The Cure
Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me

KISS ME KISS ME KISS ME

The album was released in the spring of 1987, preceded by the single "Why Can't I Be You?"; it is a musically very varied album, which takes to the extremes what started with the previous work "The Head On The Door" from 1985, indeed presenting many sound experiments that, upon first listening, give the impression of a disjointed and discontinuous work. In reality, this is one of The Cure's albums that, from the point of view of the lyrics, offers one of the most homogeneous structures. Here I will attempt to focus my attention on what I believe to be the central themes of this work, highlighting the structure that connects the various tracks on the album.

Eyes - Mouth

"Eyes - Mouth": this is the first and most significant dialectic that emerges from the lyrics of "Kiss Me," well evidenced by the album's artwork; both of these organs are invested with a bidirectionality, emphasizing much more important characteristics. The mouth is particularly linked to the material plane, especially concerning everything that goes into it (food, air), while for what comes out there is a dual valence, both material and instinctual (tongue, screams) and rational and ideal (thoughts that become words). The eye, on the other hand, acts as a bridge between the interior and the exterior; through it, the most outward and therefore material components of the world that surrounds us reach our rational part (the brain), while our more internal part (the soul) goes out and reveals itself to others precisely through the eye. The two organs, therefore, act as a bridge between the interior of the person, divided into spiritual interiority and material interiority, and the exterior world: in this way, precisely within them, a kind of short circuit is created between inside and outside, between what we have within us and what surrounds us. Another theme that thus appears fundamental in KM and that, as we have seen, is already introduced by the opposition eyes - mouth is the opposition-confusion "Inside - Outside": exteriority and interiority, which as mentioned are connected to each other by the eyes - mouth circuit, are now indistinguishable, and the loss of orientation is the main consequence of all this, both on a spatial-temporal level and in relationships with others and ourselves. The geometric figure that best represents this situation is the spiral: within it, inside and outside merge into a whole that is difficult to identify. In the songs of KM, there are recurring terms that refer to this figure (turning, rolling, twisting), but the sound structures often evoke a circular and spiraling movement; just think of the guitars in "The Kiss," the horns in "Why Can't I Be You?" and the strings in "Catch," just to cite a few songs, but it is a fundamental characteristic of the entire album.

From a conceptual point of view, the awareness of the irreparable nature of the situation, the external that has taken over the interiority and the inability to identify and place the interiority in the exteriority that surrounds us, leads to the formulation of a series of hypotheses, which however are immediately disappointed by the reality of the facts; part of this category is a series of songs, linked to the themes of desire, dream, and imagination, such as "If only tonight we could sleep," "Why Can't I Be You?," "Just Like Heaven," "Hot Hot Hot!!!," "One More Time," "The Perfect Girl," "A Thousand Hours": alternative worlds, dreamed and longed for, and irreparably doomed to failure.

Other songs, instead, such as "The Kiss," "Torture," "The Snakepit," "All I Want," "Like Cockatoos," "Shiver And Shake" focus their attention on the man-woman relationship, with the latter often being identified as the main cause of the condition in which the man finds himself, but which actually turns out to be both a victim and a villain at the same time.

Gradually, the man opens his eyes and becomes aware of his condition: initially, the resulting pain is accepted in an almost passive manner, but towards the end of the album, there is a clear invitation to fight and never give up. The doubt remains and is by no means resolved, indeed, to the optimistic cry of "Fight" will follow in 1989 "Disintegration," in which even those few remaining certainties are definitively swept away, but that's another story.

THE KISS

The track that opens "Kiss Me" is a plunge into the short circuit of exteriority-interiority to which human existence is subjected. The opposition "Inside-Outside" is immediately highlighted: the first two stanzas correspond to two penetrating completion images ("Your tongue like poison so swollen it fills my mouth"; "You nail me to the floor turning my guts inside out") immediately countered by the third stanza of a markedly opposite nature ("Pull it out, pull it out, pull out your f***ing voice from my head"). The chaos and disorientation in which the individual finds himself are clearly explained by the contradiction between the imperatives ("Kiss me"; "Love me"; "Pull it out") which imply a strong will and participation, and the last stanza ("I never wanted any of this/ I wish you were dead") found at the extreme opposite: on one hand, the desire for merging, on the other the desire for annihilation and destruction. The man is still unable to focus on the cause of his condition: the villain is the woman, and as such, it is against her that one's dissatisfaction must be vented.

