This is definitely the part of the Seventies where the Fifties makes a comeback. Some artists, like Tom Petty, take the rock/rockabilly sound and update it. Some, like Ramones and New York Dolls, take Fifties teen idol tracks and make them punk. Elvis Costello takes Fifties music as the basis for modernised songs, with the cynical lyrics of Seventies Britain over the top. He also nicks Elvis Presley’s name and Buddy Holly’s appearance to complete the sense, but his music barely feels Fifties at all.
While Presley and Holly sang generally optimistic and simple songs about wholesome girls (in the Fifties – Presley's later tracks are much more sophisticated, see for example In The Ghetto or Suspicious Minds), Costello’s songs are about unemployment, or the British fascist leader Oswald Moseley. Mostly, however, they’re about the duplicity of women.
I have to confess, that although I’m told his lyrics are deeply misogynistic, if I’d not read this I’d probably not have noticed since for the most part they’re often so highly steeped in metaphor or inference that I’ve not idea what they’re actually about. Once you look into them, however, it’s all a bit incel culture. Take the album’s big single and centrepiece, Alison. On the surface this fairly slow number seems like a love song, but underneath the singer is complaining that Alison is with a man that the narrator feels is unworthy of her and will mistreat her – if that’s not the incel’s complain about the “Chad” I don’t know what is.
The UK album features the single Watching The Detectives which, unlike Costello’s other tracks on this album that tend to blend rockabilly with new wave, is more of a reggae track. It’s as opaque as his other work. Why is this woman watching the detectives? Superficially it might be like a “Who watches the watchmen?” concept, but the final verse seems to imply that the narrator kills the woman out of jealousy – because she’s watching the detectives instead of him, perhaps. Maybe her staring corpse is “watching” the detectives.
Moreso than The Stranglers I found this blend of music and lyric quite disturbing; perhaps because with The Stranglers there was more of a sense that they weren’t being serious (despite naming themselves after a serial killer), whereas with Costello you end up feeling like you’ve just listened to a bitter man airing his grievances for half an hour.
I think it helped also that I liked the Stranglers’ music more than Costello's. His tracks are generally short, blending elements of rock and roll and rockabilly with bits of reggae, soul, new wave. But also because with this album he was given a session band, Clover, and so there is a sense of a slight disconnect. After this Costello formed The Attractions and I think having a band that was sympatico with his desired musical direction makes a big difference.
Comments
Post a Comment