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, 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 … 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 suicide-gesture livejournal will invoke your name in the daily goodbye to a thousand cruel worlds.” And this, he writes, is crap. That Elliott could not go on to produce more wonderful music is terrible and sad, but it is not romantic, and it is not the whole of his identity. He deserves to be remembered for his life, not his death.
