William Todd Schultz

Elliott was disarmingly bright, according to everyone who knew him, an avid reader of Dostoevsky, Kafka, Beckett, Stendhal, Freud, the Buddha, all of whom destabilized notions of identity. I think he knew how little we know about who we are. The idea comes through in lyrics. __ don__ know who I am,_ he says simply; at times he wishes he were no one. He__ a stickman shooting blanks at emptiness, living with __ne dimension dead._ He__ an invisible man with a see-through mind. He__ a junkyard full of false starts. He__ a ghost-writer, feeling hollow.

By now it is a ready-made cliché__he rock star dying young, whether by excess, by accident, or by suicide. For some, it__ part of the act, macabre performance art, a final song. This last mode, suicide, can be elusive. In fact, it almost always is. It might masquerade as excess__eckless, immoderate drug use. There is subintentioned suicide too. The person may simultaneously wish to live and die. No special effort is made to stay alive, but none is made to keep living, either outcome perfectly acceptable.

And what the music elicits__n me, in most everyone who hears it and takes to it__s a strangely comforting, sensual melancholy, a gentle sadness, the kind that comes with soft rain. It__ the same for all truly great dark art. There__ a pleasure in seeing our shadows paraded beautifully. It__ liberating to find them so prettily decked out, a sort of reverse Halloween.