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Elvis Costello's recent one-two punch of Chicago marked his emergence as a bona fide rock star. but there's difference between him and other guitar-toting tycoons: he can anticipate his platinum-plus success and still remain angry. This seeming schizophrenia arises from the fact that he is both the most musically gifted and lyrically deft singer-songwriter to survive the punk New Wave movement, and a bespectacled little twit manipulating a master plan. This second contention isn't just idle paranoia — a dominant theme in Costello's songs is fascism, both in its political and romantic manifestations. (His new album was almost called Emotional Fascism.) In songs like "This Year's Girl" and "Radio Radio," he notes similar dictatorial tendencies in pop culture and music, taking particular care in the latter to "bite the hand that feeds" the aspiring rocker, the radio. Given this dog-eat-dog view of the world, it's possible to see Costello's zealously antiestablishment assault on the rock biz as a devilishly clever promotional device.
Consider the evidence: in a little over two years, Costello has released three albums to extraordinarily widespread critical hosannas and an almost-instant audience of 200,000-plus; he has gained reasonable FM airplay and great second-hand notoriety from Linda Ronstadt's version or his "Alison"; with the already-gold Armed Forces, he seems on the verge of a major platinum breakthrough (if it's not this album, it'll likely be the next). Beyond the unquestionably fine albums, his rise to fame has been characterized by
---?-- collectors --?- marketing (the English and American versions of the first two albums included a handful of different tunes, and single releases invariably include unreleased B-sides), and an unrivaled antagonism toward the print-and-television end of the star-making machinery. When he performed on Saturday Night Live, he gave the show's seconds-counting director a coronary by cutting of the scheduled "Less Than Zero" after one verse and brashly leading the Attractions into "Radio Radio" because he thought it more appropriate for an American audience. Music journalists long ago stopped asking for interviews (when a Columbia publicist flew cast coast writers to town for the Aragon date, she had to be sure to house them in a different hotel from the Costello entourage),
What's so funny 'bout this purposefully abrasive approach to career-building is that it has worked in today's Bee Gees world. The difference between Costello and England's other angry New Wave pugs, of course, is that his songs arc resolutely tuneful pieces that owe great and tangible debts to the best pop-rock of the original British Invasion. Consequently, what was significant about his sold-out Aragon appearance wasn't the sheer number of fans, but that many of them were younger rockers who previously had tended to reject the new music as attitudizing without attendant showbiz panache. Hard to believe, but the kids still don't know that the Ramones have more intrinsic value than glam-bang bands like Angel. Costello's refusal to become the New Wave's darling has allowed him to walk the line between cult music And mass entertainment, and his recent successes have put him on the brink of combining these heretofore incompatible audiences.
These speculations would be so much banter were it not for Costello's already formidable recorded repertoire, for without the beat, his ranting manner would be seen as so much posturing. Musically, Costello is a stone-hard classicist, a Buddy Holly for this brave new world. The Holly allusion is not considered lightly — both men write songs that weave complicated webs with simple threads, juggling basic chord and chord and rhythm patterns --?-- --?-- toward creating --?-- --?-- --?--. Their --?-- --?-- --?-- --?-- --?-- verse-and-chorus structures are thrown into the mixmaster, and out come songs that are nothing more or less than three minutes of rhythmic persuasion. Costello knows, as Holly did, that great rock and roll need be nothing more. Within this songwriting approach, the two men struck upon disarmingly similar lyrical approaches. Though In a philosophical sense they are worlds apart — Holly's world view pitted his Youthful romantic bombast again an unreceptive adult world, while Elvis operates out of a paranoid scenario where both literal and romantic politics have already corrupted each other — they composed with the belief that their world could be sufficiently defined within a snappy beat.
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