Comments on: Sounds Great When You’re Dead

By: Libby

Libby — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“It’s unromantic, inconsiderate, and depressing for everyone concerned.”
Thank you for saying that. As a suicide survivor twice over I appreciate the realism.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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?

By: marm0t

marm0t — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is a really wonderful, and really wonderfully written, entry. Thanks for posting it.

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: M. Cait Brennan

M. Cait Brennan — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.

By: Slumberland

Slumberland — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

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…