Category: Exploring the Back Catalogue

Having just posted a lot of beautiful music off a playlist on the Currently Listening thread, it’s a bit of a juxtaposition to be dealing with a song that is decidedly not beautiful, and probably not intended to be.  It doesn’t mean I hate it – although I really, really, really dislike the guitar intro, it is like fingers down the blackboard in musical form, just the vilest sound (and coincidentally, it really goes with the album cover).  Listen for yourself…

Some of you are undoubtedly going to love it, because life is a big tapestry, no two people are the same, etc – but I’d immediately like that song a whole lot better sans that guitar intro.  I can never really understand why anybody likes heavy metal and its car crash sounds, either – although it probably has some correlation with testosterone.  Clearly not a hugely strong correlation, because not every man is a fan, but it’s decidedly more popular with males than females.

So here’s The Cure, a band who has a large number of beautiful tracks in their catalogue, with a song that makes my ears bleed.  It is, however, an interesting song – and I’m using that word not in the British sense, but in the German sense, where you really mean that something is actually interesting when you say it, and not the opposite – and where “interesting” is a compliment, not a backhanded insult.

So, why would a song dealing with a suicide sound rather upbeat? It’s not the first song on that general theme by this band; Cut Here is more what you’d expect, a reminder that you can miss the clues (if any) and then it’s too late, and the regret of that, which I’m sure a few of us have experienced by now. But The Reasons Why is far more edgy.

Somewhere, a while back, I read a moronic, very short review of 4:13 Dream, where the reviewer was assuming that the song was Robert Smith being some kind of gothic drama queen, and as per that stereotype, crooning about his own potential suicide. If you look up the lyrics on genius.com, it does have a note that this is about an actual suicide note sent to Robert Smith by someone he knew, way back in 1987.

SCENIC SIDE TRIP – DRUMS AND PERCUSSION I want to look at the musical aspects of 4:13 Dream a bit more closely, but before I do that, I’m going to write some general thoughts on drums and percussion, which isn’t easy to write about without the requisite musical vocabulary, but let’s see how it goes.  And, if anyone out there does have the vocabulary and concepts, I’d be really happy to hear a translation of what I’m going to say in plain language into the specialised language.

Well, after Exploring “Join The Dots” I needed another project, so I decided to continue open-journalling while trawling through The Cure’s back catalogue. Technically, Join The Dots is part of the back catalogue, but the thread is already very long and its title too specific to just keep writing away there instead.

I decided that I really needed one large container for writing anything subsequent about my tour of this band’s music, rather than small buckets for each individual album / song / etc. I’m interested in writing about interrelationships between things. To compartmentalise into tiny topics feeds the kind of disconnected thinking and tunnel vision that’s become so prevalent in society. We’re losing sight of the bigger picture. We need to be able to stretch our minds without being afraid we are going “off topic” – so that we can freely explore the nature of things, rather than dealing piecemeal with small and artificially separated facets of reality.