Disintegration 33 1/3: Andi Harriman in Conversation with Leila Taylor

In 1989, The Cure’s Robert Smith was going to turn thirty years old. His fears and anxieties of age-having not yet written his pinnacle album-caused Smith to embark on the band’s undoing with Disintegration. The result was an LP drenched in melancholy sublime, a beautiful decree of breaking down to build anew. From the fame and notoriety of The Cure after their hit, “Just Like Heaven,” to the departure of the only other consistent band member, Lol Tolhurst, it’s clear that the grisly spiral into the depths of pain is stamped throughout Disintegration.

Join author Andi Harriman, in conversation with Brooklyn Public Library’s own Leila Taylor, as they discuss this musical masterpiece by way of the French Modernist Charles Baudelaire and his poem, “Spleen.”

Andi Harriman is a Brooklyn-based DJ and music journalist with an emphasis on all things 1980s. She is the author of the book Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: The Worldwide Compendium of Post-punk and Goth in the 1980s and has written for Rolling Stone, DJ Mag, Creem and The Village Voice.

Leila Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer, speaker, and designer whose work focuses on the intersection of history, horror and the gothic in contemporary culture. Author of Sick Houses: Haunted Homes & the Architecture of Dread and Darkly: Black History & America’s Gothic Soul, her work has appeared in Lapham’s Quarterly, Repeater Book of the Occult, Us: The Complete Annotated Screenplay, and the graphic novel Bitter Root. She’s given talks on the eerie and the esoteric for the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, Morbid Anatomy, The Collective for Radical Death Studies, and The Occult Humanities Conference.

On-site book sales courtesy of Center for Fiction.