Like many artists of note, the Fall’s late leader Mark E. Smith needs to be thought of holistically in order to be properly memorialized. At his best, he was a sharp, witty lyricist and vocalist with unparalleled style, delivery, and vision, to whom any number of post-punk and indie-rock bands owe an enormous debt. At his worst, he was a petty, controlling man with significant substance abuse issues that heightened his most malevolent tendencies and often manifested via verbal and physical violence towards those closest to him. Neither end of the spectrum of his character can be taken without the other.
It is Smith’s creative partners who have written most eloquently of his double-edged charm and nastiness. With clarity and tenderness, in guitarist (and ex-wife) Brix Smith Start’s memoir, The Rise, the Fall, and the Rise, she chronicles their intimate and instantaneous connection, both romantically and musically, and its eventual dissolution. Bassist Steve Hanley’s memoir, The Big Midweek, has much of the same frankness and intimacy as Smith Start’s. Mark E. knew how to draw greatness out of those around him—see the way his razored voice cut through Smith Start’s melodic pop licks, or how he allowed the Hanley brothers, the Fall’s rhythm section during much of its most celebrated period, to drive the band’s jagged sound. But he also knew how to punish them for that greatness in the most hurtful ways possible. Hanley writes at one point, “The only reason we're not fighting back is because we love being in the band… in spite of him.” Though major, long-term songwriters like Smith Start, the Hanleys, Marc Riley, and Craig Scanlon certainly shaped the band’s sound during their tenures, Smith was the only consistent member through the band’s 40-year history, cementing his identity as the turbulent axis around which the Fall revolved.
Loving someone dearly always carries that sinister possibility—that the person you adore might one day use your vulnerabilities against you, and even when you gather your sensibilities to walk away, if your love for them was strong enough, no amount of self-preservation can truly delete it. Those of us who have been hurt and abused by someone close to us know the persistence of compassion, how even when we can recognize that someone’s presence in our lives is unhealthy, it may not be as simple as shutting the door and never looking back. This is what gives fodder to cycles of abuse, and also what animates some of our deepest individual strengths—our abilities to heal and move forward.
Those who loved Mark E. and were hurt by him may now mourn him, even as they recognize his destructiveness (not just to those around him but to himself as well, of course—his twinned histories of substance abuse and intimate violence are well documented). Smith Start herself wrote yesterday, with a typical open heart: “I feel deeply saddened by [Mark E.’s] passing, but I feel greater joy for having shared his journey.” As for those of us who loved his music but didn’t experience his cruelty first-hand, maybe we’ve been remembering how hearing the Fall for the first time broke open some part of us, but we also cannot forget the character of the man. I remember distinctly hearing “Hip Priest” on WHFS as a young weirdo, before Infinity Broadcasting took over D.C./Baltimore’s legendary bastion of underground music, and being instantly hooked. What was this thing that sounded like poetry did in my head, that looped surreal lyrics through bent rhythms but still felt as if it had no pretense, that told evocative short stories like I’d never encountered in pop music before?
But I also remember seeing the Fall in the mid-’90s in D.C. during Smith Start’s brief return—an absolute disaster of a performance that seemed as if it was coming unglued because the wood beneath was rotting. This is the first time I remember thinking, He is going to die sooner rather than later. That was even more evident the next time around, in Philly circa the early ’00s. He looks like E.T., I thought, taking stock of his withered form and bulging, rheumy eyes, no doubt due to the wear of alcohol and amphetamines. He slurred his words almost to the point of unintelligibility, so far from the biting vocal delivery of ’80s Fall records as to almost seem like a different person. He wobbled, clinging to the mic stand with a clawlike grip. When he looked at his bandmates, which he almost never did, his gaze said, “I’d like to set you on fire.” I felt a twinge of concern for him, and for those around him. The fact that he held on for as long as he did is surprising to some degree, but also utterly believable. He was a stubborn coot. You have to be to survive.
The old chestnut goes: hurt people hurt people. This has been true in every aspect of my life, from the people who have hurt me to my own bad behavior. I think about Smith internalizing his father’s temper and controlling nature, lashing out in the same way that terrified him as a child. I think about how I, too, learned to be awful, to suck down chemicals in the name of self destruction and numbness, and how hard I have worked (and will work) to undo those patterns, to get sober, to get right. As a friend wisely wrote yesterday, we will never resolve the paradox of the Great, Cruel Artist until we change the underlying social systems that lead to that cruelty. Though it is sometimes the only word available, I have grown to greatly dislike the term “problematic” as currently used in cultural criticism; it has become shorthand that papers over a whole bundle of more useful questions and discussions, most notably, “How do we fix what went wrong?”
To parse Mark E. and his work, we should listen to those who loved him and those who loathed him in equal measure. We should talk amongst ourselves, those of us who felt his music in our guts. We should consider him from every context available. Good or bad, heart or feather: these questions only lead us into binaries that Mark E. fought to break. His portraits of working-class Mancunian life and strong condemnations of capitalism and social control (both consistent themes in the Fall’s enormous catalog) resisted cliché and polemic, digging for ideas more nuanced, more complex, more real—and, in a sense, much less universal than most pop (or even punk) lyricism. His writing was almost never straightforward, sometimes frustratingly so, offering only imagistic shards which reflected and refracted from multiple perspectives, and which asked the listener to bring their own interpretations to bear. This, in some way, also made them incredibly personal.
Now I find myself returning to these same lyrics as a sort of wake, searching them for messy truths:
Rebellious mistakes occur again, everything moving in a circular fashion (“Hotel Bloedel”)
People only need me when they’re down and gone to seed (“Hip Priest”)
We are frigid stars (“Crap Rap/Like 2 Blow”)
Who is not irascible, he is no genius (“A Figure Walks”)
Strife is life, and that’s it, and that’s it (“Hexen Definitive/Strife Knot”)
This is not a man who would have appreciated celebrity-death grief Twitter, especially his own. Mark E. Smith would have wanted to puncture any fawning, sometimes to the point of self-sabotage. He knew that it was natural for things to remain unresolved, to lack narrative closure or simple answers. He knew that humanity, including his own, can be as sublime as it is hideous, and that neither cancels the other out.
