Elliott Smith's XO (10 page)

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,” like 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
fore
knowledge 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.

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.