“Friday I’m in Love”—A Valentine to Robert Smith as the Cure Is Inducted Into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

The Cure will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame today at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which is more than a stone’s throw from Crawley, England, where they formed in 1976. It took the Hall of Fame 43 years to recognize the band, but Robert Smith and the boys had me at The Head on the Door, their 1985 gold-certified album.

My fascination with the band—let’s be honest, with its frontman—began in high school and crescendoed in college. Their “Boys Don’t Cry” poster was taped to my dorm room wall. On it, Smith appears as a sort of New Wave Baudelaire, silhouetted and alone save for his guitar. The fall of his hand and the slight inward turn of his feet broadcast vulnerability and melancholy. The image made me swoon then, and it remains potent today but for different reasons. It’s not just that my musical tastes have expanded since the late 1980s; definitions around gender have too. The new masculine ideals in Sweden that I’ve been writing about don’t seem so far from Smith’s “soft” persona. And his penchant for black fits in with the broody, 1980s vibe going on in fashion at the moment.

The first thing that comes to mind at the mention of Smith’s name is his dramatic look. His mass of teased black hair, pale face, shadowed eyes, and painted lips were deemed goth in the ’80s—much to Smith’s chagrin.“We got stuck with [the goth label] at a certain time when goths first started,” he told Time Out London. “I was playing guitar with Siouxsie and the Banshees, so I had to play the part. [But] Goth was like pantomime to me.”

As the Cure was formed in the punk era, Smith’s boys-do-cry softness is somewhat surprising. In fact, the Buzzcocks are one of his favorite acts, alongside the Beatles and David Bowie, a fellow makeup wearer. Smith’s maquillage doesn’t fall into the gender-bending glam-rock mold nor the ’80s pretty-boy one. Duran Duran wore makeup, too, but they did so to look attractive; Smith’s lipstick is applied hastily or deliberately smeared. He started wearing makeup in his Catholic-school days and never really stopped, though he doesn’t do so in private life now. “The dress,” he told The Guardian, referring to his dramatic total look, “is just an outward manifestation of a rebellion against authority, and it’s a lifelong rebellion against authority.”

Sorry, James Dean, but personally I prefer a rebel with a cause, a penchant for eyeliner, and the heart of a poet. Congratulations, boys, on your induction.