1989: Disintegration, The Cure

By Camila Valle

I hold my honey and I store my bread

In little jars and cabinets of my will.

I label clearly, and each latch and lid

I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.

—Gwendolyn Brooks

We have talked to each other,

Taken each thing only just so far,

But in the right order, so it is music,

Or something close to music, telling from afar.

—John Ashbery

People tell me I am good at talking and I assure them that this is a recent development. The syllables still get stuck in my teeth sometimes and my best friend tells me her mouth slowly fills with cotton balls on occasion.

I sit to write this and imagine the cotton balls spilling over my desk, rolling away as I try to corral them into my circle of arms. I play Disintegration from the beginning and reach for each one slowly, dropping them in jars according to what I hear. A jar labeled kissing, another wind, then crying, memory, and on and on, one for each motif. But I am not satisfied with my sifting and change course

Let me try some facts first. As The Cure recorded and released Disintegration, its eighth studio album, in 1988 and 1989, the band was unraveling. (Frontman Robert Smith later remarked, “Calling it Disintegration was kind of tempting fate, and fate retaliated.” I, too, tempt the universe with my lore.) The band was reckoning with real mega fame for the first time and tensions were rising, Lol Tolhurst was kicked out for his spiraling alcoholism, and Smith was really going through it. He was doing a lot of hallucinogens, terrified and despondent about his looming thirtieth birthday, and feeling misunderstood by the music industry, which wanted The Cure to continue their “pop”-single streak. The self-professed remedy? To make “the most intense thing The Cure had ever done.” I am a poorly concealed cliché: a prime target demographic for intensities of intensities.

~

People tell me I am good at talking and I assure them that this is a recent development. Sometimes I give myself away and confess that I used to listen to The Cure religiously in high school, bestowed upon me by the cosmos and my father as chosen musical lineage.

Sometimes I think of the alphabetized CD collection my brother and I will inherit and how perhaps we will imagine our father’s arms outstretched to mirror the scope of his sound, as if to say here I finally am, for you to take in all at once. I picture myself browsing craigslist for a CD player and kissing every liner note.

I am also the daughter of a woman who was selectively mute for much of her childhood and periodically after, herself the daughter of a bed-ridden depressive who she witnessed refuse an at-home lobotomy. I lay in bed thinking of my younger self laying under my Robert Smith poster and a velvet-framed picture of two angels given to me by my mother, thinking of her laying in bed now and as a kid and my grandmother who couldn’t bear to be alone and they are all echoes of echoes of echoes and the point is that some things we inherit and some we make our own.

That mattress on the floor, that poster, those angels, they were the stuff I used to build my adolescent niche, away from what lay outside the confines of my bedroom. Disintegration too has its own progenitors, is too of a place, one of which much has been made: how very gray, bleak, dreary; how very English. In 1978, The Cure was founded by the self-identified “first punks in Crawley,” one of several “new towns” that emerged near London after the Second World War, “a suburban swamp built around shops, schools, and factories: the Holy Trinity of English postwar ‘progress.’” And yet, imagery of industry, war, small town life—in short, anything concrete in its specificity—is notably absent from Disintegration’s semiotic repertoire. London is not calling and Lou Reed is not waiting for the man.

Rather, Disintegration is of a world; a world anywhere but here. Not one we are born into and not one that simply appears before us, but a world built to contain vastness and, most remarkably, built around us—an act of creation, to and of which we as listeners are both witness and center. An exteriority at the service of interiority. A world with its own laws of motion and space and time. (Nobody had to tell me The Cure were raised Catholic; I knew they grew up with God in their mouths because they too play with the heavens and the earth, empty and dark, separate water from water, and someone eventually always looks up at the sky.)

The opening track, “Plainsong,” models the slow unraveling that is the mode of this world, each layer giving away the hands of the artists, so stroke by stroke that I think of paint. This is in part the influence of keyboardist Roger O’Donnell, who was a member of The Cure during the making of Disintegration, having joined in 1987 and leaving in 1990. Though keyboards had always been part of the lineup, O’Donnell—an avid fan of Sequential Circuits synthesizers and by that point the only band member who played piano and keyboards as primary instruments—helped create the grand, majestic walls of sound that contour and contain Disintegration.

If in the beginning was the word, in the beginning before the beginning was the first minute of “Plainsong”: three seconds of empty, a slow crescendo of synths culminating in a pivotal swelling, followed by a sweeping, orchestral cascade.

Disintegration does not speak, it moves. And it carries us with it.

~

People tell me I am good at talking and I assure them that this is a recent development. The result of years of therapy. I assure them that most of my life has been made up of not-saying and despite my progress I still have not figured out how to say the things about the not-saying. But Disintegration gets me close. At the peak of my not-saying, Disintegration was my sound.

