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Maybe you caught Elvis Costello on Saturday Night Live last December, the pasty-faced kid in heavy-rimmed glasses tracking the camera as if he could smash it with a look. Remember the way he stopped a song dead after a few bars claiming, "You don't need to hear this" (it was an indictment of Britain's Oswald Mosley and the National Front) and drove into "Radio, Radio" — a message clearly more appropriate to American viewers. The song is a denunciation of radio playlists and, by extension, the industry and media that purport to get us off while actually keeping us quiet. Like the decision to change his tune in mid-telecast, the song has the feel of a grandstand play, for actually the press and industry alike have been pretty good to Costello — the man advertised as the most written- and talked-about new artist of 1977. But anger is one of Costello's favorite devices, and while there is a childishness to his vindictiveness, he translates it into dramatic terms. Whether the switch from one song to another was planned or spontaneous (and both seem equally probable), Costello's appearance was the only time I've seen a rock 'n' roller turn television's gray dots into flesh. It wasn't just the switch or the camera-tracking; the guy has an instinctive sense of what comes across on the box — fast cuts, not finesse. He plays to the dollies and mini-cam with the kind of intimate knowledge born of suspicion rather than sincerity.
Those of you who missed Elvis on TV can catch him on the inner sleeve of his new album, This Year's Model (Columbia), where he is enshrined on the tiny screen of a miniature set. For those who witnessed his performance and unaccountably remain unconverted, go directly to the record inside, his second collection of original songs in less than a year. Both the sound and the songs are denser and darker than those on My Aim Is True (Columbia). A new band, The Attractions, fill out the tunes with harmonies, echoing drums and — best of all — an alternately tinny and brooding rock 'n' roll organ.
My Aim Is True was a virtuoso display, a songwriter flexing his talents in a seemingly limitless series of rock 'n' roll styles. The album had a clarity that's missing from This Year's Model. Each song was separate and shining, yet there were empty spaces that were vaguely dissatisfying. And there was something old-fashioned, not in the songs but in their settings. The lead guitar work neatly underlined Costello's sources from blues to Berry, but by focusing on the songwriter's roots rather than his visions, the accompaniment gave the album a measured sense of history at odds with Costello's insistence on the eternal present tense of his emotions.
If Costello's craft is not so briskly assertive on This Year's Model, it's not because he's forgotten it. He's freer with his sources flow, quoting reggae, not re-creating it, twining it with Beatles harmonies, Dylan's breathless phrasing. (For Britons of Costello's generation, who grew up with it, reggae is just another face of rock, not the exotic musical culture Americans fantasize over.) But the real difference between this year's model and last's is that Costello is not working out his songs alone anymore but with his touring band, and he can now envision songs in fuller, more complex forms right from the start. The guitar (now handled by Costello alone) highlights the melody, not the idiom, with brief, sharp statements; or it joins the organ in providing twangy texture. Alien, isolate still, with his band he's forged a more extensive and flexible vocabulary.
And it's Costello's fluency in the language of rock 'n' roll that separates him from whatever pack — punk, pub or new-what-have-you — that he's supposed to run with. Like the voices I've listened to most intently for a decade and a half — Dylan, Van Morrison, Laura Nyro, Joni Mitchell, Bruce Springsteen — Costello has made the language his own. His lyrics and his melodies are built out of brilliant phrases that seem to jump out of the songs but work logically within their confines. Costello is a careful writer, ear tuned to individual words and cadences, conscious of their associations. They come like lightning in the dark and illuminate their surroundings with a hallucinatory radiance. "Little triggers that you pull with your tongue / Little sniggers on your lips / Little triggers... my hand on your hip," he sings ("Little Triggers") and that repeated phrase (echoed by the slow-drag reverb guitar) lingers, acrid like gunsmoke — a provocation and a threat. Cupid's packing a pistol now, but if the trigger's in the woman's mouth, who's the barrel aimed at? "I don't want to be your lover," he shouts in "The Beat," "I just want to be your victim." Or is it victor? Both, probably. Ambivalence abounds in Costello's songs. And much of it centers on mouths. They are infuriating when they don't speak ("Your mouth is silent / Pumping like a fire hydrant"), infuriating when they do ("You're hoping that she's well spoken... / You want her broken with her mouth wide open,"). But in language there is still salvation: "If you change your mind you can certainly get a letter to me."
Costello's use of language — more, his faith in it — is enough to put him on my A-list, but how come I've got his poster — five-by-three feet, neon-green and yellow — on my wall? This is a guy, after all, who directs the greater part of his very formidable hostility toward women. I usually distrust the concept of rock 'n' roll heroism — I mean, where is the courage, the grace under pressure, in working off your fantasies on a generally admiring public? But I do find certain artists serve, not as heroes, but as dramatic extensions of myself. They speak for me and, in turn, I offer them half-grateful, half-protective empathy. Costello, for all his woman-baiting, is one of these, but it wasn't till This Year's Model that I understood why.
It helped, of course, that on My Aim Is True he didn't come across hating — just angry at certain members of the sex. And his rage focused on details I could identify with — the primitive urge to smash the mouth saying those hurtful, oh-so-reasonable things. But in This Year's Model the women Costello confronts seem less individuals than symbols of a betrayal that goes deeper than sex. This year's models are apt to be next year's cast-offs and Costello is resisting: "You want to throw me away / well, I'm not broken." If fame for Costello has become as poisonously attractive as love, if "Alison" of My Aim Is True has turned into the bitch goddess on This Year's Model, she's a hitch indeed: she's left Costello with his terror and rage intact while giving him just what he asked for. Now that he's made it he's both victor and victim with a vengeance. And he's finding that though his nightmare-women are still rapacious, they are often devoured, just as he might be. In "This Year's Girl," a close and deliberate echo of the album's title, Costello moves from attack to empathy. He knows how publicized darlings can make you feel hungry ("You see yourself rolling on the carpet with this year's girl"), but he sings as though he's been rolled on the carpet himself — "never knowing when it's real attraction, all these promises of satisfaction."
On stage, Costello's paranoia gives him the knowledge he needs to reach his audience — that's the survivor's trick, and Costello is going to be around next year. But on This Year's Model, his awareness, sharpened by fear, breeds a brief, imaginative identification with women, his habitual enemies. It may be Costello's most radical statement — that it's not in love but in terror that we most truly know one another, that ambivalence holds the only hope of grace. In a time of sexual tension and uncertainties, this message somehow gives me hope — this and the knowledge that Costello's no anarchist. His visions may be dark, but his music's as joyous as his rock 'n' roll lineage deserves. "If I'm going down, you're going with me," he sings with ferocious sweetness, but it's the ecstatic burst of guitar and triumphant chorus, "Hand in hand, hand in hand," that sticks in the memory. This may be rock 'n' roll without heroes, but their simplest dreams endure.
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