“Why Can't I Be You?” by The Cure

"Why Can't I Be You?" kicked off the Cure's seventh album, Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me, as its lead single in the spring of 1987, and it's a gothic rock band throwing a party and daring you to stay home. Robert Smith wrote the words and yelps them over a stomping, jittery romp that sounds like the gloom got locked out of the room.

Smith plays guitar and keyboards, Porl Thompson doubles on both, Lol Tolhurst adds more keys, Simon Gallup drives the electric bass and Boris Williams pounds drums and percussion. Smith and David M. Allen produced and mixed it for Fiction, with Sean Burrows, Michel Dierickx and Jacques Hermet assisting.

Tim Pope's video, shot early that year at Ardmore Studios in Bray, County Wicklow, in between rehearsals for the band's first South American tour, turned the silliness up further: all five in costume, Smith as a bear and then a schoolgirl in a pinafore, Gallup as a crow and a Morris dancer, dancing so badly that biographer Jeff Apter counted it among the clumsiest choreography MTV ever aired. It reached number 21 in the UK and 54 on the Hot 100, and a remix did even better in the clubs, going to number eight on Billboard's dance sales chart.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.