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"Less Than Zero," Elvis Costello's debut single in the giddy days of '77, opens with a vision so urgent and unforgiving it announces itself as the measure of the long career to follow: "Calling Mr. Oswald with his swastika tattoo / There is a vacancy waiting in the English voodoo / Carving V for vandal on the guilty boy's head..." In place of the socially sanctioned language of protest, this was antimatter — speech that insisted all social sanctions were coverups, love was larceny, politics domination, innocence a dirty joke. "No useless leniency" could have been the watch words of the records that came after, records that (as critic Mark Moses wrote) "made the travails of a neurotic romantic sound like a reasoned catalog of everything forbidden in the previous 20 years of rock 'n' roll." Costello exposed love, sex and rock no less than politics as ideological constructs, sources of repression disguised as sources of freedom.
Slowly, in spite of music as good as 1986's King of America, Costello's vision locked into habit: neurosis was separated from its context in the world, brilliantly declaimed — no one in rock has more sheer facility then Costello — and a little hollow. On Blood & Chocolate, the hurried follow-up to King of America, he almost seemed bent on proving the previous album was a fluke. There he was, cranking out the expected jibes, pumping the same old chords, spinning his wheels. Only on the long, deathly plea of "I Want You" did his voice carry any weight, and everything around it sounded weightless, unmoored.
With Spike, his first new record since then, Costello is back mapping the English voodoo, laying odds and looking for trouble. He finds plenty. Spike unfolds piecemeal, like an infinitely detailed bad dream, the language of normalcy — socially orchestrated consensus — uncovering what lurks in its shadows: brutalizations, gallows humor, rank masochism, impotent negation. Musically, Spike is all over the map, from New Orleans funeral parades to Liverpool pop confections, Irish broadsides to ballads whispered like passwords. As a tour of a time and place (as viewed from solitary confinement) that has submerged any common ground beyond fanaticism or resignation, Spike is the most harrowing, intensely felt work Costello has done. The persona he has constructed over the course of a dozen albums — that of a singing detective painstakingly collecting evidence of corruption and hypocrisy — starts to crumble under the weight of clues. Phillip Marlowe awakens to find he has turned into Winston Smith, reduced to the 1984 anonymity of a statistic, a victim, an unperson.
Here is Margaret Thatcher's England, 10 or a hundred years into a reign that takes on the stature of myth. The myth permeates the whole of existence, rendering incidental the ferreted-out infidelities and acts of emotional fascism, no more than faint echoes of a deeper malaise. Having claimed at the outset of his career that the grammar of revenge and guilt was all he understood, Costello now confronts a present where it has become the language of the state.
More than mere public policy, this sense of the unthinkable as social engineering insinuates itself into even seemingly neutral objects. On Spike, something as commonplace as a newspaper campaign photo can set off a rush of loathing and rage. Symbols are turned into currency, currency manifests itself as human nature, and Costello's songs become attempts to escape the myth's embrace.
The singing detective thus becomes a fugitive, a marked man — fleeing what he might turn into, marked by that which he is powerless to overcome. He moves in uncertainty, his actions no longer guided by the belief they will have any of the consequences he hopes for. Waiting on the "Last Boat Leaving," comforting the son he leaves behind ("You know your daddy is bound to go / They took his pride, they took his voice"), he tries to explain something he can't let himself understand: "And it feels like punishment, but I don't know what for... / 'Cause no matter how long we sail, we never reach the shore."
Having lost his voice, the singing detective goes underground, blends in with crowds and mobs, dons dead men's clothes. One minute he's a solitary terrorist, the next a television junkie getting his fix of cheap sex and cheaper sentiment along with a billion or so compatriots. Costello subtly, almost invisibly, goes about dramatizing the minutiae of false hope and the immensity of the culture machinery that instills it. Sometimes, the fragmentation overtakes Costello and his music. The elegance of the conceit in "God's Comic" is nearly bottomless, wry chords feeding into punchlines it can take days to unravel (the last and best one being no less than God's eulogy for himself). But stuff like "Miss MacBeth" and "Chewing Gum" ties itself in rhythmic knots, verbiage strewn about like discarded leather gear in a dominatrix's bedroom.
Unlike the every-strand-in-its-place King of America, the new album is all loose ends. What they mostly convey is a sense that to finalize certain gestures would be to fix their meanings and to fix their meanings would be to rob them of their power of suggestion. "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" feels more like a rehearsal than a finished song; taken to its logical conclusion, it would be little more than a well-made homage to the Band (in particular, to "Unfaithful Servant"). But with the Dirty Dozen Brass Band's horns edging their way gingerly into the groove and Allen Toussaint's ringing gospel piano shaping the song's brooding reproach, Costello feels out his tricky figures of speech and allegorical pleas. Then all at once, he seems to discover what the song's supposed to be about: "Jesus wept, he felt abandoned." The vague formalism of singer and song is gone; the desolation the singer has groped for pours in. Possibly stunned he's got what he came for but didn't really expect to find, Costello ends the song.
