Elliot Smith

It was strange watching the Oscars in a hospital bed with my wife and newly egressed son. Fresh from the traumatic and bewildering experience of birth, we huddled in the room, trying to adjust to the two that had become three. But as strange as that was, it was nothing compared to what happened during the Oscar broadcast. One of the inevitable lowlights of the show is the singing of the nominated songs – always boring and bland, always belted out through the roof by some vanilla songbird like Celine Dion. And, sure enough, there was Celine flame-throwing the egregious My Heart Will Go On from Titanic (the eventual winner, to nobody’s surprise), but, wait, who’s that stumbling onto the stage? Is that…Elliott Smith? Alone with an acoustic guitar? Are you kidding me? Life, which I didn’t think could get any stranger, had just taken a sharp turn into surreality.

Elliott Smith was a singer/songwriter from Portland (the one in Oregon), one of the key players in the “lo-fi” movement. Much like Phil Spector championing mono well into the stereo age, lo-fi aficionados shun the shiny production techniques popular today for a rougher, less polished sound. Some of it is, no doubt, financially motivated (sounding bad is cheaper than sounding good), but there are some real aesthetic concerns. Lo-fi sounds more human, more homey. Often recorded on a four-track in somebody’s bedroom, lo-fi hasn’t been compromised by anybody. No label to pressure you, no producer to muck things up, just you and your music, the purity of your vision, and so on. Of course, that’s largely a stance, and lo-fi can be compromised just as easily as hi-fi, but the aesthetic reeks of folk art, and that smell is where it gets a lot of its credibility.

I guess there’s some debate about whether or not Elliot Smith is truly lo-fi, but he’s lo enough for me. His albums, at least the early ones, are quiet affairs, full of strummed acoustic guitar, drums with no meat on the beat, and mournful lyrics intimately sung. He’s got a very lo-fi look, too. Unkempt hair, t-shirts and worn jeans, his demeanor matches his sound – pleasant enough, but with no real concessions made to polishing or commerciality. Smith is about as far from appealing to a mass audience as you can be, and yet, there he was, slightly rumpled, strumming his guitar and singing about Miss Misery live to over a billion people on the Academy Awards. I guess they were trying something new that year, and I guess they stopped after that because I haven’t seen anybody like that on the show since. And it’s too bad they didn’t try to get a little edgier the previous year, because then they could’ve had Fountains of Wayne singing That Thing You Do. But still, it was wonderful to see somebody so completely out of the mainstream inserted into such a festival of commercialism and middle-of-the-road aesthetics. That wonderfully incongruous moment was my favorite of the night (certainly beats the abusive James Cameron squealing that he was on top of the world) and I drifted off to sleep, next to my newly expanded family, thinking about all the ways the world had changed and wondering what else was in store. If I could curl up around my own frighteningly beautiful son – my son! – and Elliott Smith can sing at the Academy Awards, well, then, is anything really impossible?

Five years later, Smith would be found dead in his LA apartment, an apparent suicide. I say apparent because his demeanor and the stinging darkness of his songs made it very easy for everybody to assume he had killed himself, just listen to him sing. And although there are no suspects, the method of death – stabbed in the heart – is quite unusual for a suicide, especially since there were apparently no test wounds. Usually if somebody’s going to stab themselves, the do a couple of test jabs to see how it feels and how much pressure to apply and so on. There were apparently no test wounds on his chest (although there were tracks of them on his arm, Smith having fought with – and apparently lost to – a heroin addiction). I don’t know if the case is still open, but the general consensus seems to be that he killed himself because his songs are so depressing.

It’s like Sid and Nancy. There’s strong evidence and witnesses to suggest that Sid didn’t kill Nancy at all. That there was somebody else in that hotel room that night. But nobody wanted to hear that. Sid – Sid Vicious, mind you – must’ve killed Nancy because he was a punk and that would just make great romantic sense. Never mind the bollix, never mind the truth, Sid killed Nancy because the media and the police and the culture wanted him to. Case closed. Like Sid, Elliott was the songs he sang and deserved his fate in the court of public opinion. And in a democracy, that’s all that counts. Elliott fought against the cult of personality, arguing that the work and the creator should be judged on their own merits and that celebrities shouldn’t be treated differently because of what they do. But all that arguing was for naught. In the end, he was what her wrote, he lived by the guitar and died by the knife, and all his protestations added up to a big nothing.