6th february 1979

The song ”Killing an Arab” is a two-and-a-half-minute version of the central incident from ”L’Etranger,” the Albert Camus novel that became an existentialist tract. The song was written in 1976 by the Cure’s singer, Robert Smith, after he read ”L’Etranger.” The narrator of the novel, Meursault, shoots an Algerian man on a beach for no reason. In the song, Mr. Smith sings, ”You can turn and walk away or I can fire the gun/ Staring at the sky, staring at the sun/ Whichever I choose, it amounts to the same/Absolutely nothing/I’m alive, I’m dead/I’m the stranger/Killing an Arab.”