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"The switch broke 'cause it's old"
— "Radio, Radio"
Elvis Costello could be the British version of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle, except that unlike Bickle, Costello knows very well who the enemy is — at least, he does part of the time. This Year's Model hasn't half the misanthropic rage of Costello's first album, My Aim Is True, and a good deal of the rage Costello does manage is more than vaguely misogynist; his bitterness toward women is a match for the undisguised anti-female venom that plagues the Ramones. But in the end — more precisely, at the conclusion of both versions of his sophomore LP — he still hates in 1978 as well and as accurately as in 1977.
This Year's Model doesn't provide an easy answer to the question raised by his erratic first album and static, often deliberately boring stage show. Is Costello a great rock artist or a minor eccentric? Is he a hero or just another rock critic, more well armed than the rest of us? Is he among the boldest of the punk/new wave/etc. performers or just the most marketable? Clearly, the best songs on My Aim Is True ("Less Than Zero," "Mystery Dance," "Welcome to the Working Week") have a power unmatched by most of the new songs. As often as not, the new LP is bailed out by the band, which mingles elements derived from the Stones, the Who and old wave punks (particularly Question Mark & the Mysterians, who contributed the organ attack which makes "This Year's Girl" and "The Beat" so heady).
There's too much material here — in addition to the ten songs common to both versions, the US LP has one additional track, the British album two more plus a 45 — for the quality to keep up completely. And the best songs common to both albums are up to the first LP's standard: "You Belong to Me" is a neat merger of "The Last Time" with "My Generation," "Pump It Up" and "The Beat" are exhilarating, "Lip Service" pukes twice and shows its razor, to borrow the old Ronnie Hawkins metaphor for gut-bucket hard rock. Every one of these songs, however, is marred by Costello's sexual problems, which are severe; he must be the most carnally frustrated rock singer since Mick Jagger. Anti-female insults abound: "Every time I phone you / I just want to put you down." "I don't wanna be your lover / I just wanna be your victim." "You wanna torture her / You wanna talk to her." Calling this stuff unhealthy is an act of kindness or charity. Interestingly enough, at least two of the songs from which I took those lines, "The Beat" and "Pump It Up," are simply extended masturbation metaphors, perhaps the most ingenious since Side Two of Aftermath. Still, even this is offset by the country song on the British 45, "Stranger in the House," which sounds to me like an allegory about identity crisis brought on by fatherhood. "Stranger" is pure country — Elvis sounds like a single Everly Brother — and one of the best of his new songs.
But the very best are precisely those where he moves away from sex and romance and into other arenas. "Night Rally" which concludes the British version, is obtuse; it may be Costello's vision of what is likely to happen to him if he continues to taunt British fascists, as he did Oswald Mosley, their leader, in "Less Than Zero." Or it may be his vision of everybody's multi-national future; there is a giant corporate logo flashing on and off in the sky. Strangely enough, "Night Rally" begins with a guitar riff copped from post-rockabilly music, like Jody Reynolds' "Endless Sleep," only the sleep Costello has in mind is more political than physical. As he says in "Radio, Radio," "You either shut up or get cut up."
"Radio, Radio" is probably best known as the unrecorded song that Costello did — unrehearsed — on Saturday Night Live last summer, thereby pissing off the show's producer, Lorne Michaels. If Michaels had known what Costello was singing, he might have been angrier; "Radio, Radio" is probably the most radical song anyone has recorded in the past ten years.
When we think about political courage and commitment among rock stars, we generally imagine Bob Dylan's songs about black martyrs or California flyweights battling nuclear proliferation and whale-slayers. "Radio, Radio" goes farther — Costello has put his entire career on the line by challenging the decadence and aesthetic totalitarianism of the broadcast establishment. He may get more airplay than the rest of his punkish peers combined but he's not buying in and "Radio, Radio" not only says so, it says why:
"I want to bite the hand that feeds me
I want to bite that hand so badly
I want to make them wish they'd never seen me"
Of course, those lines are also an implicit fuck you to every record company executive and music business phony who's ever told a rock musician how much more "successful" he'd be if he'd only compromise his sound for airplay, and to every rock musician who has ever done so. As punk rock gallops off into the corporate sunset, buying into the very system it originally opposed, "Radio, Radio" is not just an act of vengeance and wrath. It has the force of a cold blast of truth in a furnace of lies.
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