Sounds Great When You’re Dead
I feel bad for Elliott Smith in a number of ways. He was unhappy, and had terrible struggles in life, and now it appears they were unbearable and he had to leave. That’s really enough.
In exiting this way, though, he condemned himself to a worse fate. Mr. Smith has now entered the Pantheon of Sad Artists, enshrined next to Ian Curtis, Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Sylvia Plath, Karen Carpenter, and that really talented gal you knew in high school who offed herself. Generations of grimly satisfied depressives will play his music for their friends and say “…and he died young, and so tragically. He was just not made for this world.”
That’s crap.
Suicide is a terrible thing for an artist. All sorts of people off themselves or O.D., every day, and it’s a grim business. Most of them are ordinary people with extraordinary problems, and anyone with a heart feels bad for them. It’s unromantic, inconsiderate, and depressing for everyone concerned. But when you make art and die by your own hand, you turn into a Suicide Artist and your entire body of work becomes raw material for immature angst. Every dysphoric teen in a suburban mall will wear your t-shirt, and every suicide-gesture livejournal will invoke your name in the daily goodbye to a thousand cruel worlds.
Ian Curtis should be remembered for a fine hand with songwriting, a haunting voice, and the skills and heart to make that Vox guitar scream and scream. Sylvia Plath put her nose to the grindstone and produced beautifully polished prose and poetry. Nick Drake, Kurt Cobain, and even poor Karen Carpenter worked long hours at the studio and practiced and made art that people cared about. The fact that they couldn’t make it further, beat their problems back, and produce more art is a crappy footnote to their creative biographies.
Please don’t turn Elliott Smith into the latest sad-kid suicide poster boy; he deserves better.
October 22nd, 2003 at 1:40 pm
“It’s unromantic, inconsiderate, and depressing for everyone concerned.”
Thank you for saying that. As a suicide survivor twice over I appreciate the realism.
October 22nd, 2003 at 2:10 pm
These artists had to go through personal hell to make the kind of honest, realistic, wrenching sounds they made. By rewarding that, by asking them for more, we ask them to go through more hell.
Suicide is a terrible thing for anyone. Suicide isn’t the solution. Getting better is.
Better they shouldn’t produce more “art”. Better they should get better and never be heard from again. Their lives are worth a lot more than our entertainment. We paid our money, we got their music. They don’t owe us a thing.
Heroin’s a bad idea. Ask all of the musicians who’ve tangled with it and lost. Everybody who uses it made a decision, that first time, to ignore what they should have known. The game isn’t worth the candle. Their “friends” who were there with them were no friends at all. Oh yeah, some days you feel so strong you’re sure you can shrug off anything. But then along comes some personal disaster, and all of a sudden you’re not so strong. Too bad, horse doesn’t care.
People care. Don’t they?
October 22nd, 2003 at 3:02 pm
This is a really wonderful, and really wonderfully written, entry. Thanks for posting it.
October 22nd, 2003 at 5:44 pm
I’m listening to the man right now. What a sad, sad waste.
At school, I met up with a friend who was really into Joy Division, before Ian committed suicide. When I met him again for the first time in the fall, we talked about what happened, and, yes, how some people took this as some kind of befitting artistic action, instead of the death of an actual human being. And remember, these fans should be the sensitive ones. Ick.
October 22nd, 2003 at 5:57 pm
Well done. Oddly, I’d just come home from a sneak preview of the Sylvia Plath movie and–having wrestled with suicide myself–wrote in my livejournal about how idiotic it is to romanticize it. It’s harsh and brutal and ugly and awful at best. I loved Elliot’s music, it gave me great comfort, and I hope he’s found the peace he sought. He deserves so much more than to be enshrined on the list of tragic-doomed-artists that gloomy black-clad kids try to contact with a Ouija board.
October 23rd, 2003 at 3:56 am
Not “the latest sad-kid suicide poster boy,” please
Ignatz was able to write what I could not last night: by his suicide, Elliott Smith condemned himself to enter “the Pantheon of Sad Artists…