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Elvis Costello is rock's man of the moment, and one would assume from the frenzied reception the full house gave him last Sunday at his Fox Theatre gig that the Costello ground swell will never ebb. But will Costello last? Good question. I've been to too many concerts where a performer does an absolutely dynamite performance to an audience that seemed to express undying loyality, only to be forgotten a year later with his albums taken off the Licorice Pizza display racks. Is Costello the Next Big Thing, someone whose music will have a profound influence on the pop-culture to come, or is he just another in a series of throwaway performers an audience can play with awhile and then discard like an empty box of corn flakes? Good question indeed.
I'm forcing myself to be optimistic, though, thinking that Costello has enough talent to transcend the comic book tackiness that surrounds him —Woody Allen glasses, .old jackets with skinny lapels and padded shoulders — and latch onto something firmer in the consciousness of a mass audience whose attention spans tend to be short and tastes fickle. Certainly, Dylan and Bowie had to contend with similar problems of image. Dylan refusing to remain, at different times, a mere protest singer. a mere folk-rocker, a mere country singer, and Bowie deciding to junk the Ziggy Stardust nonsense and show all his would-be glitter creep followers that he could make music as well as cutely contrived theatrics.
Costello, though, doesn't have the same initial problem that Dylan or Bowie confronted. Whereas the other two began with a limited base where everyone expected them to remain — Dylan with folk and New Left politics, Bowie with glitter-rock and an apocalyptic fantasy —Costello's music has an unbelievably broad base. His three albums, My Aim is True, This Year's Model and his newest, Armed Forces, comprise something of a short-order course in the history of traditional rock and roll motifs, a wide scope encompassing rockabilly, reggae, rhythm and blues, folk-rock, Phil Spector wall-of-sound-production values, Sky Saxon and other influences that elude me right now. Unlike the average phony fifties band who take old stuff and succeed in making the music more banal than it was originally — I'm thinking of Sha Na Na and Flash Cadillac —Costello reshapes these old ideas into fresh combinations, oftentimes mixing styles in the same song. Musically, the familiar sounds incredibly fresh.
What makes Costello's art more astounding (or confounding) is his knack for lyrics. In an age where the "important" lyricists of the Seventies — Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, Warren Zevon, Tom Waits — have produced a bulk of work that emulates but falls vastly short of middle-period Dylan and the Beat poets before him, Costello has come out of left field and caught everyone by surprise. His best songs are tightly-constructed first-person narratives, impressionistic glimpses at balled situations and the people in them, with characters who Costello has caught in the variegated acts of Bad Faith and the contingent malaise of non-actualization.
In other words, Costello gives the impression that he can tell the moment when someone, or something, starts laying on the bull, and can dissect the baloney bulwark with the well-honed epigram. His persona is that of someone who's being victimized by others, an overly sensitive soul continually on the defensive who's developed a brilliant capacity to put-down, pontificate and get in the last word. Through this visage, he takes aim at everything, whether it be lovers who use sex as nothing more than a peer group stock commodity ("Miracle Man," "Living In Paradise"), schoolyard bullies who grow up to be lamebrained thugs ("Two Little Hitters"), media organizations whose ability to Pavlov the masses borders on fascism ("Radio Radio"). or government services that bypass their humane premise and reduce everyone to a number waiting in line for minimal and impersonal service ("Oliver's Army," "Senior Service"). Other themes in his material are a bit harder to reconcile with one's innate Utopianism, like murder ("Watching the Detectives," "Alison") or mysogyny ("I'm Not Angry," "Hand in Hand," et al). Any number of highly-considered rock stars have had these traits as well, like Dylan (still the darling of the New Left after all these years) , Mick Jagger, Bowie. In any event, one has to take the best with the worse. I refuse to get hung-up in New Consciousness moralizing over Costello's alleged lack of humanity. Not to confront his world view is to duck the issues he brings up.
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