut to crack.

Another ten years later, looking back at my life, the things I've regretted about my 20s and 30s - mostly, running after people who didn't treat me with respect (family, boyfriends), spending too much time going around in circles in my head, and being too isolated - are also things that have an inevitability about them when I consider the dynamics of the family I was born into, and the early life experiences this produced for me. I regret that; how nice would it have been to not have had a vulnerability to people with similar character traits to my family of origin, and to have had respectful and supportive relationships from the outset. How much darkness and pain that would have avoided; how many car crashes often in considerable public view (a friend who specialises in trauma counselling says if you've got money it's easier to hide things like this, but if you're poor you're liable to bleed all over the carpet in public).

So it's not pleasant looking back at those problems, but the silver lining to this kind of stuff is that it does tend to produce desirable qualities like compassion, empathy, a tendency to reflect and to re-assess periodically, an identification with people who are doing it tough (as opposed to the repulsive attitudes you can observe in some quarters about that).

I don't write songs, but I am able to look back at poetry written on and off since my teenage years. Some of it I still really like and identify with, some of it rings alarm bells about what I wasn't seeing when I wrote XYZ. My early-to-mid-20s were my worst time, and the poetry this produced was bleak. Conversely, I wrote some incredibly rose-tinted stuff when I first met Brett, in my mid-30s - and when I think I should already have known better! Textbook honeymoon blindness, but I guess since I'm human it's not so unreasonable that I have typically human pitfalls, even if the psychology books intellectually forewarned me. :yum:

Now, what if you're in midlife looking back at falling in love as a teenager, and this relationship actually stayed with you? Would you get a bigger case of the bends looking back than what I can compare it to? If you read a journal you wrote at the time, or letters to each other, would you be, on one level, jolted by the realisation that you are now significantly different? If so, would you necessarily be jolted in a bad way?

Or: If you're a person who managed to have a relatively decent relationship from a very young age and this has now lasted into midlife without your killing one another or playing "happy families" to the outside while torturing each other with your respective dysfunctions on a daily basis, would you then get nostalgic for the "good old days" when you were in your physical primes, without creaky knees and arthritic finger joints, with peachy complexions and twinkles in your eyes, when you had energy for all sorts of things and you didn't need glasses to read or to write? Would you want to go back to any particular point and have this nostalgia for it? See, this doesn't happen to us, because we assume we couldn't take our current-day minds with us, and we don't want to have to learn various things all over again. I do know some people who say, "If I could go back 20 years knowing what I know now, I would!" - but don't know anyone who would trade a backward leap to youth for their hard-won wisdom since (but our sample isn't necessarily representative of the general population, and anyway, ask us again in another 20 years, maybe...errrr...shall we go back a decade or two and have rip-roaring wild-animal sex with each other, without any sort of pre-planning or preparation? :-D)

Maybe some people pine for a time when they were more innocent, less cynical, things were still fresh, possibilities seemed limitless, they didn't know some things they wished they hadn't learnt about this world or each other... maybe others look back in consternation at the unwise things they did, including to each other, and are grateful to have come out of that comparatively intact.

It will be interesting eventually to watch that little clip in which RS talks about each of the songs on this album, but I'm not doing it until I've looked at all this without the official commentary! :)

Closing thought on Lost: Often, you have to lose yourself before you find yourself - but there's different ways to lose yourself, too - which could start a whole different bit of discussion but I'm out of here now!  :angel
SueC is time travelling

SueC

If I don't get back into this thread, I'm not going to finish with this album, let alone the four earliest ones I've not listened to yet, before The Cure actually put out their new one, and this is going to cause all sorts of time anomalies.  :1f631:  :winking_tongue

This post is going to be about Labyrinth, which I've wanted to write about for some time.  It just happens that I've just explained how useful a song that is elsewhere, and I'm going to replicate part of what I said about it here (and when I get around to it, finish the post properly).


What a song like this does is to acknowledge the fundamental difficulties you confront as you live your life, rather than gloss over this stuff.  It's a place you can go which says, "This is real, and it's OK to hurt."  It's somewhere you can feel what you feel, and be honest, and just be, instead of putting on a good front for everyone else.  Most of the time I'm positive and constructive, but OMG I couldn't be those things if I was never allowed to feel the despair or the pain and acknowledge them as real.  Feeling like this isn't just about aspects of our individual situations, it's the whole thing - society, the state of the biosphere, the whole mess we're in on so many levels.  Because that's as true as the beauty and the joy we can find, and because I live a lie if I can't acknowledge darkness as well as light.

