Spinning On That Dizzy Edge

The Cure: 'Just Like Heaven'

As fatherhood approached, Michael Agger thought he would give up on the pop music of his youth. Instead, it became his furtive guilty pleasure. ‘Other dads would steal away to smoke pot, I would go on neighborhood errands to enjoy a few minutes of listening time.’

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The fluorescent-lit basement of a Duane Reade, late winter. I’m in my thirties, with a sick child at home, looking for Tylenol. As I ascend the escalator, “Just Like Heaven” starts playing on the store’s speakers. I walk toward the registers, annoyed. Don’t people know how special this song is? You don’t just drop it on someone without warning. I think of a last dance at summer camp — the feel of my hand holding a girl’s waist. Nightime in a Volkswagen Rabbit, speeding through the sad valleys of Pennsylvania. Watching MTV in my basement, wondering when real life would begin. All that time ripping away. Just like a dream.

My infant son was a terrible sleeper and I would often be up in the night, trying to soothe him. When he finally settled on my chest, I would watch YouTube on my laptop until it seemed safe to place him back in the crib. This was during the late 2000s, and the videos of my teenage years had all been uploaded. Here was Peter Gabriel climbing up on Solsbury Hill; Chrissie Hynde serving coffee in a diner; Big Country racing through the landscape on ATVs; The Go-Gos waterskiing in tiaras; and the astonishing montage of live Journey crowds in the video for “Faithfully,” set against the song’s most penetrating lyric: “They say that the road ain’t no place to start a family.” In this mix, The Cure always had its own dark energy: Robert Smith hugging himself cross-armed in the video for “Just Like Heaven,” wearing white makeup and dancing on the edge of a seaside cliff. The video played up the song’s suicidal undertones, which I had never really grasped when I was younger.

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When I’d been about to become a father, I’d thought that I would give up pop and embrace classical music. That’s all my father listened to. The compact discs were neatly lined on the bookshelf, next to the most recent books by Bob Woodward and David Halberstam. My father was a lawyer in a small, industrial town and modest in his tastes, but he would reward himself with a new BMW every five years. I remember sitting in the passenger seat, surrounded by the beautiful Bavarian stitching of the leather seats and an array of subtle yet stern dashboard lights. The Strauss, the Brahms, the Bach sounded amazing through the car stereo. This is what fatherhood was: classical music and button-down shirts and gently probing questions.

As a new father, I took a concerted run at becoming a classical music-phile. Lists were consulted. Alex Ross was read. But it was like a tree graft that never really took. I could appreciate the music, but I had trouble bringing it inside of me. What resulted was mostly an obsessive listening to Glenn Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations and an unexplainable affection for Shostakovich. And then I would return to the Smiths, or Pavement, or Frank Ocean, or Mates of State, or Post Malone’s “White Iverson.” I would listen though headphones, usually when alone. The Cure was on my playlists, and their songs remained the guiltiest of pop pleasures. Listening to “Just Like Heaven” or “Pictures of You” felt as if I were standing outside of a high school, peering through the windows like some sad nostalgist.

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As my kids became older and my hair became thinner, pop remained my furtive soundtrack. I could lose an entire winter Saturday night on a YouTube memory stroll. Other dads would steal away to smoke pot, I would go on neighborhood errands to enjoy a few minutes of listening time. This went on for years. The low point of my weird musical self-laceration came during the pandemic, when so many of us were thrown back into ourselves. While taking a long walk, I was moved to tears while listening to the heartbreak rendered in Taylor Swift’s “August” (I dreamt of you all summer long). What the hell was wrong with me? I thought of the old-school Princeton basketball coach, Pete Carril, who forbade his varsity players to eat candy bars, because candy bars were for children. Here I was, in my forties, gobbling up teen betrayal, crushes, and longing.

As the world opened up again, I began to hear a lot of The Cure in coffee shops and Sweetgreens and all the slightly anodyne places of gentrified New York. What quirk of the algorithm had vaulted “Just Like Heaven” back onto the playlists? I saw teenagers wearing Cure t-shirts and Doc Martens. Was it the same thing that had happened with Urban Outfitters and Nirvana? I never figured it out. I just didn’t want to think of my 13-year-old self when I was picking up my hot honey chicken with extra sweet potatoes.

I suppose you could simply say that I had become old. I kept waiting for the new pop songs and the new stars to take over, and certainly some of them did. But with streaming and YouTube and everything else, pop music had become untethered from time — especially great, morose pop music. The Cure could still fill Madison Square Garden. Depeche Mode was touring again. The infant son was now a teenager who played me Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time” during a long drive. One morning a young woman in line at my regular coffee place sang along to the words from The Cure’s “In Between Days” — Yesterday I got so old, I felt like I could die — and I felt my reserve softening. Perhaps there was no need for me to be so defensive about The Cure, no need to enshrine a band in my personal memory. Maybe The Cure was something we could all share, as we spin on that dizzy edge between memory and our futures. ✹

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Michael Agger is an editor and writer from Pennsylvania.

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