Rolling Stone, December 1, 1977: Difference between revisions
(+RollingStone.com link) |
(formatting) |
||
Line 20: | Line 20: | ||
Elvis Costello's debut album brought home to me just how timid Little Criminals really is. Costello's best songs are anything but timid, but they're as intelligent as some of Newman's finest, as endearingly elusive in their meanings, and funny in the same bitter, self-deprecating manner. They are also, like Newman's signature songs, very weird. Costello, a twenty-two-year-old ex-computer operator who grew up in Liverpool and now looks like an underfed, misanthropic Buddy Holly, is proof that not only are things quite strange in England today, they are capable of getting a lot stranger. | Elvis Costello's debut album brought home to me just how timid Little Criminals really is. Costello's best songs are anything but timid, but they're as intelligent as some of Newman's finest, as endearingly elusive in their meanings, and funny in the same bitter, self-deprecating manner. They are also, like Newman's signature songs, very weird. Costello, a twenty-two-year-old ex-computer operator who grew up in Liverpool and now looks like an underfed, misanthropic Buddy Holly, is proof that not only are things quite strange in England today, they are capable of getting a lot stranger. | ||
It should be said out front that there is a strictly musical difference, among many others, between Newman and Costello. Newman draws on ragtime, blues, Kurt Weill and movie music to orchestrate his lazy drawl; Costello, who in his quieter moments sounds something like Nick Lowe, who produced My Aim Is True, aims for tricky, infectious pop stylings, or he rocks out. In his less quiet moments he often sings as if there's a gun at his back, and he talks like a true pop obsessive. His songs, he told Nick Kent of New Musical Express, are motivated solely by "revenge and guilt"; he hates the record business so much he has begun to keep a blacklist against the day he seizes power. He wants to die before he gets old: "I'd rather kill | It should be said out front that there is a strictly musical difference, among many others, between Newman and Costello. Newman draws on ragtime, blues, Kurt Weill and movie music to orchestrate his lazy drawl; Costello, who in his quieter moments sounds something like Nick Lowe, who produced My Aim Is True, aims for tricky, infectious pop stylings, or he rocks out. In his less quiet moments he often sings as if there's a gun at his back, and he talks like a true pop obsessive. His songs, he told Nick Kent of New Musical Express, are motivated solely by "revenge and guilt"; he hates the record business so much he has begun to keep a blacklist against the day he seizes power. He wants to die before he gets old: "I'd rather kill myself ... I'm not going to be around to witness my artistic decline." | ||
There is genius in the wording of that last sentence, and it has found its way into Costello's songs — which tend to the neurotic, though never at the expense of finding the right place for the right lick. His most striking number might be "Less than Zero," which Costello wrote after watching the BBC-TV rehabilitation of Oswald Mosley, in the Thirties the leader of Britain's pro-Hitler Union of Fascists and today a hero of the racist, neo-Fascist National Front. | There is genius in the wording of that last sentence, and it has found its way into Costello's songs — which tend to the neurotic, though never at the expense of finding the right place for the right lick. His most striking number might be "Less than Zero," which Costello wrote after watching the BBC-TV rehabilitation of Oswald Mosley, in the Thirties the leader of Britain's pro-Hitler Union of Fascists and today a hero of the racist, neo-Fascist National Front. | ||
Line 26: | Line 26: | ||
The message is plain: if there's a place in British society for people like Mosley, then there is no place for Costello — none that he wants, anyway. This song, particularly to American listeners, is obscure, but given the violent behavior of groups like the National Front in Britain today, it is brave, and must be noted. Much more accessible are such edgy rockers as "Welcome to the Working Week" and "I'm Not Angry," or "Alison," a nasty, very sexy ballad. As for "Mystery Dance," imagine an arrangement based somewhere in the vicinity of Little Richard's "Ready Teddy," but supercharged with double-time, explosive dead stops, a band (Clover, a Bay Area group relocated in the U.K.) that plays as if its life depended on it, a mean, desperate vocal, and piano that might as well be swept by Jerry Lee Lewis — all behind these lines, as clean as anything by Chuck Berry, but so much more perverse: | The message is plain: if there's a place in British society for people like Mosley, then there is no place for Costello — none that he wants, anyway. This song, particularly to American listeners, is obscure, but given the violent behavior of groups like the National Front in Britain today, it is brave, and must be noted. Much more accessible are such edgy rockers as "Welcome to the Working Week" and "I'm Not Angry," or "Alison," a nasty, very sexy ballad. As for "Mystery Dance," imagine an arrangement based somewhere in the vicinity of Little Richard's "Ready Teddy," but supercharged with double-time, explosive dead stops, a band (Clover, a Bay Area group relocated in the U.K.) that plays as if its life depended on it, a mean, desperate vocal, and piano that might as well be swept by Jerry Lee Lewis — all behind these lines, as clean as anything by Chuck Berry, but so much more perverse: | ||
Well I remember when the lights went out | :''Well I remember when the lights went out | ||
And I was trying to make it look like it was never in doubt | :''And I was trying to make it look like it was never in doubt | ||
She thought that I knew and I thought that she knew | :''She thought that I knew and I thought that she knew | ||
Both of us were willing | :''Both of us were willing | ||
But we didn't know how to DO IT | :''But we didn't know how to DO IT | ||
Why don't you tell me 'bout the Mystery | :''Why don't you tell me 'bout the Mystery Dance ... | ||
By the time Costello crashes out of one of the better guitar solos of our day and into the third verse, which is about masturbation — there is a very insistent declension in this song — one realizes that the possibilities of present-day rockabilly have nothing to do with the flaccid revivals of a poser like Robert Gordon. "Mystery Dance," like so much of Costello's album, does not refer back to classic rock: it is classic rock. | By the time Costello crashes out of one of the better guitar solos of our day and into the third verse, which is about masturbation — there is a very insistent declension in this song — one realizes that the possibilities of present-day rockabilly have nothing to do with the flaccid revivals of a poser like Robert Gordon. "Mystery Dance," like so much of Costello's album, does not refer back to classic rock: it is classic rock. |
Revision as of 03:01, 11 January 2013
|