“Boys Don’t Cry” The Cure
I have to thank MTv for having such a profound effect on my music taste.
To let you know how old I am, I am speaking about the pre-Real World MTV which played music videos 24/7 starting with “Video Killed the Radio Star” in the dawn of the 1980s.
Just when MTV was hitting the airwaves we moved from the Chicago area to a very small town in the Iron Range of Northern Minnesota. There weren’t a lot of stations to choose from on the radio or television. I think there were only three FM stations. There was a Top 40 music station, an easy listening station which only played Michael Bolton or Celine Dion it seemed, and a public radio station which now plays a great variety of music, but in 1981 it was a bunch of people reliving the Summer of Love mixed in with bluegrass and yodeling. I think this lack of options stunted my musical growth. I listened and liked top 40 music due to the lack of being able to hear anything else. I lived for when our grandfather sent us VHS tapes from Chicago randomly set to record two hour sections of MTv.
The 180 in music taste was very sudden. I bought the Cure’s Disintegration on cassette tape the same weekend I went to see the New Kids on the Block concert to support the Hangin’ Tough album at the Minnesota State Fair. (Opening acts were Tommy Page and Tiffany btw)
I had first heard The Cure in seventh grade during a sleepover at a friend’s house. She introduced me to 120 Minutes, which played the opposite of the pop music I was hearing every day: The Cure, Jesus and the Mary Chain, early Nine Inch Nails, New Order, Kate Bush, and a whole bunch of artists that never would have been played on the local radio stations. I loved it. I wanted to soak all of it in and wear black because that is how I felt on the inside.
I listened to Disintegration for three months straight. When writing this post for my second pick, I listened to it again and I realized how dramatic and sad the album is and I think that spoke more to who I was in 7th and 8th grade. I was a little dramatic and a whole lot sad.
Too be honest, in that time in my life I wanted to not feel so invisible. I don’t know why my reaction to being less invisible was wanting to be alone, but that is what made sense to me then. There were days when I would say hello to people and they never answered, days when people ran into me and never acknowledged I was there. Sometimes I thought I wasn’t. Times when I turned to pain to feel like I existed. Listening to Disintegration again, I am remembering this about my life. It is weird the way that listening to certain songs or albums can make you time travel. Back to being that 7th to 9th grade girl who thought “Robert Smith gets me.”
Then “Friday I’m in love” came out and I stopped listening to the Cure.
I didn’t choose a song from Disintegration and chose “Boys Don’t Cry” instead. There are so many Cure songs to choose from. “Boys Don’t Cry” just makes me want to dance and there isn’t a song on Disintegration that makes me feel like doing that.
NEXT UP, can I kick it…um I think so