need to “Bottle Up and Explode,” and happier than someone who last year tried to kill himself.
Indeed, by early-to-mid-1999, many articles written about Smith made a point of ostensibly refuting the idea that Smith is “sad” or “depressed,” even as they suggested that it is unavoidable to draw such a conclusion from Smith’s music. A piece from the
Washington Post
insists that Smith is “not sad,” but goes on to describe him in very similar terms to those that are then deferred ontothe ambiguous “listeners”:
Elliott Smith is not sad. He sounds a bit withdrawn as he haltingly answers questions by phone from a West Coast hotel room, and he’s so soft-spoken that his words barely register on tape. Still, he gently objects, he’s not as “melancholy,” “bleak,” or “dark”—to use some of the more popular adjectives—as listeners often assume from his music.
A
Boston Globe
article parallels this progression:
Elliott Smith is not a junkie. He’s not desperately messed-up, at least not any more than anyone else. He claims to have written a happy song, and believes that his music seems a bit darker than most because for one thing, he doesn’t have a band, and for another, he wouldn’t dream of singing contrived lyrics that don’t mean anything to him.
Still, it’s not hard to see why Smith has been cast in the role of tunesmith to the downtrodden alt-crowd. His records are filled with unflinching, emotionally raw portraits of drug addicts and alcoholics, and spare, poetic sketches of self-loathing and decayed love…. Listening to the songs is as lonely and solitary an endeavor as the lives’ his characters lead.
While we were once simply asked to assume that Smith was “seen as a fuck-up” or “described as an acerbic poet,” the genesis of these beliefs is now tracedback to—who else—Smith himself. Smith’s music having been constructed as a corollary to his unattributed cultural reputation, it is now cited as the basis for that reputation. A May 2000 review of
Figure 8
in the
Boston Globe
summarizes and enacts this very process:
The problem with being tunesmith to the downtrodden is that, for better or worse, you become your songs. It makes no difference that you consider yourself a storyteller, a chronicler of dreams, a poet who cobbles fragments of your life and other people’s lives and an entirely made-up version of life. Your miserable fans (and even your well-adjusted fans who desperately crave a miserably authentic experience) need to believe that you are the junkie, you are the loser in love, you are the bruised, self-loathing misfit. And if you happen to be the sort of songwriter who can translate pain with the gentle intelligence of Simon and Garfunkel, the epic pop songcraft of the Beatles, and the skewed, raw edge of the indie-rock scene that spawned you—there’s no escaping the microscope.
Finally, the process comes full-circle. Smith’s positioning as an authentically “fucked up” “singer/songwriter,” set against the inauthentic artifice of the Academy Awards, formed the basis for a common reading of his music. That reading, in turn, informed a series of assumptions and projections regarding Smith’s motivations, demeanor, biography, and fanbase. These maneuvers electrified a powerful, closed circuit of meaning between creator (“reclusive, tortured artiste”) and creative product (“portraits of drug addicts and alcoholics”).
If, as I have suggested,
XO
explicitly shorts that circuit, and does so via an aesthetic that does
not
align easily with the “folk” “singer/songwriter,” why was it so often positioned in service of this popular myth?
One answer can be found in idea, expressed in the
Globe
piece and many others, that Smith’s gift was one for “[translating] pain.” In their ambitious and rewarding examination of
Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value,
Negus and Michael Pickering deconstruct the commonly held idea that
Indeed, by early-to-mid-1999, many articles written about Smith made a point of ostensibly refuting the idea that Smith is “sad” or “depressed,” even as they suggested that it is unavoidable to draw such a conclusion from Smith’s music. A piece from the
Washington Post
insists that Smith is “not sad,” but goes on to describe him in very similar terms to those that are then deferred ontothe ambiguous “listeners”:
Elliott Smith is not sad. He sounds a bit withdrawn as he haltingly answers questions by phone from a West Coast hotel room, and he’s so soft-spoken that his words barely register on tape. Still, he gently objects, he’s not as “melancholy,” “bleak,” or “dark”—to use some of the more popular adjectives—as listeners often assume from his music.
A
Boston Globe
article parallels this progression:
Elliott Smith is not a junkie. He’s not desperately messed-up, at least not any more than anyone else. He claims to have written a happy song, and believes that his music seems a bit darker than most because for one thing, he doesn’t have a band, and for another, he wouldn’t dream of singing contrived lyrics that don’t mean anything to him.
Still, it’s not hard to see why Smith has been cast in the role of tunesmith to the downtrodden alt-crowd. His records are filled with unflinching, emotionally raw portraits of drug addicts and alcoholics, and spare, poetic sketches of self-loathing and decayed love…. Listening to the songs is as lonely and solitary an endeavor as the lives’ his characters lead.
While we were once simply asked to assume that Smith was “seen as a fuck-up” or “described as an acerbic poet,” the genesis of these beliefs is now tracedback to—who else—Smith himself. Smith’s music having been constructed as a corollary to his unattributed cultural reputation, it is now cited as the basis for that reputation. A May 2000 review of
Figure 8
in the
Boston Globe
summarizes and enacts this very process:
The problem with being tunesmith to the downtrodden is that, for better or worse, you become your songs. It makes no difference that you consider yourself a storyteller, a chronicler of dreams, a poet who cobbles fragments of your life and other people’s lives and an entirely made-up version of life. Your miserable fans (and even your well-adjusted fans who desperately crave a miserably authentic experience) need to believe that you are the junkie, you are the loser in love, you are the bruised, self-loathing misfit. And if you happen to be the sort of songwriter who can translate pain with the gentle intelligence of Simon and Garfunkel, the epic pop songcraft of the Beatles, and the skewed, raw edge of the indie-rock scene that spawned you—there’s no escaping the microscope.
Finally, the process comes full-circle. Smith’s positioning as an authentically “fucked up” “singer/songwriter,” set against the inauthentic artifice of the Academy Awards, formed the basis for a common reading of his music. That reading, in turn, informed a series of assumptions and projections regarding Smith’s motivations, demeanor, biography, and fanbase. These maneuvers electrified a powerful, closed circuit of meaning between creator (“reclusive, tortured artiste”) and creative product (“portraits of drug addicts and alcoholics”).
If, as I have suggested,
XO
explicitly shorts that circuit, and does so via an aesthetic that does
not
align easily with the “folk” “singer/songwriter,” why was it so often positioned in service of this popular myth?
One answer can be found in idea, expressed in the
Globe
piece and many others, that Smith’s gift was one for “[translating] pain.” In their ambitious and rewarding examination of
Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value,
Negus and Michael Pickering deconstruct the commonly held idea that
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