Elliott Smith's XO
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New Monkey [Released on New Moon]
“New Monkey” is one of a handful of Smith’s songs that explicitly utilizes the language of drug abuse to broach broader philosophical and emotional issues. Smith begins the song by introducing a “sidewalk boss,” who sees Smith as a “picture of dissatisfaction that he can only see as a junkie.” Smith continues, “though I might be straight as an arrow, he’s busy shaking hands with my monkey.”
Here, the familiar metaphor of a monkey on one’s back is extended beyond its common association with chemical addiction. What, exactly, is the proverbial monkey on Smith’s back? It isn’t entirely clear. The song’s chorus—“anything is better than nothing”—suggests that this vagary is not unintentional; Smith applies the language of addiction to any behavior that goes against reason, be it substance abuse, self-destruction, or ill-advised romantic pursuits. The last verse of “New Monkey” is more specific in its unexpected allusion to the songwriting process:
I’m here with my cup, afraid to look up
This is how I spend my time
Lazing around, head hanging down
Stuck inside my imagination
Busy making something from nothing
Pictures of hope and depression
Anything is better than nothing
Here, the split between the act of songwriting and the life of the writer is made explicit; Smith is “stuck” inside his imagination, but he is “making something from nothing” (given Smith’s tendency toward self-deprecation in his lyrics, “nothing” may very well be a reference to the singer himself). Similarly, “something”—“pictures of hope and depression”—can be read as Smith’s own songs. Thus, the place of fearful stasis articulated throughout XO is also figured as a haven for writerly creativity. It’s an oddly unromantic vision of songwriting that seems in keeping with Smith’s workmanlike approach to the creative process. Songwriting, like anything else, is something to do—and it’s a lot better than some of its alternatives.
“Memory Lane” [Released on From a Basement on the Hill]
“Memory Lane” was officially released on 2004’s posthumous From a Basement on the Hill, but the song was originally slated for inclusion on XO. Thematically, it is a handy summation of Smith’s suspect view of memory and the past. It is also a particularly elegant example of Smith’s tendency to spatialize or literalize common metaphors; in this case, “memory lane” is reimagined as “the place you end up when you lose the chase.” A live version of the song from October 1997 offers some interesting glimpses into Smith’s lyrical concerns at the time of XO:
This is the place you end up when you lose the chase,
Where the passion and the pill make you easier to kill.
And all anybody knows is you look messed up—
They inspect you in the head and send you back to bed.
Isolation draws into its static, into night, builds a little house for you to stay.
But everybody’s scared of this place, staying away—
No one comes here, Memory Lane.
It’s just the appearance everybody fears,
Just to see you try to get a very abrasive piece of it,
What they never knew ’cause they did not want to.
You keep the doors and windows shut and never show a soul again.
But isolation draws into a static, into night, builds a little house for you to stay.
But everybody’s scared of this place, staying away—
No one comes here, Memory Lane.
If it’s your decision to be open about yourself, be careful or else—you better be careful or else.
I’m uncomfortable apart—it’s all written on my chart.
And I take what’s given me, most cooperatively.
I do what people say and lie in bed all day,
But I’m never going to cry under the doctor’s eye.
In a January 14, 1998 performance, “Memory Lane” ’s second verse covers similar ground:
It’s here a prickly fear will eventually appear
With a mountain of cliché that it dumps right in your way.
Everyone took it for true ’cause they did not know you.
You’ll keep the doors and windows shut and swear you’ll never show a soul again.
This verse is thematically related to the song’s bridge, which remains constant over the five or so years that Smith worked on the song: “If it’s your decision to be open about yourself, be careful or else.” Openness is an invitation to being misunderstood, and the effects of that misunderstanding (as in “Everybody Cares”) can be devastating.
The original chorus of “Memory Lane” ties together many of the lyrical figures from XO; the “static” of “Tomorrow, Tomorrow,” and the everpresent “night” literally build a space; a physical manifestation of Smith’s “airless cell.” The Basement version of “Memory Lane” cleverly extends Smith’s literalization of its central metaphor and further emphasizes the dangers of the past, but these early live versions make for an interesting addition to Smith’s XO-era oeuvre.
Miss Misery [Released on the Good Will Hunting Soundtrack]
In many ways, “Miss Misery” is inseparable from XO, though it was not included on the record itself. Larry Crane describes it as “the song that was almost on XO that wasn’t”:
It kind of really ties together well with that record, it was just such an albatross at that point. You know, just eclipsing everything is this one stupid song that was just a demo, ostensibly. And now [for Elliott] you’re doing an hour’s worth of interviews about this thing while you’re trying to make XO. While I was visiting Sunset Sound that week they made the move to drop “Miss Misery” from the running order of XO.
As with many songs from its era, “Miss Misery” underwent a series of notable changes, both musically and lyrically, before its completion. The earliest extant version of the song, released on the excellent New Moon compilation, contains an entirely different chorus: “But it’s alright / ’cause some enchanted night I’ll be with you.” The sweetness of Smith’s voice elevates these lines above simple cliché, but they fail to signify much beyond a utilitarian rock and roll chorus.
