#56, “Burn,” The Cure (1994)

150 Favorite Songs: #56, “Burn,” The Cure (1994)

I’ve written before about how music didn’t mean anything to me until, suddenly, one magic summer went by and then it meant everything. I don’t remember exactly what first caught my ear and brought that change, but I remember the song that told me that it had happened: It was “Burn” by the Cure, the first song on the soundtrack to the movie The Crow.

I was thirteen when it came out. I must have heard Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails by then. I must have been watching MTV. I must have listened to Q101, Chicago’s alt-rock station, and found whatever odd stuff was somehow passing through the mainstream in that very unusual year for music—“God” by Tori Amos was on the radio, so was “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove” by Dead Can Dance and “X-French Tee Shirt” by Shudder to Think—because I knew enough to know that The Crow soundtrack was for me.

It’s funny now; The Crow doesn’t exactly loom large over the culture thirty years later, but it was a genuine phenomenon at the time. It was an indie film based on a small-press comic book released fifteen years before the superhero boom, and it inspired legions of goth kids (and one famous pro wrestler) to paint their faces in mime makeup. It introduced countless of those kids to an entire world of music that they wouldn’t otherwise have discovered—combining alt-rock radio staples like Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, and Rage Against the Machine with bands on the more obscure side of the dial like Machines of Loving Grace, For Love Not Lisa, and My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult. The Violent Femmes dipped out on being midwestern folk-punk pranksters and joined the goth party for a song; Trent Reznor howled his way through Joy Division’s “Dead Souls”; Henry Rollins roared through a brutally mid-tempo cover of Suicide’s “Ghostrider”; and, of course, The Cure opened the thing up with “Burn.”

“Burn,” like the best of the ‘90s Cure songs, is all vibes. An extended intro, a grimy bassline, screeching synth notes, a propulsive guitar played low, evocative but non-specific lyrics.

I can still remember, thirty years later, how it felt to hear Robert Smith start to sing on “Burn.” “‘don’t look, don’t look,’ the shadows breathe,” the song opens, as ol’ Bob lays out a list of instructions he receives from those shadows: “don’t wake at night to watch her sleep”’; “don’t talk of worlds that never were”; “‘just paint your face,’ the shadows smile.” All of that with those thumping drums and a spooky-yet-triumphant guitar riff while he cries over the chorus: “every night I burn / every night i scream your name / every night i burn / every night the dream’s the same.”

I learned something about myself, being a very young teenager, sitting on my bed in the basement, playing “Burn” on my tape deck, rewinding it over and over to repeat those six and a half minutes, something I didn’t know previously: I had the darkness in me.

Listening to “Burn” spoke to some part of myself that had always been there, but I hadn’t known about, hadn’t yet learned how to reach. Music already meant something to me, but I hadn’t realized that there were entire worlds within me that had always existed, that I didn’t have access to until something opened up my chest and showed them to me. I had felt weird and isolated and lonely and scared a lot as a kid, and I didn’t know why, and then I heard “Burn” and it told me that there were artists out there who made music for people like me, who wanted me to find it, who heard from the shadows and didn’t know they could let them speak. It’s all incredibly corny, except it’s not because it’s real and true and meaningful when you are thirteen and don’t know who you are yet, to get your first clue. “‘just paint your face,’ the shadows smile” is silly, sure, when you hear it as an adult, but when no one has yet told you that there is a whole world of weirdness that might feel more like the one you’ve been drawn to, that you never knew existed, there’s nothing silly about it. You put the Crow makeup on because you felt like you were wearing a mask before that, and this one feels more honest. And I didn’t know that was what was inside of me. I never knew. Not until I did. Until “Burn.”

I don’t know—I was just an awkward nerd with a trauma profile I would not begin to understand for many decades. I was still straight, and cis, and white, and all of these things that help you pass for normal that not every kid has access to. I just moved around a lot and couldn’t figure out why every new school wasn’t a chance to start over and maybe this time be one of the cool kids. I just thought if I could get my mom to buy the right jeans or sneakers, maybe everyone would just not notice that I was bad at sports and was more interested in the X-Men than anything the other kids cared about. I wanted it so bad, and I never knew why I couldn’t have it, because there was important stuff about me that I just didn’t know. And then I got a copy of The Crow soundtrack on cassette and suddenly I understood that I had the darkness in me, and I was never going to be one of those kids because they did not, and that was the actual difference, and I needed to find the other kids who scrawled “every night i burn” in their notebooks if I was ever going to have a chance of having real friends. And that’s what I did.

I’ve heard people dunk on the idea that “music saved my life” as being dopey and pretentious, like if somebody had cancer and playing Black Flag at the tumor didn’t send it into remission, then music obviously didn’t save their life. But maybe the people who think it’s stupid never had the kind of before-and-after that I had with “Burn,” where there was something about myself that I never knew, and then I heard something that sounded like the piece I hadn’t known was there, and suddenly so many things that had pushed me into a box I struggled so hard to fit inside stopped being important. Because by then, I knew. I don’t know that “Burn” saved my life, but I know that if I hadn’t found those parts of myself when I did, I wouldn’t be who I am now. That feels like the same thing to me, in the end.