Cover of Elliott Smith's 'Somebody that I use to Know'
DisintegrationismOn Elliott Smith's 'Somebody That I Used to Know', and covering it back into the room I built around myself.
'Somebody That I Used to Know' is track two on Figure 8, out on DreamWorks in April of 2000. It's the sound of a man compressing a whole shared and shattered history down into a single defensive act of classification. Someone he knew all the way to the floor has become, by the last chord, an indefinite figure — a somebody filed out past the edge of his present life.
The stereotype of Smith flattens him into the whispering confessionalist, the wounded kid at the four-track. I call balderdash. This song sprints. Jabs. The guitar figure is jerky and bright and a little mean, strummed with real bite, and it runs against the weight of the subject like a punky, studded getaway car that he refuses to idle. In the wreckage of it and/or the imminent accident, he floors it, arguing fast, as if he has to close the case before doubt catches up. And under all of it sits the thing Smith always did: the doubled guitars and vocals, one man alone turned into a conversation between two parallel versions of himself.
A double beauty, double trouble, cute and cuddly, buggy buddy, eviserationistic. The recording sounds like an argument he's having in a mirror. Maybe like in the movie Two Girls and a Guy (1997), written and directed by James Toback. Robert Downey Jr. plays Blake, an actor confronted by his two girlfriends—played by Heather Graham and Natasha Gregson Wagner—after they discover he has been dating both of them. It includes the intense bathroom scene where he argues with and lectures himself in the mirror. This scene is genius acting as well as a potent realism that hits like how Elliott hits is what I mean. Watching this movie while recognizing the shocking resemblance of myself in Downey Jr. was very trippy. As if watching a mirror but on screen of another metaverse of myselfery. Our looks and paths had crossed in history like reflection crystals floating through the shattered mirror maze of The Lady from Shanghai—each fragment briefly catching a different version of us before spinning back into darkness. Was I him, and was this me acting in this mirror as I had before, almost verbatim in style and substance?
Having not cheated on anyone, yet somehow still in equal quandry with equivalency of female exquisits such as Graham and Wagner. One has often speculated oneself cloned and a pedestrian Downey spin-off version lost in some kind of hospital swap botch. Save the father resemblance; he looks like Jerry Lewis, and I did not inherit his overly fleshy lips. Higher cheekbones. Harder-to-define looks. The looks of a shapeshifter, really. I was told I looked like many men. Attractive ones, which I would let inflate my ego. And ride on until it all ran out around age 48, I would be pursuing DNA testing. Was I the brother of greatness? Who was my father? Could it be Darth Van Hagar? I digress.
The song says the exact opposite of what it means, and it knows it. The speaker insists the other person is weightless now, irrelevant, gone — but the song exists. Nobody builds an indictment this precise against somebody who has truly become nothing to them. 'Used to know' isn't a description. It's an attempted act of psychic control: attachment converted into grammar, the whole relationship crammed into the past tense whether or not the man saying it has actually gotten free. He's writing FORMER on a box and praying the label holds.
I covered this song for Song Belongs to Room, out on 38th Parallel Records, and I slightly shifted the meaning and sprinkled some light intent. In Smith's mouth, "somebody that I used to know" is a verdict. In mine, it's on-brand sarcasm and an expression of love. Making new meanings of found objects is my specialty, in fact. I do it all the time with everything I touch, as for me, life is a canvas, and I paint with the colors I am given. I am often given charcoal, but one can do a lot with that or other chalky vibrations that may whisper around slowly enough that I can snatch them out of the thin purple-hued air and create sculptures of meaning and de-languaged emotional effectivity.
What is the relational attrition name for what happens when distance and age and work and geography and your own private disasters and long accruing silence and/or someone sands a person down until only the outline is left? Ambiguous loss. Enough to see the imprint on your heart but not enough to feel their golden oxytocin wearing you like your favorite Irish Sailing Sweater. Like some kind of gingerbread man pink silver cookie cutout kitchen tool by OTOTO.
So I am not identifying with his narrator. Rather, I am asking whether 'Used to Know' has to be the final condition of every hard relationship, or whether a song can still reach a person after the ordinary channels have gone dark. This is music as relational preservation and language in itself, coupled with metamega meaning that only certain relationships can even decode. Needing the context of him and him as they are to make it correctly. The sarcasm and humor caught gently like a Wisconsin firefly kept for a fortnight of cherished lantern and fun jar hotel excursion for the flies themselves. Hopefully not a prison feel, more like a seasonal camp of togetherness and mutual fort-hanging, until the release of the summer moon or the end of the sleepover.