The song’s first bridge, which arrives disarmingly soon in its overall arc, initially read “the tarot cards and the lines in my hand / Tell me I’m wrong but they’re untrue.” By the second studio version of “Miss Misery,” this line—which initially seems like a very long way to say “I’m right”—has been given characters and a narrative. The transition from the song’s first bridge to its second verse mobilizes an almost dreamlike shift in subjectivity; the bridge involves talking to a “man in the park,” who reads Smith’s palm and tells him that he’s “strong, hardly ever wrong,” to which Smith replies “man, you mean you.” That “you” then becomes the first line of the next verse, “you had plans for both of us that involved a trip out of town.” A return to the song’s opening chord evokes a sense of waking up; that mysterious “man in the park” is only a temporary break from the play of characters central to the song. The most narratively specific portions of Smith’s songs are often the most surreal and hallucinatory.
The final lines of “Miss Misery” were subject to a similarly fruitful series of refinements. In the song’s earliest incarnation, Smith prefaced its final chorus with “and I cried to see when you talked to me the night you said we were through,” a line that veers toward cliché, both descriptively and sentimentally. As it appears on the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, these lines hit with the self-explanatory emotional specificity described by Darnielle:
To vanish into oblivion is easy to do
And I try to be, but you know me I come back when you want me to
Do you miss me, miss misery
Like you say you do?
In its final repetition, the song’s inquisitive chorus has been dramatically recast by the lyrics preceding it. Smith has revealed his dependence upon the song’s subject, but also his awareness of that depe
ndence; emotional intelligence set against an uncontrollable emotional addiction.
“Miss Misery” is a beautiful song, a rich and complicated interpersonal tale that is in fact, quite representative of Smith’s work. But its relationship to his musical legacy is, as Crane suggests, complicated as well. Smith was fascinated with contradictions, and the success of “Miss Misery” makes for a great one; it is at once remarkable (a song as understated and affectively intricate as “Miss Misery” being nominated for an Oscar) and unremarkable (a contracted professional songwriter being recognized for a soundtrack contribution). It is also predicated upon a necessary white lie; though the song was written and tracked before Van Sant ever heard it, Smith had to pretend that it was written “for” the film to see it nominated. In the next section of this book, I examine how Smith came to be constructed in popular culture through the success of “Miss Misery,” and how that construction was read over and against XO.
Part Two—“Pictures of Me”
In 1997, Elliott Smith was a respected but largely unknown professional musician who had released three albums (one on a major label) with his recently disbanded group Heatmiser, and three increasingly ornate and well-received solo albums. In 1998, Elliott Smith was an undiscovered, strung out coffee house troubadour plucked from obscurity by director Gus Van Sant.
How did this happen?
Or, to take a step back; why even bother discussing it? If Elliott Smith’s music stands in such stark opposition to his popular image, why waste time even addressing the latter?
The answer is, simply, that I don’t believe that the process of hearing a record is ever an unmediated one. One can come to an understanding of a record that does not match up with that record’s cultural positioning, but the two can never fully be dissociated. As I have found in my own experience with Smith’s music, the way a musician’s name circulates (or that of an author or visual artist) can greatly affect the way his/her music is heard.
Furthermore, an in-depth and systematic analysis serves to move the discussion away from one about which writers “get it” and which writers don’t. My interest in citing numerous articles surrounding the release of XO is not to call out any particular writers for buying into any one “story” of Elliott Smith, or for failing to understand the “truth” of his work, but rather to examine how these “stories” came to be and how they developed over time. Indeed, I am hard pressed to imagine how a 500-word newspaper article that does not play into Smith’s popular mythology could be deemed editorially relevant. The “story” of Elliott Smith is one that we as a culture have all told, enjoyed and contributed to, but the print media offers us a unique chance to take apart and examine the rhetorical engines that power Smith’s popular construction.
In his popular music theory primer, Keith Negus works toward establishing a critical framework for how this dynamic can be understood:
Although mediation has often been used in an elusive way and is sometimes a vaguely defined concept, it is one that I am using to stress how popular music cannot be known in any neutral, immediate or naively experiential way. I am using the idea of mediation to stress that human experiences are grounded in cultural activities which are understood and given meaning through particular languages and symbols…. We may, somewhere deep inside, “feel” and “know” music in a quite profound way … However, as soon as we try to communicate and share this experience we are caught up in language and culture—the range of concepts, communicative actions and social practices that we must use to formulate convey and exchange meanings with other people.
In defining music as inseparable from mediation, Negus moves against the trend toward viewing mediation as that which hinders or interferes with our ability to objectively experience music. Indeed, Negus suggests that there is really no such thing as “objective” listening, at least in the way that it is popularly conceived; instead, the process of listening to music is always social and cultural.