The terrain Costello delineates here is a man-made no man's land, where absence (of subjectivity, of imagination) has been installed as the norm. Within the dreamy sheen of "Satellite," Costello's tender lyricism passes almost unnoticed into nightmare: the satellite's transmissions turn spectators into hungry voyeurs, hypnotized more by the sordidness of watching than by anything that's shown. The scattershot wit of "... This Town..." is mined with little depth charges that go off almost out of earshot. "Let Him Dangle," the song that follows it, blows up right in your face. The explosion doesn't come from the number's airtight anti-capital-punishment narrative, it's in the fractured menace of guitarist Marc Ribot's playing (the former Lounge Lizard sounds like his amp is wired to Ted Bundy's chair) and awful golem cries — "String him up!" — Costello splices in behind the lead vocal. He doesn't contradict the song's retribution-won't-bring-the-victim-back sentiments, he just makes them beside the point. Repeating "Let him dangle" again and again, the screams rising up harsher behind him, his voice slipping over the line into guttural lynching mantra and bled of irony, Costello erases the distinction between executioner and executed. You feel the fascist thrill of pulling the gallows lever, the sadistic rage behind the law-and-order slogans of good citizens, until finally — singer gagging on his own bile, guitar notes jerking like flesh that doesn't know it's dead yet — what remains is the possibility the greatest injustice of the death penalty is that it doesn't provide judge, jury and tabloid audience with an equal opportunity to swing from the same rope.
Now the album's bleakness deepens, gathers force and heft. A couple stabs at escapism (written with noted escape artist Paul McCartney) materialize and are hurriedly brushed aside. This is the ephemera the individuals who populate the rest of the album numb themselves with. Such weightless items say nothing to the soldier and the friend (lover?) in the scarred Ireland of "Any King's Shilling." The song's grave, fated beauty consoles its protagonists but makes it plain that beauty — that wealth of feeling — offers no protection from the forces of history that have put them on opposing sides of a conflict sustained as ritual. The tradition of lyricism beneath leads softly, inescapably, to a tradition of bloodshed, already inscribed in the song Costello's singing and the landscape he's singing it in.
Of course, ephemera still surface in the midst of such conditions, not as relief from the bleakness, but as deformed comedy, a dog running from the tail he forgot he was supposed to chase. Costello unpacks a steely beat and sets in clanging against a wall of indifference on "Coal-Train Robberies" (it appears on the CD and cassette only). Images collide, disperse, reassemble: spaghetti-Western heroics and luxury-car bombings, Reds in the Welsh hills and minstrel shows by industrialists, Piccadilly metamorphosing into San Salvador. His voice a blue streak of malice, Elvis raises up his namesake to discard the body in a mine shaft: "And if you don't believe that I'm going for good / You can count the days I'm gone / Chop up the chairs for firewood." This might be as far from Graceland as you can get; a winter like nobody remembers looms on the horizon.
It is left to "Tramp the Dirt Down" to precisely contextualize this new ice age — make listener and performer alike feel how deep the chill runs. The melody is ageless: perhaps once a pagan air, later a ballad some member of the Easter Rebellion whistled as he stood before her Majesty's firing squad. Costello sings with greater delicacy and conviction than he's ever employed before. It is the voice of a man on a suicide mission. He's seen a news photo of Mrs. Thatcher kissing a child and recoils from this image of state benevolence like a priest who's seen a ghost. This image, he understands, is blasphemous, pornographic. "Can you imagine," he wonders softly, "all that greed and avarice coming down on that child's lips." Confronting that, his words and voice strain not to betray the sense of that obscenity as social fact and not reduce it to metaphor, something that can be shrugged off when you turn the record over. In this song, the only thing Costello can imagine living for is the day, however long it will be in coming, when he'll dance on her grave, tramp the dirt down on the remains of the world she built.
In every little catch and snarl in his singing, the desperation is so thick you can taste it. But slowly it accumulates an aura of furtive satisfaction, too, the release of pronouncing aloud "this pitiful discontent." Made into speech, these slivers of hate and dread move toward a measure of moral wholeness, begin to seem they will defeat the darkness as the resolute old folk melody has always promised. Then in the last stanza, the song turns down another corridor. The "you" Costello has been addressing shifts from Thatcher to an old friend or a bystander who's been eavesdropping in the shadow: "I think I'll be going before we fold our arms and start to weep / I never thought for a moment that human life could be so cheap / 'Cos when they finally put you in the ground / They'll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down."
No detective could find a solution for that, no solution short of autopsy. All that remains unsaid at the scene of the crime is an old saw from another failed detective of sorts, Hamlet: "...cleave the general ear with horrid speech / Make mad the guilty and appall the free."
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