"Why Can't I Be You?" by The Cure

For three decades now Robert Smith (born on this day in 1959) has been the voice of disaffected loners everywhere; before their were goths - before art school chic went mainstream, and long before boys like Noel Fielding and Russell Brand were ratting their hair and slathering on makeup with any regularity - even as England was being overrun with punks in 1976, he and his rag-tag band were The Cure...

So even as the band was attaining its greatest popularity, more than a decade after they were formed, Smith's angst, like his art, was holding up a mirror to the band's yearning fans. With the same kind of cheek that drove Morrissey of The Smiths to croon Never Had No One Ever in front of a screaming crowd ready to acquiesce to his every whim sexual or otherwise, Robert Smith was warbling Why Can't I Be You? - from The Cure's 1987 album Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me - at a massed assemblage of his own wannabes.
*