A merry signal thrown outward with no confirmation that anyone is still on the frequency. The lonesome trucker rasping lingo and query into the CB. Seeing who’s online. Who’s plugged into the Avatar tree tendril neural queues. The Na’vi term is kuru or tswin. The actual mind-link formed when two queues connect is called tsaheylu, meaning “the bond.” Like the bio-ports and fleshy umbilical cords of eXistenZ, plugging the body directly into a living game pod. Or the SQUID rig in Strange Days, recording another person’s memories, sensations, and emotions so someone else can climb inside and experience them firsthand. Oh, to see what it is like to be a woman in a shower, eh? That was actor Joe Urla, playing Keith, the prospective SQUID customer. Ralph Fiennes’s character, Lenny Nero, gives him the recording; afterward, Lenny tells him he had just experienced being “an 18-year-old girl taking a shower.” Call me strange. These are strange days indeed. Deal with it. I have cover songs to showcase and prose to inseminate I mean disseminate.
So Song Belongs To Room, and the room I am singing from is a self-imposed isolation I built myself, wall by wall. Chunk of 12’ 16”x6” by chunk of 12’ 16”x6”. Stacked like in the boneyard on some tilt-up jobsite. Aka the prison yard. One gets sent there where they are newish and don’t know the exact process of spraying the cancer foam that non-sticks the wall forms from the slab. Long story. I built a Costco once with like 12 dudes. Essentially. Obv more were involved, but for the most part, we built it with our fingers, knees, and backs. Chunking away at concrete forms in the hellish, blistering summer of 2022 in Lakewood, WA—aka the Cool Hand Luke Memorial Work Camp of the South Saharan Desert blister-stroke Austin, Texas weather phenom of WA and otherwise lame strip mall exurb sprawl chimps. Do we even call them cities? 1/2 real.
This cover is the sound of me knocking on the inside of it. Maybe my pals can hear that. Specific ones. They got me back in the day. They know what’s up. I still exist. We have a connection that cannot be broken by puny time or dumb distance.
Smith built the Portland underground and then fucked off to Los Angeles; Figure 8 was assembled across LA and London — Sunset Sound, Capitol, Sonora, Abbey Road — and its cover was shot against a mural at 4334 Sunset Boulevard, a wall that became a memorial after he was gone, papered in messages from people he never met. This is one of those messages not placed on that wall but on my wall. (See SunnO))) Cover song in my discography called 'My Wall') I am not proud to bring him back into the Pacific Northwest dirge that I currently wallow in. He knew better to get out of Portland. Thrift man! Tits, weed, bridges, cunty Madison wannabe peoples who couldn’t handle the truth of 60 below zero day even though they are collectively flabbier and also live in co-ops like how they do in Madison. Co-op means ‘has too many community meetings about dishes’ in passive-aggressive. Portland’s local dialect, in fact. I am just making this all up and have only been there once. Had a good time looking at the stuff, and I don't know why, but the knee-jerk is to hold Portland in a very low regard.
I’d also like to think he got out while he could.
Too bad Kurt chose Aberdeen instead. All you got was Elliott Smith. The Kurt Cobain of sad alt indie. Which is to say, they are both just about the best possible scenarios for each type of music that one could ask for. Equals in genius and both very special people, despite and because of where they were from. PNW representatives. Btw before you get pissy and start trying to shit on where I am from or on my people, good luck because I don’t have a place. I left my small-town Northern Wisconsin town for a reason. And San Francisco, and Madison. Fuck those places. But Madison was actually cool during my era. As cities are beholden to their eras, it really has nothing to do with the cities themselves. The eras are the thing, but since we all live in the now, Portland sucks a bag of dicks, and I would never live there.