CATCH

It is time to try to remember, but the memory is clouded and confused. The initial certainty ("Yes, I know who you remind me of") is immediately followed by doubt ("a girl I think I used to know"). "Catch" highlights the opposition "High-Low": on one hand, the upward gaze, on the other the inevitable downward plunge that involves the girl from the memory. The first signs of exteriorization appear, represented by circular elements: eyes roll towards the heavens; toppling on the floor. The vain and futile attempt to catch her before she falls into another "she" fails, and everything ends in a kind of oblivion, from which it is difficult to emerge. The girl now standing before us is no longer the one that barely re-emerges in our memories; she has become a tormentor ready to make us suffer and torture us.

TORTURE

Here she is, the tormentor: a blind encounter that lays bare all human physicality, placing the "new" man and the "new" woman face to face. Physical suffering emerges from every line of the song and finds its climax in the allegory of the increasingly tense skin screaming in pain. The world is now completely upside down, and the image of the vampire hung upside down only amplifies the spatial chaos reflected within each of us: even our bodies end up going topsy-turvy ("cut, broken, fragmented, and aching"). It is completely open, but the interiority that emerges is essentially physical; nothing of the psychological and spiritual interiority appears to our eyes. Yet despite all this pain, the body still isn't fully satisfied, and the cries of suffering turn into pleas for it to increase ever more. A glimmer of clarity appears in the final lines, so alongside the awareness of life's torture and the man-woman relationship, stands the "I'm almost there" offering a glimpse of hope, or perhaps the false conviction, of understanding and solving the enigma of the human existence into which we have plunged.

IF ONLY TONIGHT WE COULD SLEEP

This song manifests an attempt to escape reality through dreams. A series of dreamlike images follow one another ("the bed of flowers"; "the eternal spell"; "the deep dark waters"), contrasted by the verbs linked to them ("to sleep"; "to fall"; "to slide"), verbs that denote a fall to the bottom, but also a plummeting inside ourselves to find the harmony and peace we do not know in real life. Breathing in water suggests the unreality of all these dreams and the impossibility of the "ifs" coming true. Once again, it is external phenomena, distant and coming from above, that seek to help ("the angel"; "the rain"). The man and woman merge into a soft embrace ("velvety") that contrasts with the harshness of real life: finally, inseparable and indistinguishable, the rain washes their faces and carries away their exteriority, but it is only for a brief fleeting moment. Clearly, the final supplication ("never let it end") is destined to shatter against a reality that must be faced and resolved in other ways: the awakening will be abrupt and inevitably traumatic.

WHY CAN'T I BE YOU?

This song is a true hymn to exteriority: the woman is so admired as to want to be her, but it all resolves into a cannibalistic-sexual urge. This song, as we were saying, is not a praise to the woman, but rather to the exteriority represented with dizzying, breathtaking images racing breathlessly in every line. It is the call to the spiral figure and the consequent loss of orientation that dominates the entire song: high - low ("I'll kiss you from the head to the feet"), inside - outside ("I'll eat you whole or I'll hug you till you die"). The eye can do nothing against the immense power of the mouth ("you're so wonderful, too good to be true"): hunger reigns supreme. The spinning involves our entire universe, it is an irrepressible chain reaction; we have no choice but to abandon ourselves to our fate of devourer-devoured: because in the end, these roles are anything but defined and definitive. Only occasionally do characteristics emerge that would really make it worthwhile praising the woman ("everything you do is delicate, angelic, dreamy, delightful"), but these are illusory traits tied to the dream sphere; the sexual gastronomical spiral has scrambled our senses and brought forth our more instinctual nature. So, in the end, the image dominating over everything, encapsulating the exhausting pace of this song with irony, is represented by the most external part of the woman before us, her second skin, what she is wearing ("you're just so elegant").

HOW BEAUTIFUL YOU ARE

Glimpses are opened up on a distant past where the feeling of hate, understood as the impossibility of love in man-woman relationships, originated. A past where, at least, man and woman aspired to be one single entity ("we promised each other we'd always have the same thoughts and dreamt of being two souls in one"), shattered by the encounter with three creatures (a man, a boy, and a child) also merged into a single entity ("and all six eyes were fixed on you"), each with a different intent. The man, already familiar with the opposite sex and the rules of the game, stops at the pure exteriority of the woman ("how beautiful you are"), the boy in the phase of transition from adolescence to adulthood is confused by the exteriority and poetry of her vision ("beautiful, she shines like a star"), while the child's eyes reveal what gestures and words fail to express. This is how the eyes-mouth "short circuit" occurs, which opens a breach on the real condition of the man-woman relationship: eyes "speak" and instill fear, she doesn't want to be stared at and with her words shatters the dream of possible harmony made of love and understanding between man and woman ("I hate people looking at me, keep them away from me"). The interiority that is expressed spontaneously and unconsciously in the child ends up being shamefully imprisoned in some dark corner of our body in adults, so the exteriority prevails, forcing us into a barren and foreign world where man and woman do not know or love one another, instead consume each other greedily, nothing more. This awareness plunges us deeper into the bowels of our existence, down to the snake pit.

