Creativity Quote by Robert Smith

There is a particular kind of rock-star vow that isn’t about glory but about escape, and Robert Smith nails it with a guillotine sentence. The threat to disband The Cure the moment they hit the Top Ten reads like a joke, but it’s also a boundary line: success isn’t neutral, it’s contaminating. In one move, Smith frames mainstream popularity as a force that can flatten the band’s moodiness, oddness, and cultivated discomfort into something consumable.

The intent is less “we hate hits” than “we don’t want the hit machine.” A Top Ten single isn’t just a chart position; it’s radio formatting, label expectations, the pressure to repeat a formula, the creeping sense that your next song must behave. Smith’s subtext is a defense of atmosphere over product. The Cure’s power has always been in the slow-build, the emotionally baroque, the willingness to sit in sadness without trying to polish it into uplift. A chart breakthrough threatens to turn that interior world into a brand.

Context matters: in post-punk’s long shadow, authenticity was defined against the shiny economics of pop. Smith’s line plays to that tribal instinct while also exposing its fragility. It’s performative purity, sure, but it’s also a genuine anxiety: once you’re rewarded for being yourself, you start editing yourself to keep being rewarded. The smartest sting here is that he’s admitting how easily art can be domesticated - and how drastic you might have to be to keep it feral.