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What Happens? Does the “stuff” get used up? Do advancing years impair judgment? Or do prodigies just get tired, their pipes rusty, their hearts mushy?
Then: Elvis Costello was the Prince of Dark Humour, a seemingly inexhaustible spring of thrillingly original melody and biting word-play.
Now: Costello the crooner, whose voice sounds like nothing as much as goose farts on a foggy day (as Leo Kottke famously described his own vocal style) is trying to out-Paul the later years of Saint John of Liverpool with a low-key barrage of under-whelming wuthering. His tiresome song cycle (good-bye former Pogue Caitlin O’Riordan, hello jazzy-counterpart-to-Anne-Murray Diana Krall) is a maudlin, single-tempo stab at making “respectable” music. But whereas Costello fans are used to the man’s unrelenting rut-rejecting ways, his 90-degree turns used to promise adventure rather than a forced march.
Nothing against, you know, sad songs – or happy songs for that matter – but would it be too much to ask for a melody that doesn’t head out the door at noon and comes back at dawn having forgotten where the hell it was going in the first place? And how about those pedestrian lyrics? “Friends look at me these days with fond surprise / But when I start to speak they roll their eyes.” No doubt, Sunny Jim: maybe they’re wishing they were Randy Newman’s friends instead.
Then: Aretha Franklin was a genuine soul diva, her soaring, purring, searing voice a balm and an affirmation to those few of us with broken hearts and/or hope for the future.
Now: The Queen of Soul apes the soulless princesses who thought the way to be Aretha was to ratchet up the melisma to absurd degrees, forgetting that the last toss of the head, the final finger in the face when Aretha made us really feel the hurt or the joy. Once capable of sending shivers down the spine and into the finger-tips. Franklin now sets the scalp to itching with fingernails-on-chalk-boards shrieking.
She’s often needed someone to steer her away from her own taste for the mawkish, but this generic MOR soul stew would bore your pants off if it could be bothered to undo the zip. And what about the dopey lyrics: “Woke up this morning to a perfect day / Opened my window heard a sparrow say (Twee dee deet deet).” What other artist of Franklin’s caliber would sing doggerel like that and call it poetry? If you answered “Elvis Costello,” treat yourself to a nice CD, because you wouldn’t be paying any attention to this one if the singer hadn’t once been The Queen.
Heaven forbid that talented artists should spend their dotage in silence, but heaven also ought to forbid that they ask that others pay to support their wimped-out vanity.
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