(Context for this comment here:  http://curefans.com/index.php?topic=9418.0
...and I'll look at the song more extensively at a later stage.)

SueC is time travelling

SueC

I'm finally getting back to this thread. Here's a preamble for a later song discussion.  :)

THE ULTIMATE LEGO BOX

When you're teaching Chemistry to 13-year-olds, introducing them to the concept of atoms, you need to find a way to help them visualise things that are invisible to the human eye.

So I used to start off all of this by asking how many of the students present had ever played with Lego. Usually that's most of them, because even the ones who didn't have their own had come across it at friends' places. This, by the way, is the simple block Lego I'm talking about, not the more modern, pre-fab, no-imagination so-called Lego where you don't have to construct from scratch...



I'd ask them, "What did you build?" and we'd go around hearing about various construction projects from brand-new teenagers shiny-eyed with childhood nostalgia. So, so many things to make from just the handful of different types of building blocks.

If you hand out periodic tables without that kind of preamble, some students are going to be nervous - chemistry has this reputation for being difficult, periodic tables are not uncommonly seen as big scary things only the nerdy kids are going to understand, etc. I know this because I talk to students, and also because that's how it was for me - I didn't get this preamble when I was in middle school, so I thought, "OMG this is going to be difficult!" - and the real irony is that I was a nerdy kid and ended up winning school science prizes and ultimately a scholarship into an undergraduate science degree. But I was nervous when I first looked at a periodic table, and I didn't want the kids I taught to feel that way, it's so unnecessary if you just explain it properly.

Atoms are like Lego blocks, just much smaller so you can't see them with your naked eye. And then we can talk about, "So how do we know they exist?" and from there, "How can we know anything exists?" and how in science we have models that approximate the reality but aren't the actual reality, and how each successive model gets closer to the reality and helps us understand more and more complex things about reality - and then we can talk about, "What is reality? Is what I see reality? Can I trust my senses?" and we can do visual illusions, and talk about colour blindness, sensory variation, hypothetical body swaps, other animals sensing magnetic fields etc, and then we can talk about the fact that we don't actually "see" solid objects, which themselves are lattices made mostly of empty space, and how what we see is just photons bouncing off the lattices and entering our retinas, passed along as nerve signals to the brain which uses its software to make an internal picture out of all of that for us, which isn't ultimate reality but is our own reality, etc etc.

See? It's fascinating, and I don't know why these things are never on the curriculum when atoms are introduced, but that's how I did it in my classrooms, and the kids consistently responded with switched-on thinking and expressions of wonder - you don't need to be a science nerd to be amazed by the realisation that what you see isn't necessarily how it is, that it's different for the person next to you but you still have overlap, that we can navigate at all in this jungle, and that there are wonderful things waiting just under the surface of a simplification you take for granted - the universe is full of mind-blowing amazingness.



Back to the periodic table: It's nature's ultimate Lego box. There's 94 "standard" types up to and including Plutonium, and there's a few more you can transiently make in the laboratory, which are too unstable to stay together for very long. (Atoms themselves are made up of, at the next layer of the Matryoshka-doll-ness of all of this, three sub-components - protons, neutrons, electrons - and then we can talk about other subatomic particles, and the ultimate exchangeability between matter and energy, etc. We can talk about atomic models, and how as you advance in school, you're presented with more and more complex models which get closer and closer to the reality, but how when you're 13 you don't need to know about probability spaces just yet - and we can look at how children of various ages draw people, how at age 3 they draw circles with sticks coming off for arms and legs and how they gradually make more and more realistic representations - and then we're all OK with that idea in relation to the model of the atom.)



So: The objects you see around you - chairs, desks, curtains, pens, the floor, the walls, your own bodies, the window glass, the trees outside, the birds in them etc etc - are miniature Lego constructions, made from the different types of atoms (called "elements") in the periodic table. Just like with real Lego, you can use a relatively small number of different types of blocks to make a near-infinite number of vastly different things. And even when you're preparing meals, on one level you're just arranging atoms in certain ways that are going to be tasty - and doing a little re-arranging too with actual cooking (here we can talk about chemical versus physical change, etc).



