Aging & Wisdom Quote by Robert Smith

There is a particular kind of discipline in refusing to fetishize your own legacy, and Robert Smith frames it as an almost moral boundary. The moment a Cure song is pressed onto vinyl, he suggests, it stops being a living, private thing and becomes public property: a product, a memory machine, a mirror other people use to feel like themselves. That’s not false modesty. It’s an artist drawing a line between creation and consumption, between the obsessive, solitary labor of making music and the social life that music goes on to have without you.

The phrasing matters. “Hardly ever” leaves room for sentiment, but only barely; the dominant posture is distance. “Someone else’s entertainment” lands with a faint chill, not contempt so much as clarity. Smith is implicitly rejecting the rock-star feedback loop where musicians become curators of their own mythology, trapped in anniversary tours and self-quotation. His subtext: nostalgia is lucrative, but it’s also suffocating.

Contextually, this fits The Cure’s long arc: a band whose songs became emotional infrastructure for strangers. Fans don’t just like those records; they metabolize them. Smith’s refusal to revisit “our old stuff” is a way of protecting the forward motion that made the work matter in the first place. If the audience owns the past, the artist has to live in the present or risk becoming a tribute act to himself.