Elliott Smith is dead.

:(

I'm filing through my Elliot Smith memories now. All the times I've ever said his name to anyone, or vice versa. They're all positive.

I wonder where he was. I've been in some rotten moods in my day, and have imagined slipping away into calm oblivion, but not once EVER have I thought that things might be better if I STABBED MYSELF IN THE FUCKING HEART! And what the fuck kind of knife gets through a breastbone? Did he take a running start? That's extreme violence, extreme pain, extreme punishment. It's so grim, it's fascinating.

i shared a smoke with him once, then went inside the venue to realize --hey thats elliot smith, i guess he doesnt have bleached hair anymore. it was a small going away gig for lou barlow moving to la. 75 people there maybe. everyone sitting on the ground. acoustic set. heavy metal horns, then elliott. he kept skrewing up chord shifts. but it didnt matter.
mark p on the money. his guitar playing was so fucking out there.
a very sad day.

RIP.

It's unreal that he is gone. I didn't know him. But it feels like I did.

You should calm the fuck down, oh brave anonymous poster. Ned was answering a question which I thought was valid to answer, and just left it at that, and then responded to J0hn's followup. Or do you prefer that no one is allowed to express polite dissent anymore? Ned did NOT just pop in unprovoked and go "Ho ho! well sad that he died, but i never cared for him. so nyah". (for the record, i never really cared too much for elliott smith's music at all -- but this event makes me incredibly sad and nervous and sickened nonetheless).

1. He voiced his opinion with a sickly false respect for the dead. If he really didn't want to be "crass" he wouldn't have said anything at all. His post made the exact same point as saying "hey, i don't like elliott smith". It just reeked of "no thread is complete without my two cents" egotism.

2. This isn't a classic/dud thread. Every other post is pretty much just people expressing their positive feelings for the man and his music, and it was amazingly refreshing and suprising to see such heartfelt discussion is possible in this forum.

All your presumptions (which i disagree with) about Ned's statement and attack came off as far more crass than Ned could ever be accused of in this thread. And I forgot that opinions were only allowed on C/D threads. How could i have forgotten?

And don't get me started about the irony of you accusing people of "two cents egoism". If you were really concerned and hurt, you would have emailed Ned off-thread about this instead. (and maybe you did), of course you'd have to take the brave step of actually faking a new anonymous email account for that to remain anonymous for, ur, important reasons, I'm sure.

As for Smith himself, I'm in complete shock. This is the most "out of leftfield" music thing to happen in a long, long time. The thing that gets me is that in like the last six weeks, we've lost Warren Zevon, Johnny Cash, and now Elliot Smith.

I spent a long time living with that
never could give it a name
and when you don't know what you're looking at
makes it much harder to tame
mostly they'd meet when he was asleep and
have some sick exchange
that struck him as wrong
and moved him along closer to division day

I can't make an exception for a bad connection
that only goes one way
sell out for a song where I don't belong
with you on division day

the moon stood up on the ridge
looking down where the water shines
and a man looking over the bridge
like he'd done so many times
thinking about how to stay out
out of trouble's way
flying to fall away from you all
it's over division day
beautiful division day

His recording techniques were obviously very influential. Alot of dry, double tracked vocals, four-track sounding records came in his wake.

And I'm sadder still when I realized we were born about two month away; he started his first band at almost exactly the time I started mine... It makes me feel old, which might be what he was feeling. Still, I'll just drink a bunch of Michelob and get up tomorrow to do it all again.

rest in peace, elliott.

still not sure what you're asking me though.

Anyway, I owned the grand total of one Elliott Smith CD (XO), and I can't say I either loved or hated his music, but this is just plain fucking awful and sad.

don't tell me to Shut Up.

Here's something my friend Julia wrote. I think it's pretty important.
********
We have all of this euphamistic, false language that we use surrounding suicide so that we don't have to talk about mental illness as a true illness. To me, saying "he killed himself" is really odd, because it implies a lot of free will and many many people who "kill themselves" are suffering from addiction, depression, or psychosis that keeps them from logically deciding to die. Suicide victims often suffer from diseases that have the common symptom of death.

Saying "he took his own life" is also really weird to me. It makes it sound like now he possesses his life, like he wrestled it from the hands of an oppressor and now has it to do what he likes with it. Suicide victims don't take their lives, they have them taken by horrible debilitating diseases.

I wish that msn.com and mtv.com would run stories that said "Singer-songwriter Elliot Smith died today of knife wounds associated wiht drug-addiction and depression, two diseases that our culture refuses to effectively treat or recognize as pathologies rather than personal flaws. As a result of our culture's refusal to take mental illness seriously, we have lost an influential young artist."

The cruelty of depression is that part of initiating a cure has to be the courage and self-love to recognize and admit that you are ill, but those are the very properties of which the disease robs you. We don't expect people with tuberculosis to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, we call ambulences, feed them soup and antibiotics, hold the bloody rag into which they are coughing, and recognize that they are victims. This is (figuratively) how we need to treat victims of depression.