Non-living objects tend to have relatively stable "Lego block" arrangements - you may gradually wear some blocks off the surface of your table, etc. Living things, on the other hand, are constantly changing their Lego blocks! This is pretty obvious with growth and change - but even when you plateau a bit in your 20s and 30s, for instance, the building blocks are changing all the time. The most exchanged building blocks in your body are hydrogen and oxygen - because your body is around 70% water, and water diffuses readily throughout your whole body rather than being built into its biochemical structures, and you're constantly drinking (and eating) it in, and peeing, breathing and sweating (and crying, and snotting, and bleeding etc) it out again.

Here Comes The Identity Crisis!

Knowing about the water going in and out probably doesn't give many people an identity crisis, and neither will the common electrolytes - sodium, potassium, chloride etc - going in and out with the water, in varying proportions. I guess the identity crises begin with the idea that the "solid" things about your body - the biochemical structures that make up your muscles, your bones, etc, and particularly your brain - don't stay the same. The brain, for instance, can look much the same a year later, but have exchanged a lot of its atoms for other atoms mostly the same type - is it still the same brain? (Of course, it's not just on that level that things change - you're constantly making new neural connections and pathways, deleting some old stuff, adding new stuff, editing - and the more you use your mind, the more of this you will do, and this is how you learn, and grow as a person.)

So even when things look very similar from the outside, they can actually be very different, more different than you probably imagined, from a building-blocks perspective. Just like you can take some blocks out of a Lego castle, and put different blocks from exactly the same type into the gaps, and afterwards it won't look any different. But it's different. Does it matter? How, and how much?

It's sort of like the question: If you beam up Scotty, is the Scotty that arrives in the Enterprise the same as the Scotty that just left the planetary surface?


Scotty, by the way, doesn't always just do the beaming - he also gets beamed!

And that question has bells on, when you consider that the Scotty problem is about a near-perfect copy, and what happens in life - even in the relative plateaux visually in your 20s and 30s - is about constantly altering copies your body makes of itself.

Which is where we're going to join the Cure track Labyrinth. Let's read the lyrics to that - now that our minds are thinking about change in nature...  ;)


LABYRINTH

Say it's the same sun spinning in the same sky
Say it's the same stars streaming in the same night
Tell me it's the same world whirling through the same space
Tell me it's the same time tripping through the same day
So say it's the same house and nothing in the house is changed
Yeah say it's the same room and nothing in the room is strange
Oh tell me it's the same boy burning in the same bed
Tell me it's the same blood breaking in the same head
Say it's the same taste taking down the same kiss
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you and it's always been like this
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you and it always and forever is
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you and it's always been like this
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you and it always and forever is
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you

Yeah tell me it's all the same
This is how it's always been
But if nothing has changed... Then it must mean...

But the sun is cold – the sky is wrong
The stars are black – the night is gone
The world is still – the space is stopped
The time is out – the day is dropped
The house is dark – the room is scarred
The boy is stiff – the bed is hard
The blood is thick – the head is burst
The taste is dry – the kiss is thirst
And it's not the same you
It's not the same you
No it never was like this
It's not the same you
It's not the same you and it never really is
It's not the same you
It's not the same you
No it never was like this
It's not the same you
It's not the same you and it never really is
It's not the same you
It's not the same you

Oh it's not the same
This isn't how it's always been
Everything has to have changed...

Or it's me...



The narrative develops and morphs a bit as we progress from stanza to stanza, so I'm going to look at this in "chunks" - but I'm deliberately leaving the entire run-through of the lyrics to this song as it is, above, because I think it's worth reading through in its entirety and thinking about, and because if you're reading this, you're going to want to do that yourself and do your own thinking, and field your own impressions, and they're not going to be identical to my thinking and impressions, because we're all a different set of personality, life experiences etc.

The title to me is an interesting summary of the song as a whole, which references an old philosophical conundrum about continuity and change - to what extent is anything fixed? What does it mean to say I am me; what is this thing called "me", does the "me" change and how, is all of "me" in constant flux or are any aspects of it constant, or even approaching constant; ditto everyone else, and any given thing in the universe. A Buddhist will have a different answer to the average Westerner, etc - there's many takes on this, and you can literally go around in circles chasing your own tail with questions like this - and feel as if you're in a labyrinth trying to find a way out.

