Robert Smith at 67: The Cure's look no longer works

Robert Smith, 67 years old: when the genius's disguise expires

Can you still take the stage at 67 looking exactly like you did in 1982? The Cure's singer has just shown that the question is no longer funny. A concert video—spiced up with a fan's joke about an aunt crashing onto the stage—has circulated the same image again: the teased ponytail, smeared makeup, and loose T-shirt. Nothing new. And that is precisely the problem.

Robert Smith is 67. The Cure will celebrate 50 years of career in 2029 and continues to sell out venues. Those are the facts. Everything else in rock has always been aesthetics disguised as something else.

The character that swallowed the musician

The most widespread criticism isn't against the music, but against the management of the persona. It is argued that the look held up in his 30s and 40s, when it was truly transgressive; past a certain age, the same props stop being provocation and become caricature. Counterweighing this is an equally solid argument: he has styled himself this way since before many of his critics were born and simply never wanted to dress up as an adult.

The label that has stuck most is "Charo" (a Spanish term for a flamboyant, middle-aged woman). Hence the easy jokes: charoboy, The Charo, Aunt Paqui from Pedroñeras. The joke is cheap, but it points to something real: the distance between the sensitive material and the casing that wraps it.

Bowie reinvented himself six times; Smith, none

The example repeated is David Bowie. Ziggy Stardust was one character among many, and Bowie killed him when the time came; his last album showed him elegant, sober, older. The conclusion drawn: there is an age for every appearance, and geniuses know how to evolve. The counterargument has substance: Bowie created characters, Smith does not. Smith has always looked like this, even when going to buy bread. There is no mask to kill because there never was a mask; there is just a face, and 45 years have passed over it.

The bassist's Botox and the renamed song

One detail settles part of the issue. Simon Gallup, the historic bassist, has indeed undergone surgery: his face shows it, and nobody thinks he looks better for it. At the other extreme is the backstory of "Killing an Arab," the song inspired by Camus' "The Stranger," which the band stopped advertising under its original title to avoid Sarracinophobic readings. Two opposite ways of managing the passage of time: the one that retouches and the one that endures. Botox saves no one; sloppiness doesn't either, but at least it doesn't lie.

What the ear forgives when the eye does not

And then there is the obvious point, which almost no one disputes: the voice is still that of a twenty-year-old. Fifty years of history, a handful of songs that have moved millions of people, and a legion of young fans who are not nostalgic boomers. The same audience that laughs at the makeup fights for tickets to Barcelona's Primavera Sound.

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In the end, the discussion has never been about Robert Smith. It is about the fact that we all grow old, and almost none of us will have a band playing in the background to hide the wreckage.