"King's Crossing" - Elliott Smith and bio-power

Thought I'd go ahead and post some thoughts here before finalizing my piece. (And here's me hoping it's an appropriate choice for a text.)

The lyrics to this song have been traditionally taken, especially at surface value, to refer to Elliott Smith's eventual suicide ("give me one good reason not to do it"); it's been contested that the lyrics instead refer to Smith's drug addiction, as evidenced by other lyrics. What's interesting is that often, especially on the internet (where users are uninhibited by identity), people become upset when it's suggested that the song really is about his drug addiction. What this seems to indicate is that, on some level, Smith's suicide is more socially "acceptable" than his drug addiction, because it does less to directly subvert the authority and control bio-power had over his life.

Bio-power's shift away from control through death, which, according to Foucault, has become power's limit (138), may help explain why such strong feelings surround these two interpretations of the text. Suicide, which was once a crime in that is was a way to usurp the power of death, the sovereign's "right to kill," is now considered to be closer to a "right" than a crime: "the individual and private right to die, at the borders... of power that was exercised over life" (139). Though tragic, Smith's decision to take his own life was exactly that: his decision. Under the system of bio-power, this is much less of a direct subversion of power, which may explain to some extent why the song's audience is tentatively accepting of this interpretation of the lyrics.

However, in both discussions I have had personally regarding "King's Crossing" as well as discourse I have observed online, tension arises when this interpretation is contested with the alternative interpretation that the song is actually about Smith's drug addiction. Indeed, some phrases in the song - for example, "all I want to do is inject my ex-wife," with "ex-wife" being slang for a past heroine addiction - are explicit drug references. Thus the line "Give me one good reason not to do it" changes meaning from the decision to exercise a personal and individual right to death to an outright declaration that Smith wishes to return to drug use. This, again, is a personal choice, but it does more, perhaps, to usurp power than does suicide. Under the relatively new construct of bio-power, Smith is directly subverting both of the two poles. First, he subverts the disciplines by personally altering his body as a machine - adversely affecting and ultimately preventing the optimization of his body's capabilities, thwarting the extortion of its forces and usefulness and diminishing its overall docility in relation to society as a whole. Second, he subverts the regulatory controls inherent to bio-power by personally altering his level of health, life expectancy and longevity, and particularly a condition (drug usage) which causes these biological processes to vary. Because bio-power seeks the calculated management of life, ...It is possible that it is this direct subversion and usurping of power over and throughout life that makes Smith's audience uncomfortable with the reading of the lyrics as they pertain to drug usage (rather than suicide).



Alternately, this could also be read as an effect of bio-power in that Smith's life is being disallowed by society until the point of death. If his depression and drug addiction are viewed as biological processes, then they do indeed fall under the second pole of bio-power; that is, the regulatory controls, which supervise the level of health, life expectancy and longevity (to name a few) of the human body. While Smith's drug usage

This reading can be supported directly by the text. "All I want to do is inject my ex-wife" and "I'm going on a date with a rich white lady" are both references to hard drugs (presumably heroine and cocaine, respectively) that, significantly, are characterized by the opposite gender, imbuing drugs with a kind of sexual significance that lies at the axes of the two poles of bio-power. The seductive quality of drugs robs Smith of his personal power to resist or avoid them, influencing his decisions heavily. In a sense, as sex is such an intrinsic part of bio-power, it is bio-power that is exerting its authority over his life and not Smith making a personal decision to use or not use drugs.

This is not the only sexual imagery present in the piece, however. "Because I took my own insides out/It don't matter 'cause I have no sex life" is more challenging to understand. The first line seems to indicate a deliberate act - "I took," reminiscent of the pre-bio-power "take/let" power construct - but this emptiness is brushed aside because it doesn't matter, as the singer "has no sex life." Looking at this lament through the lens of bio-power, and particularly the axes of regulatory controls, the act of taking is rendered unimportant or meaningless by the body's inability to propagate and the lack of sex inherent to the act of taking. Literally, the act of removing one's own insides renders the body incapable of procreation, one of its main functions and the biological end to sex and continuation of a bloodline.

Thus the song is a conflicting mix of attempts to subvert the bio-power construct and said construct's inherent control over the singer's life and actions.

The song can be read as a whole, then, as Smith's frustration with his inability to subvert the outside power (bio-power) controlling his life. Looking outside the text and with a purely speculative eye, this may explain to some extent why Smith took his own life - again, with the advent of bio-power, death, being power's limit, became an individual and personal right: the right to die. If, as the lyrics state, Smith had limited or damaged personal authority over his body - not only in terms of drugs and biological processes, but also in relation to his body as a machine (and here I'm referring to the lyrics which directly reference capitalism) - then perhaps the only way he was able to subvert the two axes that comprise bio-power was to exercise this private right, thus ensuring bio-power's authority over and throughout his life ended.