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If the American Statement has eluded novelists for a hundred years, we ought not be too surprised that it eludes pop singers too. This is for fairly obvious reasons, including contradictions of purpose and spirit that characterize the country and its people — rural primitivism and technological accomplishment, wisdom of the land and values of the assembly line, no-nonsense candor and a deadening hypocrisy, love of freedom and intolerance of deviation, the noblest of dreams and the most brutal sort of arrogance. In America the pendulum swings farther than in most places, which is why the world emulates it, despises it, and finds nothing to rival it in sheer awe and fascination. Such a vast subject naturally attracts, in terms of artistic expression, the idiosyncratic few nervy enough to tackle it; but though they may get a part of the essence, they never get it all. Blonde on Blonde and Chuck Berry's Golden Decade wind up rock and roll's Moby Dick and Huckleberry Finn — coming closer than almost anything else, but grasping less than the complete truth.
If we talk of the idiosyncratic few, three more apt synonyms than Neil Young, Randy Newman and Elvis Costello can scarcely be imagined. All in their own way are incorrigibles who will not be channeled or programmed. You'd think they were Americans or something. In fact, only Newman is native-born, though Young has lived here half his life, and as a Canadian was always in the neighborhood. On the other hand, as a retrospective of American country music, Costello's new Almost Blue (Columbia) is the exercise of an unabashed tourist; how one reacts to it depends largely on one's expectations of it. I expected little. I've never been impressed with either Costello's own country originals ("Stranger in the House") or selectively chosen covers ("I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down"), and it seems a little ludicrous for anyone to have thought he would deliver definitive interpretations of songs already immortalized by the likes of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, George Jones and Merle Haggard. As neither a writer nor a singer has Costello ever displayed the naked emotionalism of classic country music; he is too neurotically complex for that, and, well, maybe not American enough for it — not to mention possessed of a temperamental surliness that holds sentiment in contempt.
It is both for this reason and somehow in spite of it that Almost Blue surprises me with some of the best singing Costello has ever done, uneven though the results may be. While his performance of a honky-tonk tune like Haggard's "The Bottle Let Me Down" is routine and lackluster, he uses the limitations of his voice to their best advantage on the ballads, conveying the weariness of a man who finally let his feelings get the better of him. His version of "I'm Your Toy" won't make you forget Gram Parsons' on Gilded Palace of Sin, but it is because Costello can never sound merely plaintive — he so naturally brings a sense of desperation to everything he does — that his eroticism his that slightly psychotic edge that is dangerous and stirring at the same time.
In terms of the Costello oeuvre, Almost Blue is an inconsequential album — the only one he has ever made. It's doubtful he meant it otherwise, or that it could have been otherwise; an Elvis Costello album without Elvis Costello songs is a little like a Randy Newman album without lyrics or vocals. Which is what Ragtime (Elektra) is, for the most part, since it serves as the score for the Milos Forman film. Newman's songs have always been stunning little three-minute soundtracks ("Davy the Fat Boy" is The Elephant Man without redemption); and if his ceaseless allusions to the past have been their own expressions of pessimism about the future, then the subversive thing about Newman is how he transforms nostalgia to nightmare by the power of his own perverse infatuation. As he's done before, Newman avoids cliches in Ragtime by reinventing them, juxtaposing American blues against a discordant European impressionism; I was startled how dramatic passages of the score are curiously reminiscent of Erik Satie's Parade. But then even Europe, in the early part of the century, was altered by the impact of the collective American persona.
By reducing the dimensions of their work on these two albums, Costello and Newman have sublimated the darkness of their visions: it is what makes the albums both so listenable and so supplemental, given that theirs are two of the darkest sensibilities around. As such, they are content to evoke a personal affection for America, or at least for American idioms; Almost Blue and Ragtime are a long way from 12 Songs or Sail Away, Newman's tormented masterpieces of an America still paying for the legacy of black bondage by which it constructed itself.
Neil Young's Re-ac-tor (Reprise) casts a shadow across that expressed affection and threatens to swallow it up. It is the fifth chapter of an ongoing, eccentric national epic as erratic as the country itself, beginning in 1977 with the lopsided American Stars and Bars, and including 1978's wistful Comes a Time, 1979's Rust Never Sleeps, one of Young's best albums, and last year's Hawks and Doves, possibly his worst. Though he has often had trouble reconciling the dark and light of his vision, the breakthroughs have been startling, overpowering and among the greatest music of the last decade.
On Hawks and Doves, Young had hoped to conjure up the American spirit with the flimsiest references to its artifacts. Re-ac-tor etches, instead, a series of personal vignettes: the good-time prole deserted by his social-climbing woman; Surfer Joe whose quest for the Perfect Wave is a metaphor of one's quest for the American Dream; Moe the Sleaze who is content to watch the obsession from the most conceivably stoned vantage point; the Southern Pacific engineer whose life careens to a close on a passage as inexorable as that of the train he once commandeered; the commuter-consumer fed up with foreign cars; Public Enemy Number One; bordertown refugees who see utopia burning from the edges inward and rotting from the bedroom outward; the rock-and-roll-wasted themselves, who squander time like a national heritage ("Every wave is new until it breaks"); the down-and-outer who's "got mashed potatoes, ain't got no T-bone" — the entire lyric of a nine-minute, fourteen-second rave-up. Propelled (as is the entire album) by the wildest, most abandoned rock and roll Neil Young and Crazy Horse have ever put on vinyl, it teaches the Ramones and John Cale something about minimalism along the way, and teaches us why Young is a kind of crazy genius the white hippie incarnation of Robert Johnson, a pack of hellhounds pursuing him down the Malibu shore.
Re-ac-tor is a glimpse of an angrier and weirder and more volatile home than we've seen before; if Ronald Reagan heard this record and had the good sense to believe it, he'd have to be a little frightened. It is a little too offhanded to quite qualify as a surrealist classic, but in its own reckless, unaffected way — as with Randy Newman's best work and even Elvis Costello's heartfelt failures — there is portrayed the conflict between the American gothic and the American real.
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