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Adolf Eichmann went to his grave with great dignity. — Hannah Arendt
Elvis Costello's Armed Forces confronts such horrors of modern life full-face. Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem was a "Report on the Banality of Evil"; Armed Forces might as well be subtitled "A Statement on the Complicity of Existence." Adolf Eichmann was spiritually dead long before the noose was knotted, and as far as Elvis Costello is concerned, he has been this year's model ever since. Costello seems determined to live or die by another sentence of Arendt's: "For politics is not like the nursery; in politics, obedience and support are the same."
Costello has never given society his support, except in the most general ways. He pays taxes, he makes profits for multi-national corporations (CBS in the US, Warner Communications in the UK). But when I say that Costello confronts evil — for that is what Armed Forces is about, facing up to evil as big as the world — I mean to imply that he has changed tactics. Great rock 'n' roll is about tension and release, and one of the reasons Armed Forces is Costello's most exciting album is that he has finally learned to balance these qualities. His debut album, My Aim Is True, was all tension — Costello was furious, but he never exploded — while This Year's Model was pure release — mostly Costello was venting his spleen.
On Armed Forces, Costello is in far greater command of his work. You can hear this on the surface of his music, which is easily the most melodically seductive he (or any new wave performer) has produced. "Oliver's Army" has a transcendent piano melody — my wife says it sounds like a cross between Bruce Springsteen and ABBA — that undercuts its despair. The rock 'n' roll attack of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding" dispels any hints of sentimentality.
Perhaps most important is the change in Costello's attitude. Never had simple point-of-view meant so much to a rock star as it did on Costello's first two records, which were attractive more for what they stood for (and against) than for their intricacies. Armed Forces offers a more complex and detailed emotional and musical vision; the chip isn't off his shoulder — Elvis Costello is still quaveringly alive — but he is now capable not only of passion, which he's owned in spades from the start, but also of compassion. He doesn't condemn the pathetic creatures in "Party Girls" (as he surely would have with last year's model), nor does he waste pity on them. He reaches out, tries to fathom their dissipation before judging anything but their sorrow. The difference bespeaks a maturity born of love and understanding. As for peace... not yet.
But Costello has arrived at some sort of truce with pop form. He's always been eclectic, mingling reggae rhythm and country accents with straightforward rock. But the very surface of Armed Forces announces that this is an aesthetic departure of major proportions. With the adept support of producer Nick Lowe, a master of the pop touch, and the constantly improving Attractions, Costello reaches out and discovers that not only can he do anything, but that he can do everything: classical piano figures, power-chorded guitar, Beach Boys harmonies, orchestral organ passages, reggae bass lines, Keith Moon-style drumming, Beatlesque guitar/bass interludes. The cover tells the real story — an Elvis pensive, brooding, smoldering in shades and black leather, is not the Elvis who looked like Buddy Holly on My Aim Is True. This Elvis Costello might be the shade of Phil Spector — and the list above reads like a catalogue of Spectorian effect. Armed Forces stops short of complete homage (at least I haven't noticed a glockenspiel), but the resemblance is hardly unintentional. Not with Lowe at the helm.
Lowe and Costello are a fascinating pair, mostly because of what they don't share. Lowe is the most frivolous figure associated with the British new wave. He is an ideologue of culture, fascinated by trashy surfaces and comedic outrage within seemingly schmaltzy contexts ("Marie Provost"). But Lowe is also a cynic. You can like, or even love, his music, but you can never entirely trust him. There's something manipulative — not to say mechanical — about his work; it lacks a political base, not so much because Lowe is a pop reactionary but because he is a product of hippie culture: he just doesn't give a damn. That's what his version of "Peace, Love and Understanding" (with Brinsley Schwarz) is about — a man who has witnessed the Balkanization of the counter-culture and simply refuses to look any longer.
