Pornography

According to Robert Smith:

"The last song, and in fact the last song I wrote for a while, is fuelled by the same self-mockery, self-hate, that burned in 100 Years, but it is, if only very slightly, a little more hopeful than the others... I am escaping (I escaped) by blaming someone else. A murder or suicide? "I must fight this sickness...""

Pornography as a whole is almost oppresively and overwhelmingly depressing. I like depressing music and have listented to them all, and Pornography is the bleakest. There is not a hint of hope or pleasure in this song, nor the album as a whole. And I love it.

one of the reversed television samples is actually one of the anchormen of the BBC saying goodnight to the viewers. Quite symbolical.

And it is a fact Robert used a lot of drugs.

things make look just right , just "perfect" but they arent. infact he is so old that he is actually on the death bed. Not in a hospital or actual bed but instead in his mind, things are winding down. and even those close to him he wishes to harm. he is sick. and cruel and ugly thoughts of destruction cross his mind. though he does realize that he wants to find a cure to the sickness.

believe it or not, it is a suicide note Robert wrote..."One more day like today and I'll kill you...I'll watch you drown in the shower"...it involve the thoughts going through an extremely depressed person...i love how in the beginning of the song where there is all the commontion in the background...shows how a person has millions of thoughts racing through their head and they cannot make any sense of them...they cannot make any sense of LIFE...song still blows my mind everytime i listen to it.

I read somwhere that the whole Pornography record was written under drug influence...

This is... the saddest and darkest song ever written. There are other dark songs, of course, but I find something unfathomable hopeless in this that I can't find anywhere else. I simply love it. The best The Cure song ever - in my humble opinion.

Another open song, the "one more day..." lyric can be interpreted in two ways, either as he's so depressed he even wants to kill his loved one or as the suicide note version, talking about himself in the third person.

The live version of this on the second disc of the deluxe edition blows the album version away. Robert sings it so violently it's brilliant :D

The opening reversed vocals are symbolic of all things to titillate the masses as in themselves pornography. Back then actual pornography in England was much darker, dirtier, as is this song. Every action becomes a staged scene in a smuggled magazine in your mind. The sense of not just being watched, but watching something you shouldn't becomes omnipresent.

Therefore, I think this song is aboutparanoia and mental disintegration. Eventually you just want to kill yourself. Even death has something voyeuristic about it at this point. Drown yourself, slit your wrists, it's all pornography for the obsessed. Then the singer starts to attempt to be self aware, pulling their hair out with intent, trying to fight their growing sickness.

Also, the arrangement of the instruments in this song, especially the vicious freeform guitar, is brilliant

INTENSELY Apocolyptic-it certainly conjures up imagery of impending death and doom.I almost think of it as a murder-suicide song.