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Wordflowers: A Visual History of The Cure’s Lyrics
Robert Smith and The Cure have often been characterized as gloomy, or Goth. But can The Cure even be categorized?
80’s alert! What was the remedy for Frankie Goes to Hollywood, cold war gloom, and cringy John Hughes films? Well…The Cure!
So, I wrote a book. Introducing…Wordflowers: A Visual History of The Cure’s Words. If you are (or even just were) a fan of The Cure, or if you just like data visualizations, you’ll enjoy this combination of art, data viz, and history. It chronicles how Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure, found his lyrical style, and how his lyrics thematically evolved over the decades. Is The Cure all goth and gloom? Hardly. You’ll see the evolution of a complex, wild, and peculiar body of work. And of course, there’s data visualization as art: The Cure’s words as bouquets of Wordflowers.
This side project had been lingering, half finished, for about three years. But in late in 2021, with the untimely passing of my sister (who was also a fan), I resolved to put my back into it and finish. I think she would have been…
