The Cure song Robert Smith said was “naive to the point of insanity”
When The Cure formed in 1978, they were fresh out of school and lacked significant life experience, a factor which influenced their early output, imbued with a sense of teenage naivety. However, naivety isn’t inherently negative and has propelled numerous bands, including The Cure, towards greatness.
The most powerful examples of songwriting are typically mined from heartbreaking events of seismic importance. However, Robert Smith didn’t have an expansive repository of experience to draw from during the band’s early days. Yet, in the teenage mind of Smith, he’d lived through enormously important hardship, and it wasn’t until he was older that he realised they perhaps weren’t as life-changing as he once believed.
As a teenager, everybody is a hormonal mess who believes the world is their enemy, and The Cure successfully bottled this feeling in their 1979 song, ‘Boys Don’t Cry‘. Despite being released to little fanfare, it has become one of the band’s most beloved creations, demonstrating themes nobody else discussed.
While the essence of ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ has been repackaged countless times over the decades, The Cure were revolutionary when it attacked toxic masculinity many years before the phrase had even entered the popular vernacular.
The stiff British upper lip was an accepted part of life when Smith wrote ‘Boys Don’t Cry’, and in the song, he hit out at the idea that people needed to limit themselves to societal restrictions. To be himself as an artist, Smith needed to be brave and express himself freely, but years later, he’d look back and recoil at the version of himself that wrote the song.
During a conversation with Rolling Stone, Smith reflected: “The pop songs like ‘Boys Don’t Cry’ are naive to the point of insanity [laughs]. But considering the age I was and the fact that I had done nothing apart from go to school – no real life experience, everything was taken from books – some of them are pretty good.”
However, almost two decades later, in 2019, Smith seemed to have changed his stance on the track, which he believed had become more relevant than ever. “I was singing [‘Boys Don’t Cry’] at Glastonbury and I realised that it has a very contemporary resonance with all the rainbow stripes and stuff flying in the crowd,” he stated.
Elaborating on the track’s message, he told NME in 2019: “When I was growing up, there was peer pressure on you to conform to be a certain way. And as an English boy at the time, you’re encouraged not to show your emotion to any degree. And I couldn’t help but show my emotions when I was younger. I never found it awkward showing my emotions. I couldn’t really continue without showing my emotions; you’d have to be a pretty boring singer to do that.”
While ‘Boy’s Don’t Cry’ didn’t arise from a unique event in Smith’s life that nobody else could begin to understand, it tapped into a universal feeling of teenage angst that was relatable on a visceral level, even if it was born out of the naivety of youth.
