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I do not hope to uncover a James Joyce in a bookstore of romance novels; neither do I expect to find art when I listen to popular music. In a business where puerile simplicity and sterile repetition are the rules that masquerade as clarity of thought and originality of expression, a genuine and articulate voice is a very rare occurrence. But, from time to time, as Elvis Costello proves with his new album King of America, the rules of popular music are broken.
Of course, King of America does not contain a "hit" song. The mass buying public has repeatedly shunned necessary complexity as so much meaningless obfuscation. The insect-voiced Madonna dragging her middle up and down a portable cassette recorder; the sultry Sade yawning the most asinine lyrics, with the most lethargic voice, to easy-listening pseudo-jazz that can be marketed as subtle sophistication — the record buying public has always been more comfortable with music like this, music that offers nothing but advertises an attractive personality. And though he is far from ugly, Elvis Costello will never be a sex-symbol for millions of tear-drenched teenie-boppers. He has never sold himself in this manner; he is too busy creating music. But Mr. Costello need not be overly concerned with becoming a superstar. The critics consistently praise his work and, though he is rarely heard on the radio, he possesses a rather large and permanent listening audience.
Over the course of a career that spans almost a decade and includes some twelve albums (two of which are compilations). Costello has explored virtually all genres of music. His musical development can be divided into three distinct stages. Costello's first three albums mark one period of growth. In these albums, Costello quickly moves away from the slower-tempo guitar centered and rockabilly influenced sounds of My Aim Is True (1977), to the faster, more modern sounds of This Year's Model (1978). He abandons the blues progression, uses more frequent and surprising chord changes, and produces more balanced songs, removing a great deal of the guitar emphasis, writing more for the entire ensemble. With this second album Costello begins to define his own distinctive sound, a sound epitomized by his third album, Armed Forces (1978).
In regard to lyrics, these albums are characterized by a barely controlled anger, an anger that shocked listeners and critics alike. He proclaims a fierce honesty and promises never, no matter the cost, to compromise himself to the music industry: "I wanna bite the hand that feeds me, I wanna make them wish they'd never seen me." ("Radio, Radio," from This Year's Model); indeed many critics, while they praised his music, predicted a very short career for Costello.
The second stage of Costello's development begins with his fourth album Get Happy!! (1979). Though he does not depart completely from the styles he had developed in his first three albums, there are a number of very marked changes: the influence of country music and the English variation of reggae music, ska; more elaborate production: greater variations in mood — generally a lighter, more up-beat sound (but for three slower ballads in this twenty-song album), and though the anger is still present in these highly political songs, there is a growing control, a more subtle delivery.
In his fifth album, Trust (1980), Costello begins to add noticeable jazz and classically influenced elements to his music, and but for one very hard rocker, "Luxembourg," the tempos are slower, more controlled, with a number of very fine songs ("Big Sister's Clothes," "New Lace Sleeves" and "Fish 'N' Chip Paper"), but this is still very much a transition album, as is his sixth album, Almost Blue (1981) in which Costello explored his growing fascination with country music. Costello recorded none of his own songs on this album but the influence is apparent on all of Costello's subsequent work. As an album it is rather peculiar, but interesting. Costello picks the least offensively sentimental country music he can find, and sings without the characteristic twang of most country singers.
In 1982, all of Costello's divergent musical influences are synthesized in what is probably Costello's finest album to date (except for King of America which at least equals it), Imperial Bedroom. There is a thematic unity and a sophistication, both musically and lyrically, present here. Many of the songs feature full orchestral accompaniment, an accompaniment that does not sound simply slapped over the top to fill empty spaces. In the album, as the title suggests, Costello explores the political microcosm of the love-relationship, constantly shifting perspectives as if it were a zoom lens gone wild — to the point where the listener is simultaneously in both the macrocosm and the microcosm, a relationship epitomized by the song "Imperial Bedroom" (which for whatever reason, is not on the album and only available as an import single in this country) which revolves around the marriage and bedroom activities of a newly-married royal couple remarkably similar to Prince Charles and Lady Diana.
Ideally, there should be a third stage of development here — and indeed there are changes. In Costello's eighth album Punch the Clock (1983), the orchestra is abandoned and replaced by a horn section and a group of back-up singers. There is a Motown influence here, and shadings of sixties' psychedelic music, specifically in the vocal harmonies (see "The Element Within Her"). But the elaborate production he handled so well in Imperial Bedroom seems to escape from Costello and the music sounds too busy, too cluttered. Thematically, the album seems to move from the personal to the very public (see "The World and His Wife") but the addition of songs like "Mouth Almighty" and "Invisible Man" do not allow this to be fully realized. Which is not to say there aren't great songs on the album: "Shipbuilding," the only uncluttered sounding song on the album and "Pills and Soap," a vicious attack upon the British media and government during the Falkland Islands crisis, which was recorded the year before and released as a single in Britain. The same sloppiness, only worse, can be seen in Costello's next release Goodbye Cruel World (1984). Costello himself confessed to the New York Times that "I allowed the arrangements to run away with themselves."