Here's how I think about it.

Say it's the same sun spinning in the same sky
Say it's the same stars streaming in the same night
Tell me it's the same world whirling through the same space
Tell me it's the same time tripping through the same day


We're starting with the universe: Stars, planets, space, time. As the song progresses, we move from the "macro" view of the enormous backdrop within which we live, to zoom in closer and closer - the house, the room, the people, our lives, consciousness etc.

I personally like such a methodological, ordered and holistic approach to considering philosophical questions and existential conundrums. This stuff isn't just suddenly going to reveal itself to you in a smoke haze; it requires thought and effort. The "Eureka" moments we have that seem to come out of nowhere are actually our subconscious, which has been very busy in the background if you've been feeding it well, alerting you that there has been an insight or development - that something has coagulated for you. It hasn't coagulated out of nothing and nowhere, it's coagulated out of the data and impressions that have floated around your subconscious. Since you don't have all possible data and impressions, and since your processing equipment is limited, this isn't an exact or necessarily accurate process.

But, it's sort of like cooking - the better the quality of the ingredients that go into it, the more likely you are to have something useful at the end. (And sadly, much of modern thinking is fast food, and produces low-quality hamburgers. What else can you make out  the soundbites, vastly incomplete information, non-fact-checked claims, etc that are quickly becoming the main thought diet modern humans consume, especially through social media and the devices that are now wedded to their navels... Please, people, if you're not doing this already, cut out the superficial chatter that's standard fare now, and instead of paying attention to that go read books, find complicated texts that stretch you, listen to music on headphones, think, reflect, take your time, write, journal, discuss with a friend...you already know that to feed your body with fresh and healthy things instead of junk is an act of self-care and love; now do that for your mind as well...be selective, because if you aren't you will just be flooded with any old junk by the path of least resistance...)

So: Stars, planets, space, time. The sun may look much the same to you as it did 30 years ago, but it has lost mass and changed composition because it's actually a nuclear furnace burning through fuel. It's losing mass at around 5.5 million tonnes a second, from a combination of solar winds and nuclear fusion, and that sounds like a lot to us, but is negligible in terms of the total mass of the sun, which has been doing its thing for over 4 billion years and is only just middle-aged. You can read more mind-blowing stuff on this; like on this proper astrophysics blog.



Just like us, the sun will one day cease to be what it is and collapse into other forms. It's confronting when you're a child to learn that even the sun won't go on forever. I remember the horror I felt at about age 7 when I was lying in the dark trying to get to sleep, the day I learnt that one day the sun will burn out. I felt strangely disembodied, and like I was spinning. Later on I realised that because of the comparative puniness our own life spans, this fact isn't of that much practical relevance to us, or the next thousand generations following - which probably won't be following anyway because we're so good at crapping into our own nest and thinking that's OK. (And sadly, politicians largely think in even smaller increments of geological time - only reaching to the next electoral cycle and their own chances of staying in power, and completely myopic beyond this.)

This is a matter of frames of reference: The sun's life span is astronomical compared to ours, which can set us off thinking about the brevity of our own existence, and lamenting about the mere drop in the ocean etc. But now flip that, and compare our average life spans to those of the adult stage of the Mayfly, which usually doesn't last beyond 24 hours - just enough time to mate and make the next generation. I was about 7 when I learnt that and cried for ages, feeling so sorry for the little things - just like I cried when I learnt that dogs only see in black and white. All the gorgeous colours my dog couldn't see! Later on I learnt that a dog can smell "colours" humans can't even imagine, and would probably cry if it understood my own experiential poverty in that department.

(By the way, I've realised that one of the reasons I remember certain things so vividly is because growing up in a traumatic family environment gave me complex PTSD and therefore turned up the volume on my emotions. This resulted in my making technicolour memories like movie clips, complete with attached emotions experienced at the time - because a super-engaged amygdala will give you this. The scenes of family violence, abandonment and other direct trauma in early childhood - the unprocessed stuff - for a long time were "silent" clips without associated sounds and emotions, because that's what a child's brain does to survive. However, it also gave me incredible recall of the more "ordinary" scenes of childhood - so many things that moved me, one way or the other. Coupled to that, I've also recently learnt I've got a form of synaesthesia which makes me frequently experience witnessing something happening to someone else as if it were happening to me, on the tactile and emotional levels in particular.)

