Elliott Smith's XO (11 page)

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 invariably did, with a picture of Smith’s Oscar performance, the article describes how “a greasy weed of a man murmured his eerie ballad ‘Miss Misery,’ about a depressed alcoholic, on the same stage occupied minutes earlier by such commercial titans as Celine Dion and LeAnn Rimes.” The article goes on to say, “such delicious incongruity never would have happened if it weren’t for director Gus Van Sant, who plucked Smith from the hip hinterlands to grace his soundtrack to ‘Good Will Hunting.’”
XO,
with its impeccable production values and forceful
rock and roll arrangements, threatened to undermine this very “delicious incongruity,” perhaps accounting for the newfound emphasis on Smith’s personal life it seems to have triggered in the mainstream press.

A
Boston Globe
show review describes the “scraggly-haired” Smith, who “no one’s every going to confuse … with the happiest boy in the room,” and suggests that even as
XO
is a more optimistic record, “if you grasp what Smith’s singing, you hear the gritty imagery under the chiming chords and even-keeled tempos.” The vague shorthand “gritty” signifies barely anything if not fleshed out by some understanding of Smith’s popular image. And, once again, the suggestion that this “gritty imagery” is the part of Smith’s music that needs to be “grasped” swiftly dismisses the album’s remarkable musical achievement as something that needs to be overcome to get to the “real” nature of Smith’s songwriting.

By late 1998, the press seems to have grown frustrated and impatient with Smith’s unwillingness to accept the “singer/songwriter” tag—a frustration no doubt enhanced by the punked-up renditions of
XO
tunes that Smith was performing with Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss of Quasi as his backing band. In an
Irish Times
article previewing a December 6 show, Smith is quoted extensively as wanting to escape the “singer/songwriter” tag. The article retorts, “… that
seems unlikely. Smith is shy and self-effacing—and the songs cover the usual songwriter territory of alienation and self-doubt. The difference is that not every songwriter can so successfully transform such frustration into something of beauty.” It is often directly before or after a quote in which Smith rejects the “singer/songwriter” role that he is described as “shy,” “self-effacing,” “soft-spoken.” Even if he doesn’t see himself as a “singer/songwriter,” it is clear that
we all
do, and it is clear why we should.

A follow-up on
Yahoo! Launch
from October of 1998 repeats the deferrals of the earlier piece:

You can’t read about Elliott Smith without running across phrases like “reclusive, tortured artiste” and “sad, haunting songs.” As a result, there’s a prevailing public image of Smith as some kind of brooding and brokenhearted waif-man perfect in his misery, a writer of beautiful melancholy music but not exactly the type of guy you want manning the phones at Suicide Prevention.

Once again, Smith expresses his frustration at being painted as a “morose folk singer.” Once again, the writer responds incredulously:

Well, you’re probably thinking, you do play acoustic guitar and write lyrics like “Here’s the
silhouette/The face always turned away/The bleeding color gone to black/Dying like the day” (from “Oh Well, Okay”), sooo …

Indeed, as Smith’s music grew farther away from the “singer/songwriter” mold, his lyrics became a more common means of asserting that he
is,
in fact, a real-life “tortured singer-songwriter,” despite his protestations. An extensive feature in the January 1999 issue of
Spin
equates one of Smith’s song titles with his supposed suicide attempt:

Massaging a glass of beer, he seems happy, truly happy, which is not something a singer/songwriter so often linked with words such as “gloom” and “Garfunkel” is supposed to be. Happier than someone who sings about the 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 onto
the 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 traced
back 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 fan
base. 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 creativity is a simple codification of preexisting experiences and emotions:

People do not—as artists, writers, musicians—have some pre-formed condition that they then seek to express in an art form and communicate to others. The contours and characteristics of experience are given meaning and value through the process of expression and communication …

A songwriter may decide to write a sad song, regardless of how they’re feeling at that moment. A painter may wish to convey a sense of anger at the atrocities of war. We may hear the song or see the painting and interpret it as an example of someone condensing their experience into song form or pictoral representation
and then relaying it to us. But the act of expressing whatever sadness or anger we may recognize and relate to is realized in the act of making the song and painting. It doesn’t exist in some pure or prior state which words, music or paint then approximate in some way or other.