King of America, however, is a creation that ends Costello's two album stagnation. Here is the true and long awaited beginning of Costello's third stage of musical development, the beginning of a new sound that will certainly develop over Costello's forthcoming albums. The musicians accompanying Costello, for the first time, do not include the Attractions, but former Elvis Presley guitarist James Burton, Del Fuego's keyboard player Mitchell Froom, Los Lobos' accordionist David Hidalgo and guitarist-producer T Bone Burnett.
Costello has returned to a very clean sound: "Musically these are the simplest songs I've ever written," he told the Times. "They were composed on an acoustic guitar without a lot of jazz chords. I wanted to make sure the lyrical clarity wasn't compromised with a lot of extraneous musical nonsense. The recording was done with very few overdubs and mixing was done the day we recorded." Costello, once again, has synthesized all that he has done before, as well as adding elements of Celtic music and American folk music, into a seamless whole, and has accompanied it with the most mature and clever lyrics he has ever written. Though the spare structure of this album is reminiscent of My Aim Is True, the musical and lyrical content is not. As he was able to do on Imperial Bedroom and not on My Aim Is True, Costello has combined perfectly what Yeats calls "passion and precision."
Costello's lyrics consistently spark thought. Though his music is accessible, the lyrics place demands upon the listener — they function simultaneously on three different levels: the personal-emotional, the public-political and the artistic. But his lyrics do not exist alone and may not read so well when forced onto paper; they are inextricably wedded to the music and are not meant to exist apart from it.
On an artistic level, Costello seems to be approaching his namesake Elvis Presley — a fascination that does not simply appear from nowhere. From the beginning of his career, when his name was changed from Declan MacManus, he has been highly conscious of his new identity, of the implications of his audacious boast, "Elvis is King." The first song on Get Happy!!, "Love for Tender," is an obvious reference to the Presley classic "Love me Tender." Also on Get Happy!! is a song entitled "The Great Imposter"; "Pills and Soap," a single Costello released independently in 1982, was credited to "The Imposter." Goodbye Cruel World features "Worthless Thing," a song that attacks the legend-makers, the profit-makers, the drinkers of "vintage Elvis Presley wine," and spends a great deal of time deflating the bloated image of the King.
The title song of the album, "Brilliant Mistake," is, on a political level, a narrative describing the great American dreams and failures of three people, and on the artistic, as Jim Sullivan noted in the Boston Globe, an ironic undercutting of himself: "I was a fine idea at the time, now I'm a brilliant mistake." In addition, there is an ironic reference to the original king, Elvis Presley, whose kingship seemed to place him in a prison, whose success yielded him nothing more than isolation and a dependence on drugs.
In "I'll Wear it Proudly," Elvis sings "I've finally found someone who's turned me upside down / and nailed my feet up where my head should be / if they had a king of fools then I could wear that crown / and you can all die laughing / because I'll wear it proudly." The king of fools, a reference to the old English sort of Saturnalia in which, once a year, everything is inverted; servants become masters, laws are lifted, and a king of fools is crowned. But his rule, an artificial one at best, lasts for only one day, at the end of which he is, according to ritual, chased out of town to restore order — ironic in the context of the love song that he is singing; even more ironic when read as the words of a more mature Elvis sympathetically but mercilessly exposing the childishness of his early ambitions. Though his self-mocked stage name is probably here to stay, Costello for the first time uses his given name in the album's production credits.
In "The Little Palaces," a song that features acoustic guitar and mandolin, Costello attacks the media's and the government's mutual fostering of comfortable illusions, comfortable opiates. "Now they're moving problem families from the South up to the North / mother's crying over some sad soap opera divorce." He calls for a reawakening from illusions while at the same time recognizes the selfishness and worthlessness of his early desires to rule: "To be the heir apparent to the kingdom of the invisible... the sedated homes of England."
King of America is a powerful distillation of all that Costello has done before and, at thirty-one years old, a promise for much more in the future. Costello vows never to fall into "the trap of making records that try to sound like the year in which they were recorded" (from New York Times), as his last two albums seemed to do. Costello makes abundantly clear that he is in control of his craft once again. He has not sold himself: "I'm not interested in having a dishonest hit. I've been making records for eight years, and I'm too old to be bothered about becoming a big pop star."
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