The Tris McCall Report

British Inversion, September 16, 1999

I've found that many younger fans of Elvis Costello, like myself -- those of us who don't remember the fury of the first records firsthand, and who could never concieve of the possibility of Costello as a pop star -- like Blood And Chocolate, Brutal Youth, and Imperial Bedroom best. Older fans who grew up with Costello and who got the full brunt of the nastiness of his early persona tend to dismiss everything after Imperial Bedroom as inconsequential. I'm sure it must have been horrifying and enthralling to have the romance-as-fascism logic laid out so bluntly, but I've found that if you look at Costello's career end to end -- from My Aim Is True (which, to me, is a fun but very overrated album) to Painted By Memory, it tells a far more interesting story than the conventional rock critic line about Costello's slow decline into middlebrow irrelevance. I understand where it comes from, because I've read, in Contemporary Literary Criticism of all places, early critical essays on Costello's work. Here you had a guy who was writing "it's just the kind of catchy little melody/to get you singing in the showers", and that was breathtakingly scary for everyone. After the viciousness of that initial stance, everything Costello did must have seemed to those early critics like a kind of weakening.

But King Of America was my first Costello record, and seen through the highly articulate lens of "Jack Of All Parades", much of This Year's Model smacked of juvenilia. From the perspective of a fan from 1986, Blood And Chocolate looked like a much smarter, and more sonically inventive version of the concerns of the first few records. I know I'm not alone in this opinion, especially among those of us for whom Costello the bad guy had been automatically demystified on Top 40 radio by "The Only Flame In Town". I think that the Elvis Costello records that are going to be remembered by Twenty-first Century rockers aren't the ones that get five star reviews in current rock books. That's because future critics won't be looking at his career as it unfolds; rather, they're going to have the opportunity to judge Mighty Like A Rose alongside Armed Forces. So the question won't be one of artistic development; it'll be one of qualitative judgement between two albums recorded at different times.

Think of it this way: when a pop music critic first heard "Two Little Hitlers" in 1979, what tools did he have to understand it? "Night Rally", "Less Than Zero", a handful of other horrific songs, and Costello's own nasty interviews. He must have had a perspective on Costello as an immediate, furious force, a perspective that I can't even begin to pretend to have experienced. I just catch snatches of it from articles and rock books written by those who were there at the time, but they might as well be talking about Joseph Stalin for all the sense it makes to me. Because when I heard "Two Little Hitlers", I had already heard "American Without Tears", and "Tokyo Storm Warning", and roughly seven thousand other Costello-penned songs on dozens of subjects, so I always understood him as an intellectual with a cool, rueful distance from the ugliness he was singing about. I also understand him not as a rock star, but instead as as a monumental musical figure; stretching melodies and small combo arrangements in audacious directions, and influencing nearly every contemporary rocker in the process.

My Costello has rarely disappointed me. Kojak Variety, in particular, is a tremendous collection that doesn't even merit mentions in most retrospective articles. Costello's staggering growth as a vocalist is also rarely discussed, but I think that's another facet of Costello's career that the original critics then to disregard, as if developing vocal skills was a betrayal of his original directness and authenticity. The punks's version of Costello is going to keep on letting them down. I don't think there's any way around that, and there's probably no way for them to feel the greatness of Spike, or even Blood And Chocolate. But, hey, I can't appreciate the latter-period Public Enemy albums for the same reason, and I know that there are a whole generation of later kids who now hear "Bring The Noise" through the prism of Muse Sick N Hour Mess Age.

Sometimes you phone me when you know I'm not lonely, but I always disconnect it in time.