Boys Don’t Cry- The Cure

While not all of my “Songs I’ll Always Love” posts will be this lengthy, I feel as though I have to explain the background of my URL and overall obsession with The Cure, because it’s quite honestly a pretty weird story.

When I was a freshman in high school I entered a somewhat unhealthy period of One Tree Hill binge watching. Aside from this being arguably the best TV show of all time, it, in a strange way, led to my love of music. I saw a lot of myself in one of the the main characters on the show, a popular girl on the surface, but a deeply brooding teenage girl on the inside. She dressed a bit edgier than her friends, she loved “weird” music, and she really liked to draw. I became enamored with her character and the parallel level I felt our lives were on to the point where I would actually pause the show to see what music she was listening to. I noticed Peyton’s affinity towards The Cure early on in the series, and so in summary, my thirteen year old self was thrown into the in-categorizable 80’s New Wave/Post-Punk/Brit-Goth world of Robert Smith and The Cure. It’s difficult to word the ways I felt when began my adventures into the deep discography of the band, but I think Peyton Sawyer herself puts it all too perfectly:

When I began listening to The Cure, I did so meticulously, in a way I’ve never done with any other band. Instead of starting off with their greatest hits and top singles, I listened album by album, song by song, analyzing lyric after lyric- truth be told, I spent more time studying this discography than I did studying for school that year.

So where did I begin? Their first U.S single, dropped in 1979: Boys Don’t Cry.

Robert Smith claims the band had little creative control over their early music, and has expressed distaste for their premiere album, Three Imaginary Boys, calling it “lightweight”. To be honest, I do have to agree- this album is not one of my favorites, but you can’t talk The Cure without mentioning Boys Don’t Cry or Three Imaginary Boys, as both of these iconic tracks put them on the map.

Boy’s Don’t Cry tells the familiar tale of a boy who has yet to mature into a man, found lost in a mix of emotion and patriarchal brainwashing. In summary, it’s the story of a boy who has accidentally pushed away a girl he deeply cares for. Instead of apologizing and trying to win her back (showing weakness and therefore compromising his male hood) he “…tries to laugh about it/ cover it all up with lies/ hiding the tears in my eyes/ cause boys don’t cry”. If listened to as background noise, the song sounds very much like bubblegum Brit Pop- but the lyrics tell a deeper story, and I think it’s a narrative everyone has been involved in at some point or another. Not being ready for full emotional expression, masking emotions with fake laughter and vices, and ultimately feeling deeply miserable because of it. This song always makes me think, what’s worse? The gut sinking feeling of rejection or the forever drifting thought, “what if?”

To check out the lyrics for yourself, click here