THE SNAKEPIT

The abyss into which we have fallen is a sort of narcotized environment that gradually extinguishes our deepest parts: the brain and the eye are no longer under our control ("and nobody knows and nobody sees because everyone is drinking the brain"). The second verse marks the defeat of the interior by the exterior, and again the eye and the mouth are the protagonists representing the scene. The mouth has now lost its inner characteristic, namely speech, the ability to communicate ("I've forgotten how to talk, I can't remember a word") and thus becomes a total symbol of exteriority: the nothingness, the void is "full of stupid girls". The eye tries to resist to the end, but it is all in vain; it too is destined to succumb to the spectacle before it ("and it's as if my eyes are about to burst and are opening like plums"). The individual, in regard to this situation, attempts to rebel for the umpteenth time, twisting upon itself, but like a serpent at risk of eating its own tail. The bottom has been hit; no escape route seems possible, yet above there is still a glimpse, nothing remains but to focus on it and attempt to reach it even if it seems impossible, much like heaven itself appears unreachable.

JUST LIKE HEAVEN

In the second half of the album, after the first has led us into the bowels where man has plunged, attempts are made to focus on various ways to try to resolve and uplift the condition to which man seems inevitably destined. "Just Like Heaven" is a desperate scream addressed to oneself and the life that has stolen the only girl we've ever loved. The cry towards ourselves is due to having been unable to do anything to prevent what happened. The exterior nature of things has revealed itself gradually, and man has abandoned himself to it, and it is once again a "whirling" image ("spinning over that edge whirling") that marks the change of perspective and the loss of all points of reference. Man has thus closed his eyes, preventing his true self from revealing itself ("why can't you understand that I am in love with you?"), and allowed himself to be tempted by the mouth: she asks to see the trick that makes her cry, that makes her laugh, and he kisses her face and head. The "show me" with which the song begins, though it might seem to mark a change, as the showing implies the use of eyes, in reality, upon closer reading has the same meaning as the "kiss me" with which the album began, only the roles are reversed. The attempt to uplift through the female figure is doomed to failure; the woman speaks of love, but what she really wants are unequivocal signs of the exteriority that dominates the world. The "high" connotations referred to the feminine figure ("soft"; "angels", "heaven") very similar to those used in "Why can't I be you?", collapse and lose their illusory character ("you're just like a dream") as soon as they come into contact with the reality of things. And indeed it all vanishes, like a dream, and when eyes are finally reopened, the reality that presents itself is one of silence and solitude.

ALL I WANT

Disappointment for the new loss is followed by surrender; man conforms to the rules of the game, lowers himself to the level of what surrounds him ("tonight I feel like an animal; tonight I howl inside; tonight I feel wild"). Man and woman end up abandoning themselves to primal instincts and releasing their animalistic nature ("all I want is to hold you like a dog"); but all this debasing ("tonight I am falling so low"), this attempt to convince oneself that trying to change the state of things is pointless is an ongoing self-deception, and precisely that "that's all I want" repeated ad infinitum loses its efficacy and ultimately reveals the exact opposite. The man feels impotent, sees no way out, and risks being dominated by exteriority and the malaise it entails; that mouth, screaming with its cry inward and not outward, is the symbol of exteriority seeking to definitively destroy what remains of interiority, to deliver the final blow. The individual feels an urge internally to fight; however, in the condition he finds himself, he prefers to suppress with a scream that exhortation. For salvation, it remains only to hope for external intervention to change the course of things, as it has already happened in the past.

HOT HOT HOT!!!

In the history of man, it has already happened that the sky struck the earth to close one era and open another, possibly better than the previous, but history itself unfolds on a spiral path that leaves no hope. The various periods in which "lightning struck" are symbolic of extended and complex historical phases. Underground: it is the period in which evolution leads to the emergence of man; instincts inherent in our nature dominate unabated. Lightning strikes, the low is pervaded and invaded by the high ("the sky crashed down to earth, that place was lost in space for a second"), the evolutionary leap has occurred, man can leave that condition for a new life on the surface. Sea: the sea is the symbol of the boundary between earth and sky, between low and high; it is the second time lightning appears, again the high strikes the low: it is the fish, below the surface, that are taken and overturned like rain above man. Bed: the third time lightning strikes, it surprises man in bed, symbolic of the strong sexual valence that exteriority has taken. Here too the room is struck from above and for a moment finds itself on the moon, but the issue lies precisely here, in the fact that exteriority is never defeated definitively because, in reality, exteriority is found inside man and not in the objects surrounding him. For a second, the high prevails, a brief flash followed immediately by darkness ("then everything went black again").

