Let's Go to Bed

What nostalgia this song evokes! When I was a teenager it had a sort of cult-within-a-cult status all its own among Cure fans. You know how enthusiastic teenagers can be about anything that even appears to have the slightest, remotest bit to do with sex. Since you just have to look at this song literally, no interpretation required, to see the sex references, we were mad for it. Everybody got a particular kick out of the line "You think you're tired now, wait until three." Clearly, it was universally agreed, the narrator is (or is trying to come across as) a master seducer.

Another fond recollection from my teen years that's kindled by this song is jaded-chic. This was the period when it was considered cool to be cynical and alienated and wear black a lot. (This in turn generated a meta-cynicism movement in rejection of what was viewed – probably correctly, in many cases – as merely affected cynicism. IMO this was what generated such phenomena as, for example, South Park, which often makes fun of the sort of cynicism associated with "Generation X.") The distrust (or perhaps disdain would be a better word) for authority was in some ways kind of like in the '60s, although the widespread cynicism was very different from the peace-and-love mood of the '60s. (I'm not old enough to recall the '60s or even more than a tiny bit of the '70s, first-hand, so this is based on the popular reputation of that era along with stories I've heard from older friends.) It often provided, at the very least, a convenient excuse to ignore rules and such; for example, it was widely agreed that the school administration's priority was covering their own asses.

I remember a number of times when friends or acquaintances would listen to a group for a while, then decide that group had gotten too 'commercial.' (This typically meant that the band in question had yielded to pressure from their manager and agreed to appear on MTV.) Other quirks of this time: at some point (I believe around 1990 or '89), it became not merely socially acceptable, but actually cool to be on antidepressants. I accidentally provoked a brief wave of interest in Voltaire among my classmates when I did a book report on Candide (which rejects the more standard Englightenment claim that humanity is essentially good, with numerous counterexamples as well as plenty of humor and irony).

Approaches to relationships among this crowd varied, but a lot of people rejected the idea of monogamous or long-term relationships and took a rather Marquis de Sade approach (another Enlightenment figure who didn't buy into the typical world-view of the philosophes) - okay, not quite that extreme, but they did like his idea of "do whatever feels good," and I recall his name getting dropped a lot. When I was in college, a lot of people rejected marriage as a discriminatory institution that privileged heterosexual monogamy, but some went further and rejected monogamous relationships in general, or even relationships in general. (Most of these people have since gotten married.) Nobody used the phrase "make love," or referred to being in a relationship as "dating" or the like: people in relationships were "having sex" or, if one preferred to be euphemistic, "hanging out." The new approach was to have sex with any of your friends whom you found attractive. In our 1st year of college, a lot of people in my class got involved in open relationships with people several years older than ourselves. Sex was something you did for fun, whenever you felt like it and could find a willing and attractive partner, although there were long-term relationships (that is, people who slept together on a regular basis). Needless to say, this led to a lot of one-night stands and brief relationships (and a lot of things people regretted later; many of us had arrived at college not recognizing the awkwardness that being around a former sex partner with whom one has had a falling-out could entail). (Fortunately, there was also a strong emphasis on using condoms; anyone who refused to use one probably would have been ostracized, or at the very least, would have an extremely tough time finding anyone willing to sleep with them.)

Despite the fact that the themes of their songs are often sharply opposed to this attitude toward life and relationships, the Cure was very popular among the disaffected, black-wearing crowd in the mid-late '80s and later on (I think the change started sometime in the early or mid-'90s, but it's hard to be sure), the beyond-cynical too-cool-to-bother-wearing-black types. (I guess this is "Generation Y;" my sister called them "Generation 'Y Not?'" in honor of of their seeming willingness to try anything.)

The point I'm getting to is that I'm not sure that Robert Smith is liable to be entirely pleased with the effect that his work seems to have had on young people. What do other people think? Has he commented on this matter?