Between beautiful and brutal: Elliott Smith

On Oct. 21, indie folk-rock singer/songwriter Elliott Smith was found dead of a stab wound to the chest in his Los Angeles home. All appearances indicate that it was self-inflicted and intentional.\nPerhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated song "Miss Misery," which appeared on the soundtrack for the 1997 Ben Affleck-Matt Damon film Good Will Hunting, Smith's delicate music and honest lyrics made an indelible impression on anyone who heard them. He was working on his sixth solo album at the time of his death.\nAs violent and horrifying as his end was, fans and friends are not surprised that Smith's tortured life finished tragically. It always seemed a matter of when the fragile artist would submit to the darkness that seemed to permeate his life. Stories abound of his confused and sometimes bizarre actions at his own shows in the last year, from trailing off when speaking between songs to getting into brawls.\nFlaming Lips lead singer Wayne Coyne commented on one incident. "It really was nothing but sad," Coyne told Billboard.com. "You just sort of saw a guy who had lost control of himself." \nMany of his songs dealt with hard realities of Smith's life, namely drug abuse and depression, and his resulting suicidal thoughts. Smith was sometimes expressive about drug use in songs such as "The White Lady Loves You More," from his 1995 self-titled album. Other songs, such as "Everything Means Nothing to Me," expressed Smith's loneliness. \nHe sang, "Someone found the future as a statue in a fountain at/Attention looking backward in a pool of water wishes with/A blue songbird on his shoulder who keeps singing over everything/ Everything means nothing to me." \nThroughout all of his music, there was an underlying sadness, expressed so poignantly and honestly as to touch the heart of any listener and make one wonder at the amount of sadness in this man's soul when so many people seemed to love him. \nWhatever loneliness Smith felt, the outpouring of love from his fans this week proves that Smith was loved and will be greatly missed. Fans held a memorial service at Central Lawn in New York City's Tompkins Square Park on Sunday. In Los Angeles, hundreds of people left notes, photos and other memorabilia outside the Solutions! speaker repair shop on Sunset Boulevard, which appeared in the album cover art for Smith's 2000 release, Figure 8. Smith's official Web site, www.sweetadeline.net, displayed an obituary and tribute letters while the Web sites for Kill Rock Stars, DreamWorks Records and Suicide Squeeze Records, three labels on which Smith's music has appeared, each put his photo on their main pages.\nLuke Wood of DreamWorks Records was quoted on Billboard.com as saying that Smith's life was "a very beautiful and brutal place, and his songs were that ground in between." Many such statements have been made lately as a requiem for Smith's life, but this is perhaps the most apt and precise expression of the man and the artist. On Oct. 21, the brutality of Smith's life overwhelmed the beauty, leaving the world a darker place for his absence.\nIt seems almost in vogue to be a "tortured" artist. Musicians, poets, painters, actors and writers are expected to be intense, irrational, sensitive and lonely, according to the book Media and Society by John Ryan and William M. Wentworth. Sadness seems to go hand in hand with this conception of a lonely, intense artist with suicide becoming romanticized as almost an extension of artistic self-expression. The dramatic suicides of Shakespeare's plays and the harsh reality of the deaths of Vincent Van Gogh, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and, in our generation, Kurt Cobain contribute to this ideal of suicide as an expression of disdain for all things worldly by souls too intense for this world.\nSmith's death, like the deaths of these other artists, was far from poetic, however. The man took a knife and buried it within his own heart, an act so ineffably riddled with self-hatred as to be an unmistakably unambiguous, clearly-focused expression of a loathing for his own life and the world so intense that it could only be quenched by piercing it cruelly and decisively. \nThis was no cry for help, no perverted attempt at high art. This was reality at its most brutal. It has left Smith's fans bewildered and lonely, as the outpouring of love has shown this week. Whether he realized it during his lifetime, the talent and poeticism of Elliott Smith made the world a more beautiful place, and in death his legacy will be this beauty, though the world mourns his too-early absence.