ONE MORE TIME

The new attempt to reach for the heavens finds its manifestation in this track, a plea addressed to her to take us in her arms and lift us like a child to the sky. The need for female intervention seen in its most maternal and protective aspects ("so take me in your arms and lift me like a child") is prayed for and hoped for almost as if it were a second birth. However, the awareness remains of the difficulty and emptiness of that high moment: man is allowed to break away from the ground only for a brief moment, just long enough to savor the sky, only to return to his low and earthly nature.

LIKE COCKATOOS

This song adopts a cinematic narrative technique: there is no narrating "I", but rather an observant "I" that moves like a camera around the scene where the meeting between him and her takes place. The detachment between man and woman occurs in a dark and rainy night, where the confusing vortex manifests once more ("and all around the night sang like cockatoos"). The rain is not a purifying rain, it is instead black, like blood. The gloomy and heavy atmosphere enveloping the entire song is rendered perfectly by the definitive sense of detachment ("I will never tell you these things again") and the extemporaneous nature of the relationship, which in a low and exterior world cannot leave a lasting memory ("left in its place a trail of bleeding bubbles"), and what has happened immediately becomes a mental image destined to be lost and dissolved in the nightly spiral.

ICING SUGAR

This song shows a more feminine perspective compared to other songs on the album. The first image that comes to mind reading the lyrics is predominantly sexual ("I'll empty you, empty as a boy can be"), however, viewed under the interpretive key we have used for all other tracks, it indicates eliminating what exteriority has polluted in the interiority, thus allowing the return to the state of inner purity that once existed, pure just like a boy about to enter adulthood.

THE PERFECT GIRL

The encounter with this girl so strange and different, seeming to come from another planet and whose words cannot even be understood, creates a sensation of confusion: one would like to share our swirling world with her ("I'd like to make you spin all around, I'd like to turn you upside down"), but her way of looking, her eyes, make us plummet, make us fall in love with her. The doubt that remains is whether this girl is real or an imaginary girl, the desperate scream of "A thousand hours" would suggest the latter hypothesis...

A THOUSAND HOURS

It is indeed a desperate and heart-rending scream that emanates from the words of this song, which also introduces the theme of the inexorability of time, finding its complete form in the subsequent album "Disintegration". Time assumes distorted and overwhelming forms ("a thousand hours wasted every day") imprisoning the effort to try and feel in an internal manner ("just to feel my heart for a second"). The disappointment and unendurability of one's external and disoriented condition, the wind covering and enclosing everything, reaches its limit and who knows how much longer man will find the strength to resist.

SHIVER AND SHAKE

Even the woman, always seen with a sort of attraction-repulsion, no longer seems capable of providing any help and also becomes wasted time ("you're a waste of time"). In her, there is no longer any glimpse of that inner light which repeatedly fueled hope for a different tomorrow; the exteriority dominates and invades the female figure, which, just like our existence, is degrading ("you're just three holes that run like wounds, you're a f***ing loss, you're like a snail on the floor"). The woman becomes a source of hate, precisely because she has disappointed our expectations, because instead of representing a possible paradise, she has ended up abandoning us in an endless hell, and therefore given her uselessness, one could do without her, destroy her, eliminate and make her disappear forever. The final shivering, however, shows a man ready to do anything not to give up, well aware that the cause of his condition, after all, is not the woman: she too is a victim and only personifies and amplifies that call to instinct and exteriority, permeating every aspect of life. The struggle to face is with ourselves, to awaken the dormant and corrupted interiority hidden within each of us. Thus, from the initial imperative "kiss me", which foresaw an encounter between man and woman united to combat the decay of existence, through the realization that such a plea could not be realized precisely due to mutual exteriority, we arrive at the final imperative "fight", directed at oneself, not to surrender.

FIGHT

This song is the perfect summary of what has been said for all the other songs on the album: the insensitivity and futility of life ("sometime there's nothing to feel for"), the impassive and resigned surrender to suffering and inevitable pain ("sometime you feel so old it hurts when you cry, it hurts just to breathe") and the awareness that no one can help anyone else ("and so it feels like there's really no one else"). But the anger that in "Shiver and shake" was mistakenly directed at the woman for not helping us, here is hurled against the true cause of the human condition: our compliant slide into the spiral with which exteriority has enveloped us. So one must not resign, our fate is not yet decided ("otherwise, watch yourself burn again" referring back to "Hot hot hot!!!"), one must not pretend that what we want is this ("don't howl like a dog" referring instead to "All I want"), one must believe in the possibility of rising towards the top and bringing out the interiority free from any constraint.

It will be a difficult and tortuous journey ("so when the pain begins and the nightmares start, remember you can fill the sky"), but we must try with all our might, and never give up.