Yes, thanks for Gus Van Sant, Matt Groening, Sam Elliot. OH, and Courtney Love, The Dandy Warhols, and oh, Sleater-Kinney, etc. Look at that, all the same era as when Madison was cool, back in the 90s. So Madison wins again, go fuck yourselves and your rainy bitch tits at every gas station, coffee shop, and dive bar. No one needs all that nudity in every venue or the tip-beggy topless punk rock chicks who think they are cool and/or being feminists or whatever because tits and all that progressive nudity and sex work fuckery. I’m not down. I’d rather just go to an actual all-nude strip club. And no, I don’t even really want that even though I tried to figure out how they are fun for a while. And it turns out, they are not that fun unless you are rich, as if I would know that. And then they can be fun as long as you don’t have morals or care that much about your resume. As every such transaction steals just a smidge of your chi and their chi every single time, no matter what anyone pretends or says on hooker positive podcasts. No offense to hookers. I am also probably a hooker. Maybe worse.
Of course, accepting those times when she actually thinks you are super hot and gets legitimately turned on anyway. Like if you were Brad Pitt and just more so paying for the NDA and subsequent night of Molly and epicness with 3 girls. I watched Entourage, and it seems like sometimes it is a good deal for the girls, is all. By the way, fuck San Francisco. It was cool in the 90s and early 2000s. But again, Madison was cooler, so Madison wins yet again. Nudity was funny in Madison. Streaking the quad. No hardons at parks like in SF. Fistings at First St. Fist at home, folks. Fist at home.
The bottom line is, know your city and love it when you can however you can. Even if that means you hate it and talk a little smack. Grow things from it. And if it sucks as bad as Portland and now San Francisco and for sure all of Washington, talk shit about it up until the point where you leave and then reminisce about how lame it was and how smart you were for escaping.
Apparently, he named the record after the figure-eight because the shape never arrives. It is pure sustained motion, an endless pursuit whose whole point is the beauty of staying in the loop. It is artful pretentiousness forced into cool only because Elliott Smith. That is a truer map of certain friendships than any straight line, especially with your straight friends who have never looped. People separate, circle back, recede, and cross again. Aka the common decency of a reach around if they are driving the Oscar Meyer hotdog truck, that is. The relationship stops moving in a straight line. That is a different thing entirely from the relationship ending. Complexity is not extinction.
So call this a transmission against disintegrationism. The easy relationships survive on convenience. The hard ones sometimes need a symbolic act: Morse code, tap code through the wall, heliograph flashing across impossible distance, dance. For the people I have known, loved, created with, fought beside, separated from, and may never see again. But will probably see again once I finish my Viking compound museum homestead Talieson shadow house on the rock.
You sick of my run-on descriptors yet? I am. I’m stuck in a pattern, so says the autism (self-diagnosed; GPT tested me and I pass positively with flying colors and sparkles with star stickers for good behavior).
To all the failed and complicated relationships that I have cultivated, then lost or damaged. To those whom I have shared most of myself and attempted to build a legendary legacy with one way or another. One that they would write about in the future. One that I am and will write about now. I say they, but there is no they anymore. Because I am the last remaining they as far as I can see. Having a non-sexual male crush is more like what war soldiers feel. It is a bond consummated by blood. You cut yours, and I cut mine, and we shake on it. Blood brothers. And that is that. For life. Anything less, and you are dead to me. And I won’t send you hidden messages through my songs or write about you in books or remember you fondly during my psychedelic trips. You may become a nagging dark energy irritation that I use my special and chosen psyche talisman and protective methodology to thwart. My advice is this: you don’t want my thwart, so like, call me. One day. Instead of 5 more times in this life. Because at this point, once every 3-4 years is like 5 more times. And those calls only last about 45 minutes at best until you get tired of me. Oh, I’ll keep you for 4 hours no problem. I will break you. I am the master and champion. Try me.
Of course, no, I do not mean any of it as darkness. I lean into the complicated ones because I refuse to let them disintegrate and fade away just because life made them hard to hold. Like it put pig grease all over them and you can’t catch’m. Like a cheater ju-jitsu opponent, vaselined and slippery.
Music can carry what conversation cannot. And my version of 'Somebody' says what it says. It goes directly to your heart without needing your ears or brains to translate my syllables and tonology into misunderstandings.
So here is my cleanest mythical metamega communication: hold on, man. Keep being my friend even when we barely speak, even when the map scattered us, even when we never stand in the same room again in this life. You mattered. You still matter. I am out here screaming a transmission from the far reaches of my own life and damnation (mellow, dramatic way to say isolation, and out of context here but sounded cool), hoping it reaches you before you actually become somebody that I used to know.
