The Alternative Number Ones: The Cure’s “Fascination Street”

In The Alternative Number Ones, I'm reviewing every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks/Alternative Songs, starting with the moment that the chart launched in 1988. This column is a companion piece to The Number Ones, and it's for subscribers only. Thank you to everyone who's helping to keep Stereogum afloat.

It can be so easy to take the Cure for granted. They've been a band for longer than I've been alive. Robert Smith has not changed his personal style one bit since the first term of the Reagan administration, and his painted-up and tousle-haired face was staring at me from magazine covers before I had the slightest inkling of what alternative music even was. (I suppose I'm still not certain of what alternative music is, but that's a different story.) Smith's supporting cast has changed so many times that the Cure's always-revolving lineup has become its own blurry, mysterious constant. They've got songs that I've heard so many times that I don't always know how to hear them with fresh ears. The Cure have simply always been there.

But when you take a minute to dial into what the Cure were doing, it's immediately clear that they're a miracle band, a thing that could never be replicated. Once upon a time, these English guys were part of a whole movement of theatrically morose rock bands, a zeitgeist that the Cure themselves accidentally helped will into being. But the Cure outlasted all of those bands, and they became a different band themselves. A group who once made bleak and absorbing mood-piece albums shifted into becoming one of the great singles acts of the '80s, a decade that was not exactly short on great singles acts. The Cure's evolution was something like Joy Division, if they'd been able to gradually shift into becoming New Order, with no deaths or name changes. And then they made Disintegration.