Breckinridge Elkins
10-24-2008, 02:20 PM
Mr. Misery
http://culture11.com/files/libertywire/elliotsmith1.jpg
Reflections on indie rock's doomed minstrel at the fifth anniversary of his death.
By James Poulos, October 21, 2008
“You know his girlfriend murdered him.”
It was a somewhat chilly Silver Lake evening five years ago and people were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers and smoking Chestertons and roughly eighteen hours earlier LA’s most famous singer-songwriter not named Beck, Elliott Smith, had been discovered with a largish knife sticking out of the center of his chest.
“No, dude.” Man bangs were pushed away from guylinered eyes. “She Facebook messaged me at four in the morning saying people were going to start saying she did it. She didn’t do it, man. She promised.”
This is how I remember the scene, but it is hard to vouch for the details.
Guyliner dude, who played for a local band that had been too well hyped for well too long, could have easily explained instead that there wasn’t any motive for that crime, that Jenny was a friend of his. That night, Elliott Smith’s famously rumpled performance at the Academy Awards (for his Good Will Hunting theme, “Miss Misery”) was as far back in time as Smith’s death is now. A lot had happened between ’98 and ’03, and although much of it was ironic not much of it was good. Ambiguity was cultivated and non-commitment a social compact. A blurring of the basic facts took shape as a habitual coping mechanism.
But if some percentage of the hipsters who survived Elliott Smith were themselves amateur blurs, Smith was the town professional, a wastrel who earned his stripes and a hero to the healing and the decaying alike. Over the course of a blotchy career that peaked on that Oscar stage but never escaped the darkness, Smith released a series of increasingly baroque, intricate, and depressing acoustic-based records that catalogued everything truly defunct about life as a skinny, greasy person entangled in, but always disappointed by, drug-and-sex-based relationships.
When he was criticized, he was derided as not just a downer but a whiner. But Smith — who worked out his musical amateurism in the earlier outfit Heatmiser — was one of indie’s most potent tunecrafters, a smith indeed. His natural ear for melody (occasionally, it bored him) produced some of the sweetest pop gems ever to emerge from a warren of stale apartments, dirty clothes, and cat hair. Though 1998’s XO is his most polished, straightforward effort — try not bopping down the street with “Bled White” on the iPod — 1997’s almost cruelly spare Either/Or reveals the real genius of Smith’s songwriting: deceptively complex bridges wind like lost ribbons between barren and unforgiving posts of chorus and verse. Smith’s early and late work faded in and out respectively; “Needle in the Hay” off 1995’s self-titled album didn’t make a mark until it played over the pivotal scene in The Royal Tenenbaums (a suicide), and 2000’s Figure 8, recorded as he crashed hard after his brush with the big time, sank like Smith did in its wake.
The building he stood in front of for the cover of that record became a shrine almost immediately after his death. (Shortly afterward, that year, you could drive further west down Sunset into Hollywood and see another wall shrine, a cluster of votive candles and little notes piled against the black of the Viper Room.) It remains a testament to the irresolvable quality of pain in Los Angeles, where all goods are presumed to be damaged and as many people come to find themselves as come to invent themselves. In the inevitable scramble of clutching and groping that follows, the distinction between finding and inventing — and then losing — breaks down and seems arbitrary.
It was never clear enough whether Smith was helping people through that process or helping them along; it was all too clear, by contrast, what he was doing to himself. Those who knew him could never do enough. It seems unfair to criticize a talented, soulful artist in profound pain. Yet in a place where everything is indulged under the right (or wrong?) circumstances, the enervating power of Smith’s kind of darkness makes it too hard for those accustomed to part-time bad vibes to find their daily sunshine. One day you give Elliott another hug — this story was told to me by a bandmate — and you say “cheer up, guy,” and you mean it, and you realize that this is going to accomplish absolutely nothing. It is like throwing a shiny nickel into the cold black Pacific.
Reckoning with the implications of that is always more awful than listening to even the bleakest and most harrowing of Smith’s lyrics. But sometimes they converge, and the plangent beauty of the song hangs hauntingly over the ugliness of his death and what it means:
I heard you found another audience to bore
A creative thinker who imagined you were more
A new body for you to push around and pose
It’s all about taking the easy way out for you I suppose.
For reasons like these, it’s easier for everyone to still presume that Elliott Smith’s death was a suicide, so they do. And the line between poetic justice and poetic license? It’s still a blur.