This idea helps to erode problematic theoretical differentiation between “real” music fans and casual music listeners. Pop music theory is marked by a history of such binary oppositions; art vs. commerce, active vs. passive. Theodore Adorno, the great grandfather of academic music criticism, wrote extensively of music fans being fundamentally “duped” by the popular music apparatus. David Reisman amended Adorno’s critical framework to include the “subcultural” listener, a music fan too hip and savvy to be fooled by the vast capitalist machinations of the culture industry. This mode of thought has its cultural legacy in the distinction between those listeners who are smart and interested enough to see past social, cultural, and industrial cues (“real fans”), and those who blindly follow them.
Negus’s theoretical approach suggests not only that listening is an essentially active experience, but also that it is in fact inseparable from the forces that theoretically ensnare the “passive” listener. In Music Genres and Corporate Cultures, Negus expands his argument to address how specific genres of music can bring to bear their own processes of cultural mediation. He positions the term “genre” not as a strict aesthetic codification, but rather as a set of interpretive expectations:
In using the term “genre culture” I am drawing on Steve Neale’s use of genre as a sociological rather than formal concept, “not … as forms of textual codifications, but as systems of orientations, expectations and conventions that circulate between industry, text and subject” (Neale, 1980, p. lp). One of the most obvious ways that these expectations may circulate is through the institutionalized system of media, particularly radio and video, and the way this contributes to the definition and boundaries of what falls within and without a genre of music.
Negus’s formulation of genre (itself based on the work of a film scholar, not a music scholar) goes beyond the use of the term to denote a naturally unified aesthetic or “sound.” To see this theory put to practice, one need not look farther than Elliott Smith’s oft-assigned genre: “singer/songwriter.” Technically speaking, the term is an occupational/biographical description more so than an aesthetic one. And while this generic distinction may have its origins in the aesthetic of Smith’s early work, it also served to cast him as a figure of pure, “authentic” confessional expression, set against the decidedly inauthentic world of the Academy Awards.
Negus cites Richard A. Peterson’s construction of “authenticity” as crucial in how genre issues are communicated. In his study Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity, Peterson describes in detail the processes by which “authentic” country music has been defined and reshaped over time.
The ironic phrase “fabricating authenticity” is used here to highlight the fact that authenticity is not inherent in the object or event that is designated authentic but is a socially agreed-upon construct in which the past is to a degree misremembered (Hawlbachs 1992) … Unlike these other situations that have been researched, no authority is in a position to dictate authenticity in country music. Rather, as we will discover in the chapters that follow, it is continuously negotiated in an ongoing interplay between performers, diverse commercial interests, fans, and the evolving image.
Peterson’s use of the phrase “socially agreed-upon” is intentionally and productively vague; indeed, there is no single party that can bestow “authenticity.” Nor, as I have suggested, is “authenticity” simply a fallacy embraced by those dastardly writers who don’t “understand” Smith’s work exactly the way I do. “Authenticity” is, in many ways, a necessary cultural construct, one that often seems to work against hegemony precisely because it cannot be conferred by any one authority. Toilet paper jingles hatched in a corporate boardroom and pop songs crafted in a barren bedroom are both written to tug at our heartstrings. The imperfect and illusory construct of a bottom-up consensus is one way to filter the incessant stream of stimuli we are confronted with—a flawed but well-intentioned way to decide what we will “trust” to move, repulse or inspire us.
Of course “authenticity,” lik
e any other cultural construct, is highly manipulable. Negus and Peterson both primarily address ways in which a musician’s perceived “authenticity” can be shaped and directed by those who stand to make a profit. But in the case of Elliott Smith, there seems to have been no such attempt by DreamWorks, Smith’s management, or Smith himself to present himself as an “authentic” singer/songwriter—or an “authentic” anything, for that matter. In nearly every interview from the time of XO, Smith flatly rejected the “singer/songwriter” tag.
If Smith and those who stood to profit from him did not present him as an “authentic” singer/songwriter, how did this construct come to inform his popular image? And how did this construct inform the perceived continuities and disjuncts between Smith’s biography and his musical output?
Just as Negus did in his definition of “genre,” I turn here to the work of a film scholar. John Ellis, who has written extensively on the issue of stardom, describes how an actor’s “star image” can provide a kind of foreknowledge to that actor’s films:
Stars have a similar function in the film industry to the creation of a “narrative image”: they provide a foreknowledge of the fiction, an invitation to cinema. Stars are incomplete images outside the cinema: the performance of the film is the moment of completion of images in subsidiary circulation, in newspaper, fanzines, etc. Further, a paradox is present in these subsidiary forms. The star is at once ordinary and extraordinary, available for desire and unattainable … Furthermore, the star’s particular performance in a film is always more than the culmination of the star images in subsidiary circulation: it is a balancing act between fiction and cultism.
Ellis continues: “It may well be that a similar creation of stars is impossible for broadcast TV (which fosters ‘personalities’), but does take place in the rock music industry.” Indeed, star studies provides a fruitful and productive lens for examining how a figure like Smith is created in the popular consciousness, and how his music can come to be the crux by which that popular image must be realized and validated.