k-punk: IT DOESN'T MATTER IF WE ALL DIE: THE CURE'S UNHOLY TRINITY

Maybe you remember a while back when I referred to The Cure as "psychedelic".
Well here's a lot more from somebody who thinks about The Cure too much.
My friend Ted e-mailed me the link to this really great write-up of the big three Cure records.

k-punk: IT DOESN'T MATTER IF WE ALL DIE: THE CURE'S UNHOLY TRINITY:
"Goth morbidity arose in part from a Schopenhauerian scorn for organic life: from Goth’s perspective, death was the truth of sexuality. Sexuality was what the ceaseless cycle of birth-reproduction-death (as icily surveyed by Siouxsie on Dreamhouse’s ‘Circle Line’) needed in order to perpetuate itself. Death was simultaneously outside this circuit and what it was really about. Affirming sexuality meant affirming the world, whereas Goth set itself, in Houllebecq’s marvelous phrase, against the world and against life. By the early eighties, it was possible to posit a rock anti-tradition that had similar affiliations, an anhedonic, anti-vital rock lineage that began with The Stones – with the neurasthenic Jagger of ‘Paint it Black’ rather than the cloven-hooved demonic-Dionysus of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ - and passed through the Stooges and the Pistols, before reaching its nadir-as-zenith in Joy Division. But Goth suspected that rock was that always and essentially a death trip. This was the gambit of The Birthday Party, who hunted rock’s mythology back to the fetid, voodoo-stalked crossroads and swamplands of the delta blues. After all, isn’t Blues the clearest possible demonstration of the discrepancy between desire and enjoyment, and therefore of the validity of the theory of the death drive? The Blues juju – or jou-jou – relies upon the enjoyment of desires that cannot be satisfied."