James Poulos is the political editor for Culture11.
http://culture11.com/files/libertywire/elliotsmith1.jpg
Reflections on indie rock's doomed minstrel at the fifth anniversary of his death.
By James Poulos, October 21, 2008
“You know his girlfriend murdered him.”
It was a somewhat chilly Silver Lake evening five years ago and people were grilling hot dogs and hamburgers and smoking Chestertons and roughly eighteen hours earlier LA’s most famous singer-songwriter not named Beck, Elliott Smith, had been discovered with a largish knife sticking out of the center of his chest.
“No, dude.” Man bangs were pushed away from guylinered eyes. “She Facebook messaged me at four in the morning saying people were going to start saying she did it. She didn’t do it, man. She promised.”
This is how I remember the scene, but it is hard to vouch for the details.
Guyliner dude, who played for a local band that had been too well hyped for well too long, could have easily explained instead that there wasn’t any motive for that crime, that Jenny was a friend of his. That night, Elliott Smith’s famously rumpled performance at the Academy Awards (for his Good Will Hunting theme, “Miss Misery”) was as far back in time as Smith’s death is now. A lot had happened between ’98 and ’03, and although much of it was ironic not much of it was good. Ambiguity was cultivated and non-commitment a social compact. A blurring of the basic facts took shape as a habitual coping mechanism.
But if some percentage of the hipsters who survived Elliott Smith were themselves amateur blurs, Smith was the town professional, a wastrel who earned his stripes and a hero to the healing and the decaying alike. Over the course of a blotchy career that peaked on that Oscar stage but never escaped the darkness, Smith released a series of increasingly baroque, intricate, and depressing acoustic-based records that catalogued everything truly defunct about life as a skinny, greasy person entangled in, but always disappointed by, drug-and-sex-based relationships.
When he was criticized, he was derided as not just a downer but a whiner. But Smith — who worked out his musical amateurism in the earlier outfit Heatmiser — was one of indie’s most potent tunecrafters, a smith indeed. His natural ear for melody (occasionally, it bored him) produced some of the sweetest pop gems ever to emerge from a warren of stale apartments, dirty clothes, and cat hair. Though 1998’s XO is his most polished, straightforward effort — try not bopping down the street with “Bled White” on the iPod — 1997’s almost cruelly spare Either/Or reveals the real genius of Smith’s songwriting: deceptively complex bridges wind like lost ribbons between barren and unforgiving posts of chorus and verse. Smith’s early and late work faded in and out respectively; “Needle in the Hay” off 1995’s self-titled album didn’t make a mark until it played over the pivotal scene in The Royal Tenenbaums (a suicide), and 2000’s Figure 8, recorded as he crashed hard after his brush with the big time, sank like Smith did in its wake.
The building he stood in front of for the cover of that record became a shrine almost immediately after his death. (Shortly afterward, that year, you could drive further west down Sunset into Hollywood and see another wall shrine, a cluster of votive candles and little notes piled against the black of the Viper Room.) It remains a testament to the irresolvable quality of pain in Los Angeles, where all goods are presumed to be damaged and as many people come to find themselves as come to invent themselves. In the inevitable scramble of clutching and groping that follows, the distinction between finding and inventing — and then losing — breaks down and seems arbitrary.
It was never clear enough whether Smith was helping people through that process or helping them along; it was all too clear, by contrast, what he was doing to himself. Those who knew him could never do enough. It seems unfair to criticize a talented, soulful artist in profound pain. Yet in a place where everything is indulged under the right (or wrong?) circumstances, the enervating power of Smith’s kind of darkness makes it too hard for those accustomed to part-time bad vibes to find their daily sunshine. One day you give Elliott another hug — this story was told to me by a bandmate — and you say “cheer up, guy,” and you mean it, and you realize that this is going to accomplish absolutely nothing. It is like throwing a shiny nickel into the cold black Pacific.
Reckoning with the implications of that is always more awful than listening to even the bleakest and most harrowing of Smith’s lyrics. But sometimes they converge, and the plangent beauty of the song hangs hauntingly over the ugliness of his death and what it means:
I heard you found another audience to bore
A creative thinker who imagined you were more
A new body for you to push around and pose
It’s all about taking the easy way out for you I suppose.
For reasons like these, it’s easier for everyone to still presume that Elliott Smith’s death was a suicide, so they do. And the line between poetic justice and poetic license? It’s still a blur.
James Poulos is the political editor for Culture11.