(Bereaved fan reacting to the news on a website.)
Elliot Smith is surely not the first rock and roll suicide on record, but he may be the first of this millennium. The 34-year-old American singer/songwriter took his own life by – picture this – stabbing himself with a clear blow to the chest in his Los Angeles apartment a few weeks back.
Smith had a strong cult/indy following, but he was more widely known for providing soundtrack music to the film Good Will Hunting. He earned an Oscar nomination for the song "Miss Misery" from that movie.
Critics creamed over his self-recorded, lo-fi albums, which seemed like an alternative cross between Nick Drake, Alex Chilton, Brian Wilson and the Beatles. It’s the first three on that list that need some attention: when you’re linked to singer/songwriters who themselves committed suicide (as Drake did) or went crazy (as Chilton and Wilson did, briefly), you may be in for some trouble. At the very least, keep an eye on these morose souls.
Elliot Smith had a soft, easy voice and a way with acoustic guitar melodies (he claimed he got his acoustic picking style from the Beatles’ song, Blackbird). His subject matter was far from the mellow moods of, say, Bread: drugs, drinking, suicide, misery and emotional blackness. His music belied all this, though: inventive and sad, with minor chord changes and delicate guitar figures. Like the Beatles on downers, maybe, Smith was one in a long line of musical prodigies who soaked up the music of the past and rearranged it to their own sad orchestration.
The young kids today call it "emo." Jack Black, the crazed used-record salesman in High Fidelity, called it something else: "Sad bastard music." Sad Bastard Music (or SBM for short) is a vibrant musical form showing no signs of decline. Evidence can be found in the popularity of Radiohead and Coldplay, just two phenomenally popular SBM bands.
What’s Sad Bastard Music like? It’s like sitting over a cold cup of tea on a miserable, overcast London morning. It’s like a rainy weekend in Seattle, and not enough change for Starbucks. It’s sung by melancholy folks who sound like they’re ready to slit their wrists, pop their heads in an oven, or at the very least ride around miserably on the MRT. For certain moods, granted, Sad Bastard Music is just the tonic: if you feel like reveling in depression, if your mood stabilizers haven’t kicked in yet, or if you just want to watch the sun go down and surrender to twilight, basking in the immense sadness of it all, SBM is a perfect soundtrack.
Kings of SBM include: The Velvet Underground (the dreary languor of their first and third albums are SBM templates); the aforementioned Nick Drake (a British folkie who hung himself); and Big Star (by their Third Album, lead singer Chilton was nearing mental collapse, all captured on tape, while his erstwhile songwriting partner Chris Bell, after two unsuccessful suicide attempts, died in a car crash. How sad is that?).
More modern practitioners of SBM are: The Smiths (e.g, Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now); Red House Painters (truly depressed and depressing); Belle and Sebastian (they’re Scottish, so of course they’re sad bastards); and Jeff Buckley (whose trilling wail foreshadowed his eventual mysterious disappearance at sea).
The Reluctant/Suicidal Rock Star is a powerful archetype, of course. Kurt Cobain simply cemented the template in place for a new, grungier generation. No one can ever answer the single question that nags at the public consciousness, though: Why did they do it? No one but the deceased, of course.
Friends of Smith said he had been "really reclusive" for the past few years. (How does one remain friends with a recluse? Slip notes under the door? Spam them with smiley faces?) Says singer-songwriter Mary Lou Ford, who toured with Smith: "He sort of shut everyone out for the last three or four years. Maybe he was in a downward spiral and he didn’t want to take everyone else with him." And then there’s the method of ending it all: either too Japanese, or too brutal for a depressive’s suicide act.
But conspiracy theories just feed into the pop iconography – the cool glamour of young death. Musically (unlike Cobain who lamented that his songwriting had stalled by the time Nirvana’s final album, In Utero, was released), Smith had matured considerably since self-produced EPs like Roman Candle and later efforts like Either/Or and XO. He battled drug and alcohol addiction, but was said to have cleaned up. Some say he lost some indy cred by learning to play electric guitar. But though 2000’s Figure 8 was his last and most polished effort (he was working on a follow-up, From A Basement Hill, before he died), it sacrificed none of the melancholic lyrics or grim humor. "Everything means nothing to me," his ascending voice recites, over and over, above a simple piano line on a song from that album. It could have been a clear peek into Smith’s dark soul… or simply a hauntingly beautiful melodic phrase.
The songwriter himself disavowed any simple connection between the songs and the person: "I don’t think anybody can get a fair assessment of anybody as a person from listening to their records… That would be like saying you can get a fair assessment of someone because they told you a dream they had last night."
Listening to Smith’s often funny lyrics, you might have concluded that, amid the ennui, the malaise that drifts over his songs, humor would ultimately save him. It didn’t. Nothing did. The only conclusions dead rock stars leave us are the ones they draw down upon themselves.