popular construction. A column in the UK’s
Times
includes a near-hallucinatory reading of Smith’s music, and its positioning against the “hysterical” artifice of Celine Dion:
You just don’t meet Oscar-nominated songwriters who aren’t Celine Dion. And, unlike Dion, her 17 producers and her hysterical 1,600-piece orchestra, “Miss Misery,” like all Smith songs, is just Smith and his guitar. Finger-picked Nick Drake melancholia.Vague country-folk, washed in inky blue blues, like Simon and Garfunkel trying to be Big Stars.
The equation of Smith’s music with “Nick Drake melancholia”—ostensibly in a review of an album thick with electric guitar, bass, drum, and keyboards—seems rooted in more in Smith’s popular construction as a Nick Drake-esque folk antihero than in the music itself. A review in the London
Independent
tows a similar line, opening with a picture of Celine Dion and Smith standing side-by-side at the Academy Awards: “the glittery, coiffured diva and the nervous, slowly spoken singer who etched out his career playing in the quirky and eclectic underground scene of Portland, Oregon.” Once again, Nick Drake is invoked as a point of reference:
For someone who delivers haunting tales of truncated, druggy relationships set to a mostly acoustic sound-scape and delivered in fragile whispering tones, Smith’s rave notices in the US press have often harked on about Nick Drake or other folk or singer-songwriting legends. It’s not something he seems to cherish.
This curiously anthropological-sounding observation ushers in an extensive quote from Smith, explaining that he is “neither folk nor singer-songwriter,” and that he’s always had a preference for “punk bands.”The piece resumes, “In any case, Smith’s music is undeniably late-Nineties in tone.” Though I’m still not entirely sure what “late-nineties in tone” means, the description itself seems less telling than the odd dismissal that precedes it. The presence of a quotation from Smith himself gives the article an air of authority and veracity, which is in turn used to sacrifice Smith’s voice to his cultural myth.
These rhetorical strategies carried over into the flurry of press surrounding
XO
’s release. An August 1 article in
Billboard
magazine already differs sharply in tone from an earlier Billboard piece from February 21 of that same year. While the earlier piece immediately mentions Heatmiser, and discusses the relative success of
Either/Or,
the August 1 piece responds to a perceived need to establish continuity between
XO
and Smith’s earlier work:
XO
comprises more full-band material—featuring Smith playing most instruments—while retaining the intimacy and immediacy of his solo acoustic work.
XO
is still clearly an Elliott Smith record, with its share of quiet acoustic numbers, detours into time, and songs about love, longing, and drunken stupor.
Here, the essence of an “Elliott Smith record” is reduced to its “quiet acoustic numbers,” even though the record preceding
XO
was by no means a “quietacoustic” record. (Nor, for that matter, was “Miss Misery” a “quiet acoustic” song.) An August 25 piece in the
Toronto Star
describes Smith’s music as “stark, mostly-acoustic, confessional-feeling tales of drug addiction, failed romance, and existential turmoil.” An August 29 article in the
Globe and Mail
mentions Smith’s “intimate, poetic folk muse.” For Smith’s music to effectively complete his “star image” (and for it to remain newsworthy), it must be continually constructed as
other
to the perceived excess of pop music.
As Smith’s music grew even farther away from the aesthetic mold of the “folk singer” or “singer/songwriter,” an odd current of personal antagonism began to emerge in the press. A review of
XO
in the
New York Daily News
exemplifies the increasingly harsh and belittling language used to describe Smith. Setting the scene, as such reviews almost
Times
includes a near-hallucinatory reading of Smith’s music, and its positioning against the “hysterical” artifice of Celine Dion:
You just don’t meet Oscar-nominated songwriters who aren’t Celine Dion. And, unlike Dion, her 17 producers and her hysterical 1,600-piece orchestra, “Miss Misery,” like all Smith songs, is just Smith and his guitar. Finger-picked Nick Drake melancholia.Vague country-folk, washed in inky blue blues, like Simon and Garfunkel trying to be Big Stars.
The equation of Smith’s music with “Nick Drake melancholia”—ostensibly in a review of an album thick with electric guitar, bass, drum, and keyboards—seems rooted in more in Smith’s popular construction as a Nick Drake-esque folk antihero than in the music itself. A review in the London
Independent
tows a similar line, opening with a picture of Celine Dion and Smith standing side-by-side at the Academy Awards: “the glittery, coiffured diva and the nervous, slowly spoken singer who etched out his career playing in the quirky and eclectic underground scene of Portland, Oregon.” Once again, Nick Drake is invoked as a point of reference:
For someone who delivers haunting tales of truncated, druggy relationships set to a mostly acoustic sound-scape and delivered in fragile whispering tones, Smith’s rave notices in the US press have often harked on about Nick Drake or other folk or singer-songwriting legends. It’s not something he seems to cherish.
This curiously anthropological-sounding observation ushers in an extensive quote from Smith, explaining that he is “neither folk nor singer-songwriter,” and that he’s always had a preference for “punk bands.”The piece resumes, “In any case, Smith’s music is undeniably late-Nineties in tone.” Though I’m still not entirely sure what “late-nineties in tone” means, the description itself seems less telling than the odd dismissal that precedes it. The presence of a quotation from Smith himself gives the article an air of authority and veracity, which is in turn used to sacrifice Smith’s voice to his cultural myth.
These rhetorical strategies carried over into the flurry of press surrounding
XO
’s release. An August 1 article in
Billboard
magazine already differs sharply in tone from an earlier Billboard piece from February 21 of that same year. While the earlier piece immediately mentions Heatmiser, and discusses the relative success of
Either/Or,
the August 1 piece responds to a perceived need to establish continuity between
XO
and Smith’s earlier work:
XO
comprises more full-band material—featuring Smith playing most instruments—while retaining the intimacy and immediacy of his solo acoustic work.
XO
is still clearly an Elliott Smith record, with its share of quiet acoustic numbers, detours into time, and songs about love, longing, and drunken stupor.
Here, the essence of an “Elliott Smith record” is reduced to its “quiet acoustic numbers,” even though the record preceding
XO
was by no means a “quietacoustic” record. (Nor, for that matter, was “Miss Misery” a “quiet acoustic” song.) An August 25 piece in the
Toronto Star
describes Smith’s music as “stark, mostly-acoustic, confessional-feeling tales of drug addiction, failed romance, and existential turmoil.” An August 29 article in the
Globe and Mail
mentions Smith’s “intimate, poetic folk muse.” For Smith’s music to effectively complete his “star image” (and for it to remain newsworthy), it must be continually constructed as
other
to the perceived excess of pop music.
As Smith’s music grew even farther away from the aesthetic mold of the “folk singer” or “singer/songwriter,” an odd current of personal antagonism began to emerge in the press. A review of
XO
in the
New York Daily News
exemplifies the increasingly harsh and belittling language used to describe Smith. Setting the scene, as such reviews almost
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