Monday, August 30, 2004  

Yet Another Very Special After-School Suburbs

The Cure, "Pictures of You" (Extended Remix)
from Razor Rare Remixes Volume 2 (bootleg)
The Cure, "Pictures of You" (Extended Dub Mix)
from Mixed Up (Elektra, 1990)
The Cure, "Pictures of You" (Live in Stockholm)
from a bootleg
The Cure, "Pictures of You" (Demo)
from a bootleg
The String Quartet, "Pictures of You"
from Whisper: A Tribute To The Cure (Vitamin, 2002)
The Cure, "The End of the World"
from The Cure (Geffen, 2004)

Sellout schmellout:
I like it when good tunes are used in TV commercials. Case in point: Hummer used the fab Mojave 3 song "Bluebird of Happiness" in a commerical that I saw during game seven of this year's Stanley Cup Finals---and it made me put on the CD and smack slapshots against the basement wall as Neil Halstead's dreamy voice floated through my makeshift rink. Hummer also used the Who's "Happy Jack." As soon as I decide to stop riding the bus to work, you best bet I'm gonna lay out the cabbage and buy a Hummer just for their fab taste in tunes. Oh, and then I'll buy a Jetta cuz of that killer Nick Drake song "Pink Moon" that they used to hawk their toy. And you better believe my garage is gonna be stuffed because I'm getting a Saturn, too---they used Pas/Cal's "The Bronze Beached Boys (Come On Let's Go)," which always makes me thing of my much-missed homeslices from Michigan.

While I like all the commercial-fied tunes I mentioned, I absolutely adore "Pictures of You" by the Cure. Robert Smith saw through his mascara and cheek fat to entrust the tune to HP for a digicam commercial---all the while worrying about selling out since the song means so much to so many. Drink your tears, Robbie, and have another donut & lager. When I hear the tune on HP's ad all it does is make me think of Gaele (see 8.27.04 post), not consumer electronics, and that's a good thing.

See, one of my best memories of visiting Gaele in France was holding hands and skipping through a vacant parking lot in Valence while singing "Pictures of You" at the top of our teenage lungs. (Sorry for that skipping image. I swear, normally I just walk briskly, but sometimes life takes over and the feets just follow.)

For Gaele it was fun to croon a good song with a good friend, with the added benefit of getting in some nice cardio. For me, I was probably struggling through a pulled hammy and a rippin' backache while trying to get a point across to her---how my heart felt about our trans-Atlantic romance, which had turned into friendship because of distance.

"Looking so long at these pictures of you / But I never hold on to your heart / Looking so long for the words to be true / But always just breaking apart / My pictures of you / There was nothing in the world / That I ever wanted more / Than to feel you deep in my heart / There was nothing in the world / That I ever wanted more / Than to never feel the breaking apart / All my pictures of you."

How could anyone belt those lines and not feel like the Cure were talking about me & my situation? Well, Gaele, for one. But for me---oh, those words meant everything.

"These pictures are all I can feel."
So tru, Robbie, so tru!

See, I'm a sentimental guy. I tear up during Olympic montages set to Bon Jovi tunes. I watch Richard Linklater movies and whimper, "So tru!" I think Dashboard Confessional, the Counting Crows and the Cure write songs just for me. And they do.

BTW, the Cure's new album is far better than I would have expected. You can see the video for "The End of the World" here. And you can see a gaggle of Cure videos here, including "Pictures of You."

Posted by CP | Link |

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