Artforum International, January 1984

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Artforum International

US magazines
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Executioner's song


Greil Marcus

Elvis Costello
Pills And Soap

Click click. Click click. There's a bloodlessness to the punctuating handclaps on Elvis Costello's "Pills And Soap" that is almost entirely self-effacing — an odd detail for a song about fascism in Margaret Thatcher's United Kingdom, after five years still on track as harbinger for Ronald Reagan's United States. But perhaps not so odd when fascism is denied its image-bound, pornographic dimensions and represented on the level Hannah Arendt brought into view in 1945, with "Organized Guilt and Universal Responsibility":

The transformation of the family man from a responsible member of society, interested in all public affairs, to a "bourgeois" concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon. ... Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of hangman.

Costello's device doesn't sound much like rock 'n' roll handclapping, a grand tradition. (In the midst of the Sturges-like confusion of Floyd Mutrux's 1978 film American Hot Wax, a frantic '50s record producer trying to get a dead "Come Go with Me" off the ground grabs the black janitor: "You've got big hands, get in here!" History is made.) In "Pills And Soap," a song based on "Sing a Song of Sixpence," the handclapping sounds alien, like a joke that isn't funny: a hipster snapping his fingers in front of a firing squad, maybe. Costello's refusal of rant or melodrama in a performance that does not hedge its bets — pills and soap are what (in the wondrous English neologism) "redundant" occupants of the U.K. are to be melted down for — ultimately isolates the clapping, raising it out of the background until it comes off about as subtly as Boris Karloff footfalls in a haunted house. No one is "clapping," someone is counting.

Like everything else on Costello's recent LP Punch The Clock (CBS), "Pills And Soap" is catchy. And yet it is very nearly too well-written, too artful, to sidle its way into a listener's day, which is what it means to do — so that days or years later one will recall its whole, unfragmented vision, as bits and pieces of that vision begin to come true. There are striking, displacing lines in this song, but they are not allowed to call attention to themselves. The sure, sensual, somehow natural sway of the music, and Costello's insistence on singing to the music, not to the words, make his words communicate like real talk, make the singer seem like a real person, make the situation he is singing about seem like a real situation.

If there is such a thing as the fascist personality, it comes not from "the dim No-Man's Land between the Bohemian and the Pimp" (where Susan Sontag was still locating it thirty years after Arendt coined the phrase to kill the cliché) but from "the normality of job-holders and family men." The bathroom in the fascist utopia is made of plaster and ceramic tile, not rubber and steel; it contains pills and soap, just like any other bathroom, not arcane sexual aids. Life goes on. To be presented as horrifying fascism must be made to seem ordinary.

If the presentation itself is ordinary, though, it will evaporate on contact with the listener. Poetry is necessary, and in the case of Elvis Costello — a U.K. family man, interested in all public affairs, whose rage on appearance in 1977 allowed him to ride the punk wave and whose pop classicism allowed him to land on his feet — this means wordplay, puns, diverted homilies, distorted slogans. As a pop pantheist, Costello is too captivated with the possibilities of his chosen form to settle for the didactic protest art valued by critics like Lucy Lippard. He won't play the demagogue; he won't use the nonspecific paranoid "they" of such work. "Give me the needle, give me the rope / We're going to melt them down for pills and soap" — whatever happens here leaves neither the singer nor anyone else the privileged out that is the most specific benefit of protest art. No doubt without having read it, Costello works from Walter Benjamin's dictum: "the tendency of a literary [we can say "esthetic "] work can only be politically correct if it is also [esthetically] correct."

"Pills And Soap" was originally released in the U.K. last year, not long before the election that returned Thatcher to office; it was released pseudonymously, credited to "The Impostor," and withdrawn on election day. It never mentions or even refers to Thatcher; its subject matter is all that is nonspecific about "Pills And Soap," which is why the performance has such disarming power. A good subversive pop song is like a disease — in terms of what it truly means to say it arrives silently. The song begins with some sort of nightly-news tragedy, reporters poking their microphones into the faces of a sister, a mother, and a father — this could be a war death, or something much more private: a suicide, a fire victim, even an accused murderer in the family. None of which makes direct sense of the chorus that follows: "What would you say, what would you do / Children and animals, two by two / Give me the needle — " The quiet, repressed way Costello sings the word "soap" is so erotic he seems almost to be swallowing it: the soap, not the word.

The song is seductive; it begins to sound like something Peggy Lee might sing, until Costello makes a tiny rip in the smooth, curling fabric of his music with the phrase "Lord and Lady Muck." They are, you realize then or later or never, Prince Charles and Lady Di. The singer's acceptance of his new fascist personality is immediately replaced by hatred: "They come from lovely people with a hard line in hypocrisy / There are ashtrays of emotion for the fag ends of the aristocracy."

The calm of the performance is so strict that the slightest increase in pressure is like a bomb. For these lines alone Costello clips his syllables, his thick tone sharpens, and you can imagine a guillotine hitting home. The lines are not ordinary (this is no neatly drawn portrait of a nice family befuddled by TV cameras): if "ashtrays of emotion" is meaningless bad poetry, it nevertheless sets up "the fag ends of the aristocracy," the words rushed as they're sung, the sort of line that needs only to be heard to be understood, the sort of lyric that is never fully absorbed.

This is the only moment of the song when Costello sings to the words, not the music- — and as the "pills and soap" chorus pulls the lines into a secret fantasy of regicide, the man who is singing is comforted. The man who is singing — and the "singer" is no less a representation, a construct, than any image in the song — sings only this chorus freely, happily, but by the final chorus the energies liberated by his fantasy will be turned away from their sources and back toward their mandated objects. The man who is singing is singing in the voice of the man Arendt cites as the SS member recognized as a high-school classmate by a Jew upon his liberation from Buchenwald. The Jew stared at his former classmate; "the man stared at remarked: 'You must understand, I [had] five years of unemployment behind me. They can do anything they want with me.'" That "they" is not nonspecific; after "Pills And Soap," you can hear the tune's handclaps behind it.

If Costello is wrong about the future he has lined out in "Pills And Soap" he will seem like a paranoid fool, but that risk has never bothered him in the past. It is worth remembering that people can be melted down to pills and soap, melted down, within the stated limits of the Thatcherist or Reaganist project, to utensils, to their social and economic functions. Which is to say that a long listen to Costello's song can convince you that he is not singing about the future at all.


Tags: Pills And SoapMargaret ThatcherPunch The Clock

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Artforum International, January 1984


Greil Marcus reviews "Pills And Soap."

Images

1984-01-00 Artforum International page 67.jpg
Page scan.

Cover.
1984-01-00 Artforum International cover.jpg

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