Who is popular today?

Once upon a time there was a man called Robert Smith. He was beautiful and talented and wonderful and depressing and bizarre and dark. It was the Eighties, so there was nothing wrong with what he was being or representing.
He wore eyeliner so thick you could lick it like frosting and I don’t remember this bringing his sexuality into question (really, God bless the Eighties). His band, the Cure, was made of shadow and magic. They came from so far underground you needed a pickaxe to find them. Like goblins. Or like the Cure.
When I saw them in concert not so long ago, I thought, “This is impossible.” It had to be impossible. They would be old, and old would not serve them well.
Some of us will never do well old. We are not meant to age, or at least we are not meant to be held by the trappings of grown-uppitude.
In 2023, Smith is a pudgy version of his younger self, but there he is, there is Robert Smith of the smeared scarlet lipstick and the structural impossibility that has always been his hair. But he is so him.
So very hopeless, innocent and dreamy. His voice is so unchanged it’s as though he’d never even heard of pollution or cigarettes or the common cold.
A more-than-middle-aged man, 64 years old, but somehow so young. That awkward sway, as if this was his first gig ever, and not a return no one in their right mind could have expected.
Rolling Stone’s headline read: “The Cure Are This Summer’s Hottest Rock Tour. Yes. Really.”
And it really was. And there was so much weeping that could have taken place that night that somehow managed not to happen.
Let us, as the saying goes, wheel and come again.
The venue is said to hold 20,000 people and the concert is sold out. It is sold out and I am going with a girl I met on the first day of secondary school. I am going with a friend I’ve had since the first day of secondary school and, each of us is coming from afar, to meet in this place, to play mild dress up and pretend we are 16.
At school I was troubled and maladjusted and beastly. She was unflappable.
But we bonded over music and when you bond over non-mainstream music in your youth, that’s you set for life.
There is no perfect more perfect than this moment.
Right up until it dies. It is almost like a Cure song. Just like heaven. But not. Work intervenes and she has to leave a day early.
But there is something equally beautiful. A friend who does not know the smallest thing about the Cure wears an operatic pink cape, and stands (if not sways) by me.
She will not wear dreary black clothes, makeup and general aura. Before the show, she submits herself to the songs everyone has heard at least once: Friday I’m in Love, The Love Cats, Just Like Heaven, Lullaby.
The Cure always attracted those on the fringes, the misunderstood, the different, the lonely, the misfits. But this was a special, special time. This show, this was…a family show? Yes, it was. There were goth families. Intergenerational mesh and leather and corsets and billowy shirts and spatula makeup.
When the band took the stage, all the phones lit up. Instead of images, I tried for sound clips. The acoustics were so incredible that when my friend who couldn’t make it got the recording of Alone, she said it sounded like, well, a live recording. You know, an intentional one.
She may have stayed up all night listening to Cure songs. Pink-caped friend only just managed to stay awake, but admitted to enjoying some of it. She is nothing if not intrepid.
The friend who could not make it does some long drives for work, and on these she finds what she describes as Zen moments.
“Once,” she said, “Once, Anu, I was driving and there was nothing but forest for miles and miles and Beethoven’s 7th Symphony came on. That was the first one.
“And another time, it was almost identical. Trees, fields. Peace. And Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of the Seventh Son came on. So beautiful.”
And this is why I say once again: Judge not, for if you do, you will miss out on all the best people.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.

The post Just like heaven appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.