Cruel and Crass

When you're tough and transparent as armored glass

All the words of love seem cruel and crass
When you`re tough and transparent as armored glass

Elvis Costello used this couplet in a few different songs. You can’t get love, he tells us, if your protective armor refuses to accept it. It has been estimated that there have been over 100 Million love songs recorded. It has been speculated that love ballads go back to 8th century Spain, where they were sung by medieval Arab female slaves. Where does one start with that? There is no 14th Amendment for passion. There are no labor laws for love, and there is no minimum wage. “I don’t wanna be your lover,” sang Elvis. “I just wanna be your victim.” You don’t want to read the fine print on that one. It’s one thing to sing one of the 100 Million love songs, another when you need love and you don’t get it, or you don’t get it the way you want it, or from the person from whom you want it, and you become desperate, frustrated, resentful. If you have felt these things, as many primate mammals have, you could find your way into an Elvis Costello song. Welcome to the working week.

You have gone to considerable effort to be your own boss. But you’re not. You have one. And that boss has you, body and soul. The pay is not good. Love songs began with slavery.

So many songs, so many poems, and now multiply those times everything. Elvis knew the words of love. He felt them with everything he had. He even had Rogers and Hart in his soul: his version of “My Funny Valentine” sounded like no one else’s. It brooded. It pierced, only after giving it much thought, like Hamlet. It sounded like Elvis Costello. He believed those songs. All romantics meet the same fate. Those words of love were in his soul, and they turn sour when the love goes cold. It still exists, but in the boulevard of broken dreams. He had met Cait O'Riordan, the 19-year-old bass player for The Pogues when he was 30, producing The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. He said that he stopped producing records for other artists after that. You can only marry the bass player once. On one of the songs, “Crimes of Paris,” she sings background vocals—coldly, without affect, like an anesthetized Irish lass—and he belted the words.

All the words of love seem cruel and crass
When you`re tough and transparent as armored glass

You keep changing. People evolve, and you don’t always evolve together, and the pain follows. And it is the pain, not your love, that is your constant companion. You are the same person. Love is the same emotion. But you change, and so does love. It is supposed to be constant, but that’s the booze they feed you. It’s the weather. It might remain, but it will not stay the same. Love is not constant in this song, either, and if it speaks to you, that love has become a palimpsest. You remember how obnoxious you were in the bloom of passionate, new love. You had discovered paradise. You thought it would last forever.

Elvis is pushing that adenoidal tenor for all it’s worth. It’s messy. You hear fluids. You hear regrets. You hear something huffing and puffing. But she is cool and controlled. He runs hot. She runs cold.

On the day I voted early, Elvis Costello dropped King of America and Other Realms, a remixed and expanded version of King of America, his 1986 masterpiece, an album that would set the tone for the rest of his career. He would make artistic decisions from here on. No compromises. He had broken up The Attractions and was now working with the likes of the great jazz upright bassist Ray Brown, and Jerry Sheff and James Burton, from the rhythm section for the other Elvis’s band. (Speaking of the King.) After he married O’Riordan and started a collaboration with Paul McCartney that was supposed to result in an album but resulted in songs divvied up for their solo albums—imagine the temptation and frustration when you can’t agree on making an album with Paul McCartney! He knew how the Beatles broke up, and he wasn’t about to go through that. Elvis was a member of the Beatles Fan Club was a boy. Objectivity was impossible, but the muse was who she was. He would call his memoir Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, but at this moment, she was faithful to the extreme, in the face of all else. In 1986, a year when gated reverb was everywhere—that big, echoing drum sound we all heard from Phil Collins and everyone else, including artists we loved—Elvis went back to drums in the room and no synths. It was him and Tom Waits against the world.

You started voting when you were young. You got married when you were young. The world was new. You never wanted to give in to cynicism, but here you are. All romantics meet the same fate. You performed your civic duty, turned around, and this new Elvis demo spoke back on your headphones.

I wish that I could push a button
And talk in the past and not the present tense
And watch this hurtin' feeling disappear
Like it was common sense
It was a fine idea at the time
Now it's a brilliant mistake

He’s talking about a relationship, a country (which is a kind of relationship with a lot of people), an idea that enlightened ideas can produce life, liberty, justice, blah, blah, blah. Elvis thought he was the King of America, but this place started out as rebellion against the monarchy. Maybe until now. You wish you could find succor with your love, how is that working out?

Elvis Costello was perhaps the first artist who seemed made for the rock critics, a wish fulfillment that an Englishman with bad teeth and an autodidact’s knowledge that would expand beyond rock and roll and jazz and country and rhythm and blues to world, to classical, to everything. “Watching the Detectives” and “Allison” are on his first album, from when he was the same age as my college seniors. Some poets develop, some unfold. Elvis was who he was right away, as an artist. Developing as a person would take longer.

When all is misaligned, Elvis is your muse. He is the voice of indignation. He is arguing, but he’s arguing for you. Barbed words, clever words, witty words, merciless words. Elvis has a heart, but it has been wounded, and when that happen, trouble begins and an Elvis Costello song is born.