my power pop addiction, no. 82 (154)

I’ve always had reservations about Elvis Costello. My earliest memories of him are of seeing posters for his first album on the wall while I was browsing the LPs at Record Connection on 86th and Lex, drooling over Kiss Alive and Houses of the Holy. Record Connection was a place where you could not only buy records but also pipes, papers, Rush, incense, Creem, Circus, Rolling Stone, and stag films, which they made no attempt to hide from underage kids. It’s not like what happened later in video stores where all the porn would be kept behind saloon doors. ‘Howdy pardner, I’m here to buy something to jerk off to… Record Connection, along with Music Maze, a few blocks away, were basically hescher outlets that had to make grudging concessions to punk and New Wave as a matter of survival. They ended up not surviving anyway. I remember seeing a New York Dolls album at Record Connection, and David Bowie’s Young Americans, and thinking to myself, ‘man, those guys are scary and gross.’ Kiss somehow seemed less threatening, in spite of spitting up blood and breathing fire, probably because there wasn’t the same degree of gender bending. They wore makeup, and Paul Stanley flitted around like the King of Christopher Street, but Kiss was much more of a meat(head) and potatoes kind of thing in both its sound and signification. …Costello is somebody I should champion without ambivalence since he basically made being a nerd cool, but there’s a certain pompousness with him that I find unpleasant. He gives you the feeling that he knows he’s the smartest guy in the room, and a lot of the time he’s right, but that level of self-confidence means he’ll never be somebody who lives the pop life. The most apt observation I’ve ever heard about him comes from – who else? – David Lee Roth, who remarked that the reason rock critics love Elvis Costello so much is that he looks like they do…In spite of my reservations, though, Costello’s first few albums, and especially the second album, This Year’s Model, all have a number of outstanding songs on them. I could do a whole week on my favorite Costello songs, but I think I’m gonna just do This Year’s Girl, which is arguably the high water mark for New Wave. …I remember being in 4th grade and seeing high school kids walking around with Elvis Costello albums, and I congratulated myself for already being cooler than they were since I had Aerosmith’s Rocks and Steve Miller’s Fly Like An Eagle at home, and how could this angry nerd wearing glasses and a disheveled suit possibly compare to a bunch of drugged-out long hairs playing 10-minute guitar solos in front of gigantic Marshall stacks? As I got older and became a little more discerning, I came to appreciate that Costello, early on, rarely seemed to do a song that went over three minutes. Only as he became more insufferably self-important did he start to go longer with regularity. I think of him as an example of the dialectic of pop: In the beginning, the pop artist seeks to achieve an impact with quick, concise, uncomplicated songs. But once he succeeds in doing this and gains a measure of self-certitude, the songs get stretched out, which is indicative of the artist’s newfound sense of his own importance. Money and adulation will do that to you. Over time, the successful pop artist’s work becomes increasingly bloated, windy, and pretentious, until a full transmutation has taken place, turning the pop artist into a rock star. With Costello, the dialectic begins with Armed Forces, his third album, and doesn’t really come to full fruition until Imperial Bedroom, the last album of his I can stand. Each record over that four year period has its share of great music, but the deftness and urgency of the first two albums fades further with each offering until finally it vanishes entirely...