I'm enjoying Elvis Costello's most recent standard rock-and-roll record (whatever "rock and roll" means anymore), "The Delivery Man," and, funnily enough, at about 5:00 this afternoon, "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" was on CNBC -- a quirk of their schedule and our time zone -- and there was Elvis Costello with the Imposters doing "Monkey To Man," storming through it and showing off his monkey cufflinks in the post-performance interview. I mentioned this to a friend of mine -- another Costello fan of long standing. He said it was "one of those songs that Costello probably writes in his sleep." He meant that as a compliment, and I think I understand it. The record's a good one. I applaud Costello's feints and efforts and aspirations in other directions -- the jazz work, the Brodsky Quartet "Juliet Letters" work, and, although I haven't heard it yet, I imagine "Il Sogno" is probably pretty entertaining, extrapolating from his movie scoring work and his ability with melody. As for "The Delivery Man," God knows it's better than the relentless, formulaic sameness we're getting from just about everybody else. But I do think there's a certain extra something he brings to his "rock and roll" (whatever that means anymore) records, and it's all over this one.
When other people try to simultaneously use all the tropes and conceits of a particular genre -- even if it's only for a single song -- it often seems like an exercise or a project, the self-consciousness, distancing and framing in quotation marks leaches something out of it. Costello's one of the few people who can borrow idioms like some kind of guitar-toting magpie and still make it sound like his understanding of them is deeper than most, and that there's something in the particular form he genuinely needs to express some element of the song they're used in.
(As for Steve Nieve's quoting Bernstein & Sondheim's "I Want To Live In America" in "Button My Lip," well, I don't have any theories or notions or ideas about that, except that there seems to be at least one really obvious musical quotation on every Cosetllo record. And it's amusing, and it works.)
Lucinda Williams is great on this record. I don't know anything else she's done. Also, I think I was confusing her with Gillian Welch. Or, at least, I did until I saw Gillian Welch on "Austin City Limits." I don't think I'll confuse Gilliam Welch with anybody else again; her dreary, lugubrious moaning makes Leonard Cohen sound like Iggy Pop. I kept flipping back to the show as I continued channel surfing, just in case Welch livened things up and maybe my initial glimpse had been at a particularly downbeat point. Nope.
I'm as much a fan of moaning, spooky hillbilly murder ballads as the next person. But when it's so obviously a fake-out pose glommed onto by someone whose entire knowledge of the idiom and its history seems to have come from a college course in "American Folk Art: Naivete as Metaphor," it's hard to connect with. It's part of a tradition, no question. But not the tradition it wants to be a part of. Instead, it's part of the perpetually adolescent miserablist tradition -- Nick Cave and countless others -- whose "sadness" seems like a marketing gimmick or a pose they struck that they kept at so persistently they forgot it was a pose. They failed to heed the warning that if they kept making that face it'd get stuck like that.
I used to think I was insufficiently deep or mature or somehow insufficiently equipped to connect with their terrible mopery. Now I realize that in fact I was no longer sufficiently adolescent to have much appreciation for self-dramatizing bogus world-weariness. I keep thinking of that observation Ben Folds made: "What's Billy Corgan got to be depressed about? He's a white upper-middle-class kid who grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. Stevie Wonder has been blind since he was a child, grew up poor in Detroit, and makes the most joyful music possible."
Not that we're singling out poor old Gillian Welch or whoever she is. She just came to mind because of the Lucinda Williams confusion. There are plenty of other examples. A local example who leaps to mind . . . well, that's not really accurate, since it's impossible to imagine him leaping anywhere . . . is Herald "Of Course That's Your Real Name" Nix, who's just released his second album, a mere seven years after his first one -- no point saturating the market or creating a glut of Nixiana. I happened across Herald mumbling his tuneless, one-chord moans on the local cable access channel. Imagine Ed Gein doing a really bad Chris Isaak imitation . . . with two fewer chords . . . and about two minutes longer than necessary. Hey, if you come up with some cliched refrain, you're not really getting your money's worth unless you repeat it about at least 44 times. Watching Herald's performance, I felt worst for his sidemen. The audience wanted to endure Nix noise for whatever unfathomable reason. But the sidemen had to play the one-chord drear through all its interminable tedium. I guess it might be possible to just get into the zen minimalist meditative repetition of it all, but I doubt it.
I prefer my poignant or self-pitying sad songs from the jazz canon: Rodgers & Hart, for example. Or Billy Strayhorn.
I have a similar problem with British rap. The Stereophonics? Feh. The Streets? Please. It's all too fake to even be considered as any kind of expression, and its fakeness obscures any artistic aspirations its perpetrator might have . . . like not-quite-good-enough-actors not quite managing to do a convincing American accent, or Kenneth Branagh pretending to be Woody Allen in "Celebrity."
besides, if you want British rap, why go through the circuitous route of listening to British folks try to imitate an African-American artform they don't seem to be able to do well, for whatever reason? You want British rap? It's been around for about the same time as real rap.
Please stand up and take a bow from the Great Hereafter, Ian Dury.