Costello has been an endearing figure from the beginning, even at his most icily arrogant. That's because he looks so vulnerable — part of the secret of Armed Forces is that he lets himself sound vulnerable, too. The difference between "Alison" as recorded on My Aim Is True and "Alison" on the EP included in the first 200,000 pressings of Armed Forces is not, as John Rockwell has suggested, simply a matter of diction. It is also the difference between a man who's fighting himself and a man who is trying to come to terms. On the former, Costello is trying to convince Alison that their relationship will be her salvation; on the latter, he simply needs her.
Part of what this means is that Costello has displaced his cynicism, which often bordered on contempt for both his fans and his admirers in the press. At times, being an Elvis Costello fan has felt like a perfect substitute for masochism. On Armed Forces, this problem is solved, partly by simply grafting the warmth of Lowe's beloved pop formulas onto Costello's hard-edged sound. But the more meaningful solution is Costello's acceptance of his own perpetual dissatisfaction. He isn't blaming anyone else for his unhappiness and the result is the best sort of compromise: by knowing his limits, he's blasted them into oblivion.
The apex of misanthropy reached by This Year's Model couldn't have been sustained anyway. But here, in "Oliver's Army," Costello catches a man on the verge of becoming a mercenary for no reason other than ennui; and far from condemning him, he empathizes. The result is a breakthrough not just for Elvis, but for rock. When Costello sings, "There's no danger/ It's a profession, a career," he's expressing an idea that seems beyond most leftists and glib, youth-culture militarists like Warren Zevon — soldiers (even those in repressive, reactionary armies) don't just kill, they also die. Costello understands the emotional incentives in becoming a soldier and the social forces that create those incentives — why not join the army, if you'd really "rather be anywhere else but here"? What else is there, except waiting around for retirement, like the poor sap in "Senior Service"? That really is a "death that's worse than fate."
What links the worker in "Senior Service," the recruit in "Oliver's Army," the dissolute hustlers in "Party Girls," the boys in (and victims of) the "Goon Squad," and all of Costello's other characters is a sense of revoked options. But not only choice has been denied them; what's lost is their humanity. Like the characters in Springsteen's "Racing in the Streets," Costello's personae are leading finished, inevitable lives, which are, finally, no lives at all. And Costello's realization that there is no way out is what I mean by the complicity of existence. The observer of the "Party Girls" is in no way superior to them. Even success only perpetuates the evils he hates the most. What are Costello's considerable forces armed against? The litany of places in "Oliver's Army" is not casual. Unlike the Clash, Costello sees the enemy everywhere, even when he's alone.
Perhaps the clearest metaphor for all this is offered in "Two Little Hitlers," which is not so much about what society does to impinge upon our humanity as about what we do to each other: "Two little Hitlers who fight it out until/ One little Hitler does the other one's will." The song is a reggae nursery rhyme, which suggests how universal the exploitation finally is. And the solution is a cliche: the triumph of the will ("I will return/ I will not burn").
It is, presumably, inevitable that solutions to such problems emerge as cliche. This may be the truest measure of how banal evil has made us. But what of "Peace Love and Understanding," which, like Springsteen's anthems to the car culture, is not simple cliche but redeemed cliche, veracious cliche? When Elvis Costello sings this song, he does not offer us solace or even catharsis. He offers to purge us, momentarily, to unite us in our vulnerability. This is the peculiar task rock 'n' roll sets for itself — it halfway makes me want to endorse the medical studies that claim it weakens our muscles. And in this context — especially in a rock 'n' roll world where everyone, punk, disco dancer, rocker, bopper, finger-snapper, one and all, chips away at everyone else like so many little Hitlers of the soul — rock 'n' roll stands glorious, free; liberating in its very inability to accomplish much, or anything at all. It won't save you, but it might give you a clue on how to stay alive, which is the real challenge.
"Peace Love and Understanding" could never be, for Elvis Costello, the act of satiric resignation it might have been for a reformed hippie like Lowe. Its platitudes are an act of war against everything that costs us our passion, our compassion and, thus, our lives. In the sense that it enlists the best parts of our selves against the worst, Armed Forces is the only military force in the world worth saluting.
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