This myth of creativity intersects with Negus’s inclusive and insightful definition of genre as a series of culturally agreed upon expectations; indeed, different “genres” rely upon and activate this particular construction of creativity in different ways. Broadly speaking, those musicians whose “genre” casts them as musical innovators or cultural pastiche artists are not necessarily presumed to be expressing some deeply held emotion or experience. By contrast, the “folk,” “acoustic” or “singer/songwriter” genre construct is often presumed to be the most directly confessional. When postmodern posterboy Beck released the more conventionally “folky”
Sea Change
in 2002, it was suddenly held as a shining example of personal “truth” put to music, dramatically recasting the type of “creativity” credited to artist who had previously been seen primarily as a clever aesthetic manipulator.
Rolling Stone
called
Sea Change
“an impeccable album of truth and light [created] from the end of love.” Nobody seemed particularly interested in what emotional experience(s) may have informed
Midnite Vultures,
nor
in the possibility that
Sea Change
was simply another genre experiment from one of pop music’s most dexterous stylistic chameleons.

Indeed, while Beck has his roots in the self-proclaimed “anti-folk” scene and helped to usher in the playful aesthetic irreverence of the mid-to-late 1990s, even he could not escape some of the longest standing cultural assumptions about creative production. The mythology surrounding the “author” is central to modern cultural studies, and forms the basis for many of the ideas set forth by scholars such as Ellis and Negus. In the seminal essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes discusses at length the way that literary criticism privileges knowledge about the author him/herself as a means of interpreting a work:

The
author
still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, and in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passion, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The
explanation
of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always
in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the
author
“confiding” in us.

Barthes goes on to explain how this sort of interpretation is advantageous to the critic, giving him/her a clear set of criteria by which to validate his or her opinion.

Once the author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyche, liberty) beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is “explained”—victory to the critic.

To expand Barthes’ assertion with the modern aphorism “everybody’s a critic” is to understand part of what we stand to lose by disjoining Smith’s craft and his biography. The process of uncovering the “truth” behind a piece of art is gratifying for
everybody
and, in the information age, a pursuit that is by no means limited to critics or “men of letters.” Ironically, the burgeoning online media democracy seems only to have exaggerated this effect; as blogs and message boards offer up innumerable, conflicting interpretations of
creative work, the urge to fix a piece of art to its “true” meaning is more prevalent than ever.

If we are to give up the quest to fix Smith’s music in its “true” meaning, we must also give up the romantic illusion that this meaning is only accessible to a select few “true” fans, or to those who knew Smith personally. To do so is both to draw a tenuous interpretive perimeter around Smith’s work itself, and to accept that the potential meanings that exist within that perimeter are limitless. In. doing so, we recast Smith not as a rarified genius whose artistic concerns are beyond our understanding, but rather as a skilled, dedicated, and fallible craftsman whose work we can all discuss, interpret and enjoy. The myth of Smith’s “genius” explodes his agency; he is at once omnipotent and impotent, blessed with a preternatural gift that was somehow beyond his control or understanding. (In one of the more darkly romantic iterations of this myth, this blessing inevitably becomes the curse that leads to the artist’s tragic downfall.) Crane suggests that it was hard work, not some unquantifiable spark of “genius,” that ultimately elevated Smith’s musical output to the stellar heights of
XO
:

I was just reading
This Is Your Brain on Music
by Daniel J. Levitin…. There are no geniuses, but there people that are called “geniuses.” In every case, it’s
10,000 hours of practice before anybody ever starts to say that. And that’s got to be the case with [Elliott]. I remember we were tracking one song, playing it on guitar, and he goes, “eh, I’m not sure if this is working out. Maybe I’ll try it on piano.” And he just walks over to the piano, and plays the song perfectly, top to bottom. And I know he hadn’t practiced it; he was just able to transcribe it in his head, and then really play it on the piano—we’re talking left and right hand and everything. And then he could walk over and play it on drums. And it’s because he’s already done that work—he’d recorded thousands of hours of stuff that no one needs to hear.