So getting back to the song - no, it's not really the same sun spinning in the same sky, it's a sun further along in its life cycle that's had some changes - but from our frame of reference and in our direct experience, it looks and feels the same (the extra burning sensation in our part of the world these days is due to damage to the ozone layer, rather than changes in the sun). And similarly it's not the same stars streaming in the same night - and that's an even more mind-blowing thing, because some of the sources that made the light we see no longer exist, it's just light still travelling in space (and if you think about it, it's a nice metaphor for our own lives - there are still impressions left of us after our death; like words we wrote, songs people recorded, things we've said or done that have been helpful for other people, that they remember when they're facing difficult stuff, etc).

When we look up at the sky, we're seeing the past - because astronomical distances are so enormous that even at the speed of light (300,000 km/s) it takes the light of our own sun about 8 minutes to arrive on Earth. The light even from the brightest stars we see can be hundreds of years old; the light from the Andromeda Galaxy, just visible with the naked eye on clear, moonless nights away from areas of light pollution, takes around 2.5 million years to get to us, so that's how old that light (and the image of the galaxy) is when it gets to our eyes. (Want to play? ...Andromeda, Andromedary... :winking_tongue)

So while the stars at night may still look much the same to us as they did in our childhood, there's a lot more complexity going on than we see at first glance. We're still seeing pictures of the past; these are now several decades more recent, but their appearance to us is still just as delayed as it was when we first saw them. It's a "delayed telecast" with approximately the same delay.

Similarly, we know that it's not exactly the same world whirling through the same space. The world has changed - geologically, plus we're cumulatively wrecking the biosphere and exterminating other species; living things are constantly dying and being born, social and political changes happen (for better or worse), etc. It's still Planet Earth, but a changed one. Also, the world isn't even whirling through the same space - the universe is expanding and our location in it is constantly changing. Because our location in relation to the sun and our own solar system is much the same (although the planetary orbits are pretty individual) we don't tend to notice.

And it's not the same time tripping through the same day either, even though it may feel like it. Time is a continuum, even if we align our concept of it to the cycles of day and night of our rotating planet, and the revolution of our planet around the sun. This spring is not like last spring, and today's midday is not the same as yesterday's. Westerners, interestingly, tend to see time as more linear and "running out"; the Hopi Native Americans and many other Indigenous people see time as more cyclical and replenishing, and that's neither right nor wrong, it's just a matter of perspective - it's like the wave-particle duality of light, both things can be simultaneously as true as each other - and probably neither of them are completely true.


So say it's the same house and nothing in the house is changed
Yeah say it's the same room and nothing in the room is strange
Oh tell me it's the same boy burning in the same bed
Tell me it's the same blood breaking in the same head


Now zooming in on happenings closer to home - the house and room are a bit more pedestrian to consider than things astronomical and living creatures, from my perspective. As we saw in the post's preamble, non-living physical objects aren't constantly changing out their components, although they can wear down etc. Plus, this is just a side view here; and in this stanza, I'm getting more haunted house vibes than anything else.

Tell me/say...



(Constructing...)

Say it's the same taste taking down the same kiss
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you and it's always been like this
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you and it always and forever is
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you and it's always been like this
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you and it always and forever is
Say it's the same you
Say it's the same you

Yeah tell me it's all the same
This is how it's always been
But if nothing has changed... Then it must mean...

But the sun is cold – the sky is wrong
The stars are black – the night is gone
The world is still – the space is stopped
The time is out – the day is dropped
The house is dark – the room is scarred
The boy is stiff – the bed is hard
The blood is thick – the head is burst
The taste is dry – the kiss is thirst
And it's not the same you
It's not the same you
No it never was like this
It's not the same you
It's not the same you and it never really is
It's not the same you
It's not the same you
No it never was like this
It's not the same you
It's not the same you and it never really is
It's not the same you
It's not the same you

Oh it's not the same
This isn't how it's always been
Everything has to have changed...

Or it's me...







(Constructing, and this is going to be fun, at least for me.  :P  Work to do - will add to this later.)
SueC is time travelling