Mike Doughty’s EDM mixes of Elliott Smith an utter travesty

Recently, solo artist Mike Doughty released some of his old demos from an apparent late-1990s foray into electronic dance music, or EDM, featuring a cappella vocals by none other than the late Elliott Smith. 

That’s right, Elliott Smith: the master of sweet, sad acoustic tracks that make misery sound appealing. Um, what?

Unfortunately, this is not a joke. Doughty has put three awful songs on his Bandcamp account with the equally repellent titles “The Record,” “Dogs” and “Burn (Aah F*ck).” 

Apart from reeking of amateurish underproduction, Doughty’s songs — and EDM in general — are stylistically opposite of the work of the perpetually melancholy Smith and clash horribly with his soft-spoken approach to singing.

This doesn’t mean that two opposite-sounding artists can’t collaborate to make something beautiful, which has been proven with the rise of sampling in music, but Smith had a reputation for using dark, disturbing material as inspiration in his lyrics. I don’t know about you, but nothing makes me want to dance around more than weighty topics like drug addiction.

It’s hard to distinguish one song from the other two, since all three are made up of the same hazy formula. In “Burn (Aah F*ck),” we hear a disorienting drumbeat synthesizer backing annoyingly redundant Smith vocals, which sound more like a whiny, skipping record than anything else. What’s more frustrating, however, is that the lyrics aren’t even comprehendible. We get the impression that Smith was used just for the appeal of his name. 

There’s only two things worth noting about these bizarre hybrid anachronisms: the first being Smith singing an early version of his song “Bottle Up and Explode!” before it had been officially released in “The Record” and the second, hearing some in-studio banter from him on “Dogs.” As a fan of Smith, I always find it to be a rare treat to hear him speak conversationally and to remember him as the human being who lived apart from his music. 

https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/131828307

As is the case for each of these songs, “The Record” would sound a whole lot better if there were fewer gimmicks involved. What is beautiful about Smith’s songs is their simplicity — a man and his acoustic guitar. But as Smith sings on this track, his precious words and signature shaky voice are soiled by Auto-Tune, chopped up into tiny pieces and mercilessly repeated, resulting in an electronic stew of noise. 

“Dogs” is the worst of the trio, probably because it opens without any synthesizers, drumbeats or other electronic irritations, just Smith offering suggestions for the song. This lasts 20 seconds or so before defaulting back to the same formula as the other two songs and quickly becomes too irritating to finish. Not long after Smith ceases speaking, his words are contorted, echoing, “Dogs, dogs, dogs,” to a few spastic keyboard notes, like an animated YouTube video with dancing animals. 

In between listens to “Dogs,” “The Record” and “Burn (Aah F*ck),” I actually had to pause and put on some of Smith’s own music in an attempt to persuade myself that this had all just been some bad dream. 

But of course it wasn’t. These songs are an abomination to Smith’s name. If Doughty wanted to release these songs to Smith’s fans, he should have respectfully done so with just the a cappella tracks of Smith’s voice and left the unnecessary Auto-Tune and other cheap effects in the studio.