What Elliott Smith Taught Me About Suicide

Mostly? “Don’t.”

This is another of those posts that has a soundtrack — of course, because it’s about music. So do me a favor and queue this one up while I’m pontificating:

Also, obviously, content warning for lots of suicide-related talk.

Elliott Smith was the perfect voice for the damaged child I was growing out of being in the 90s. He was “one of ours,” as Natalie Merchant said about River Phoenix, a similar pop-culture figure. He was one of those who cried out under the pressure we all felt, one of those who didn’t make it out of that era, didn’t come home from the war. We left him there, with Kurt Cobain, Jonathan Larson, and Tupac Shakur, buried in the rubble of the American dream as it crumbled with the Twin Towers.

I got a boom box in about ’96, one of those shoulder models that played tapes and CDs. I will here permanently tarnish my reputation by admitting that my first CD, selected by my parents in a clumsy attempt to relate, was Backstreet’s Back, the Backstreet Boys’ second album. I played it once or twice. Mostly I played tapes of the Beatles and David Bowie recorded off my mom’s records.