Boys Don’t Cry. The Cure. 1980. PVC.

Of the many things you can count Boys Don’t Cry, perfect rock and roll single is arguably the easiest to name. An indefatigable crowd pleaser, Boys Don’t Cry captures a defining moment in the build up to the original English new wave. Like the Cars’ My Best Friend’s Girl, released a year before the Cure’s great single, Boys Don’t Cry’s unifying pop exuberance closed a door on the nineteen seventies musical experience by imposing a sense of intimacy on the recording that was in keeping with the punk era’s stated determination to eradicate the impersonality of the stadium rock experience. For a better, contrasting example of the major difference between the two camps’ aesthetics think of the far reaching tone of the Chris Thomas-produced, Stooges/Alice Cooper-influenced Never Mind the Bullocks compared to the fearless hermeticism of the next three PiL records. Robert Smith similarly enjoys the vacillation from pop harmony to its studio produced discordance, often losing artistic focus in the transition, which tendency is a major draw with his considerable fan base; the sense of disruption resonates with an audience inured to day to day social destabilization. The ongoing struggle of contemporary peoples to maintain an established identity reverberates at all levels of the developed world, and will continue throughout our nonstop race with advancing technologies. It’s why we allow music to attach itself to us, and vice versa. The portability of recorded music was already intrinsic to popular culture when the Cure released Boys Don’t Cry, and has carried over to our current time of compressed files and streaming subscription accounts, resulting in an unmanageable overload of content. In a world unceasingly habituated to the act of transforming its citizens into objects, then punishing us for allowing it to do so, plumbing the adolescent verities alive in Boys Don’t Cry can seem like a radical act of maturity. In that critical corner of Smith’s creative imagination, and typically perverse, the distinction is negligible. 

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