The overarching difference between film and music, of course, is that film is understood to be mimetic and fictional; certainly, nobody thinks that a famous actor and one of his roles are actually the same. What stardom studies suggests, however, is that the star’s cultural image—articulated in “newspapers, fanzines, etc”—provides a context for understanding the fictional film; a context that is utilized in promoting the film, and in many ways necessary for understanding the film. This dynamic seems more unencumbered in popular music, as there is often no presumed difference between the star and his or her role in the text.
With these critical lenses applied, one begins to see how both Smith’s “life story” (”star image”) and popular readings of his music (”narrative image”) could be simultaneously constructed through a sort of epistemological feedback loop. For Smith to be an “authentic” singer-songwriter, he must have really experienced the things he sings about—especially those that most mark him as “other” to the glitzy world of Hollywood. For the gratifying completion of Smith’s “star image” to take place, his music must, in turn, reflect the biography offered in newspapers and magazines. For Smith to retain his “authenticity,” that reading of his music must be verified by the “life story” told in newspapers and magazines. And so it goes.
On February 20, 1998, Yahoo! Launch ran a piece about Smith’s Oscar nomination—one of the first to appear anywhere in the mainstream media. Discussing Smith’s contributions to Gus Van Sant’s popular Hollywood film, the article’s writer retroactively constructs a “star image” for Smith via the “narrative image” of Matt Damon’s Will Hunting:
Maybe [Smith and Will Hunting] aren’t so far apart; maybe Elliott Smith was so perfect for Good Will Hunting because, just like Will in the movie, while seen by society as a fuck-up, he’s a genius working in obscurity who’s suddenly given the chance to enter the mainstream. That is, if he can … and if he wants to.
A number of assumptions are passively enacted here; most notably, that Smith is “seen by society as a fuck-up.” Who exactly sees Smith as a fuck-up is not specified—the narrative of Smith’s meteoric and unprecedented ascent is, in a sense, already written: just as Sean Maguire acknowledged and elevated Will Hunting’s scorned and untapped genius, we can all acknowledge and elevate Elliott Smith’s.
The problem, of course, is that Smith’s genius was not all that untapped, nor his ascent all that meteoric or unprecedented. By and large, “society” didn’t see Elliott Smith at all, and among those who did, he was well respected for his musical talent. Having already released on album on one major label and signed a contract with another, any claim to Smith’s absolute “obscurity” is more than a little bit dubious. But the story of the unrecognized, “authentic” genius suddenly thrust into the national spotlight is an irresistible one.
On March 20, 1998, this “authentic genius” was introduced to the country at large; Smith was written up in an extensive USA Today article that reads as a kind of primer on the deferrals and paradoxes inherent to Smith’s cultural positioning. As with the Yahoo! Launch piece, it introduces Smith as a singer “plucked out of obscurity and plunked smack into Oscar hubbub.” The article goes on to say that Smith “has been described as an acerbic poet and street bohemian who writes sad folk songs.” Smith’s self-description as “pop … I like melodies” does little to drown out the unspecified throngs who apparently perceive him as an “acerbic poet.” Once again, an uncredited passive voice is used to describe Smith to an audience that is likely quite unfamiliar with his work. Needless to say, I have not been able to find a single article that explicitly names Smith as a “street bohemian.”
An April 1998 article in the LA Times expounded a bit upon what exactly the life of a newly elevated “street bohemian” might look like:
A few weeks ago, Elliott Smith performed his Oscar-nominated song “Miss Misery” for more than 55 million on the Academy Awards telecast. A month earlier, he was playing the tiny L.A. Rock club Spaceland. A year ago he was trying to kill himself.
Here again, Smith’s “authenticity” is posed as a direct counterpoint to the inauthentic Academy Awards. And, as would often be the case, allusions to suicide attempts—or heroin use—are offered as irrefutable proof of such authenticity. (Both of these subjects have long been used as rhetorical shortcuts to “authenticity” for many artists, writers, and musicians.) Doubtless, the fact that Smith broached these subjects in his lyrics made it all the more necessary for suicide and drug abuse to be constructed as an integral part of his life story, as his status as an “authentic” singer-songwriter was predicated upon his musical expression being “real” and “genuine.” Besides, if the aestheticization and idolization of a singer’s image—like that of Celine Dion—render an artist shallow and false, then what could be more “authentic” than utter self-annihilation?
In her article “Art Versus Commerce: Deconstructing a (Useful) Romantic Illusion,” Deena Weinstein suggests that drug use and suicide are common discursive tools for constructing the romantic myth of the artist:
Critics celebrate romantic rock deaths because they affirm the myth of the artist. A drug overdose, a shotgun suicide, or a gangland gangsta slaying; these deaths show, rhetorically, that the romantic artist was authentic, not merely assuming a (Christlike) pose. The right kind of death is the most powerful authenticity effect, the indefeasible outward sign of inward grace. “The artist must be sacrificed to their art; like the bees they must but their lives into the sting they give,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote…. Death isn’t the only authenticity effect embraced by rock writers. They also champion heroin-addicted musicians and rockers who are off their rockers…. Addicts and insane are automatically authentic because their grip on rationality is too weak to allow them to “sell out.”
Thus, in the wake of his Oscar performance, Smith’s “star image,” as articulated in the news media, was that of the sad, suicidal sap, suddenly (and perhaps unwantedly) thrust into the national spotlight. His extensive back catalog, its enthusiastic reception, and its modest commercial success often get entirely omitted. Reputable labels (Kill Rock Stars) and sizeable clubs (Spaceland) are suddenly “tiny.” And—most troubling of all—Smith himself is positioned as a suicidal “fuck-up,” whose “sudden” success as a musician is in no way the result of hard work, perseverance or—God forbid—ambition (I mean, the guy tried to kill himself!).
As Ellis suggested, however, such “star images” are incomplete without that star’s texts. In both the Yahoo! Launch and LA Times pieces, Good Will Hunting itself is positioned as such a text. The May 30, 1998 UK release of Either/Or offered a preliminary glimpse of how Smith’s music would be read against his newfound 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 “quiet acoustic” 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 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 revi
ew 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:
Elliott Smith's XO Page 8