As I do research for this piece, I discover that Smith made Disintegration during one of what he called his “non-talking modes,” communicating in the studio through written notes. “When we were gonna make the album I decided I would be monk-like and not talk to anyone. It was a bit pretentious really, looking back, but I actually wanted an environment that was slightly unpleasant.” I feel like I must have known this already somehow, or that the ink rearranged itself when I flipped to the interview page—a little gift just for me. Me and Robert, unspeaking twin flames.

I reshuffle my jars and again try to reckon with the running threads. This time, I sort them into broader categories and arrange them in a circle:

WORLD: dark, quiet, rain, cold, dirt, water, wind, sky, time

BODY: hands, hair, face, heart, mouth/lips/tongue

METAPHYSICS, OR VERBS, OR ENCOUNTERS, OR OR OR: death, love, language/speaking, kissing, memory/remembering, crying, smiling/laughing, finality

Two overflowing jars remain—I and You. I place them in the center.

This, to me, is the brilliant configuration of Disintegration: this is the world and this is me and this is the tragedy of all that hangs in between. A tracing of the liminal spaces of and between the self and the world outside it—a world fundamentally inhabited by others—and then lingering in the recesses.

Every song on the album has an I and every song except for two, “Closedown” and “Lullaby,” are addressed to a You. They speak directly to beloveds, presumably women, and though nothing gets a name in Disintegration, the Yous get voices—the real precious substance of the album’s world. The Yous speak when Smith can’t, existing as memory, photographs, snippets of dialogue. I always loved the “Plainsong” beloved in particular, because she gets the last word: “Sometimes you make me feel like I’m living at the edge of the world,” Smith croons. “‘It’s just the way I smile,’” she responds—the concluding punchline. There’s a joke here somewhere and it’s on Smith, and on us.

Again and again, the album reveals its preoccupation with words and their failures: “If only I’d thought of the right words” (“Pictures of You”); “Whatever words I say” (“Lovesong”); and the ultimate, “Never quite said what I wanted to say to you / Never quite managed the words to explain to you / Never quite knew how to make them believable” (“Untitled,” the closing track, doesn’t even get a title—a final act of relinquishing language). This is the ethos of Disintegration: I don’t have the words, here are the words/I don’t have the words, here is the sound.

The relative length of the songs—averaging six minutes, if my math is correct, and ranging from three and a half minutes to almost ten—gives this away too, as the lyrics tend only to fill a fraction of their duration, and the instrumental lead-ups and taperings take up most of the album’s sonic space.

But the impetus of Disintegration is not that one must speak simply because one must speak. The attempts to speak are made and have stakes because there is someone on the other side to hear us. I make the jar of I and the jar of You kiss, pressing on either side, but they do not pass through. Only clinks and rasping glass. Words fail, but bumping against the limits is also an encounter. Though The Cure is sometimes accused of solipsism, to me Disintegration has always been committed, above all, to reciprocity, the You as much as the I, or the I as an I only in relation to a You.

As the song that comes closest to a traditional love song, “Lovesong” is arguably most forthcoming about this commitment. Yet it is often considered out of place in content and in style—both a respite amid laments of things lost and accessible for its brevity and groove. But I understand “Lovesong” not so much as a departure from the rest of Disintegration, but as a kind of culmination of its spirit, an articulation that is otherwise impossible or frustrated. Smith, who wrote the song as a wedding present for his grade-school sweetheart Mary Poole, voiced something similar in 1989: “It’s taken me ten years to reach the point where I felt comfortable singing a very straightforward love song.” Love as transcendent of the worlds we build for ourselves and for others, sealed with a hidden whisper between the second chorus and the middle guitar solo: “Fly me to the moon.”

Even the names of the songs, mostly succinct descriptive nouns, are often compound words or made up of prefixes and suffixes, held together by linguistic sleights of hand just as easily as they can be cleaved or undone by the pulling of a thread: “Plain/song,” “Close/down,” “Love/song,” “Dis/integration,” “Home/sick.” We come together and fall apart to make and remake meaning, sorting things into permanence and impermanence, left again with the forgottenness that we may become and the memories like tendrils that grow and spread and recede and come back in flashes—a testament that something once stood here, and can stand again.

What I’m trying to say is that I love Disintegration because as a teenage girl looking to die it let me bypass all the talk and just feel, when I had been told all my life to strive for the opposite. For once, hysteria felt like wisdom, sensitivity like a clarifying force. I look at all my jars, containers of the ineffable, and I have no other term for it but an exercise of faith.

Put another way, the album’s first word is I and its last two are you again—a sacred loop. Or, as Toni Morrisson wrote, “Talking to you and hearing you answer—that’s the kick.”

Camila Valle is a writer, translator, cruciverbalist, and abortion doula based in New York.