In one of those sweeping-yet-concise graphs that are becoming one of his specialties, friend Carl Wilson recently got my attention with a post at his blog Zoilus. Carl wrote:
“Momofuku finds Costello…in his most incisive mood in a long while, much more of a return to form to my ears than When I Was Cruel or Brutal Youth (though they’re both good records)–though more a return to form of, say, Spike or Blood and Chocolate than to his first four or five records, a do-no-wrong streak people ought to stop measuring him by. Bob Dylan’s made some great records since 1970 but it verges on the impossible for him to touch Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde, because that was all about how Dylan’s energy and creativity fit into and altered the spirit of its times. You can’t assess stuff like that ‘purely’ as songs and performances, aside from context and pure newness, and the same goes for albums like My Aim Is True and Armed Forces, I’d say.”
I’ll say more about Momofuku elsewhere soon enough, but in the meantime, I want to second Carl’s stretching of EC’s early “do-no-wrong streak” through “his first four or five records.” Through, that is, both Get Happy and, the most underrated album of Costello’s career, Trust, rather than stopping with his third lp, Armed Forces, the way so many did in the day (see Rolling Stone’s blue cover record guide) and still do. In fact, I’d extend Elvis’ streak all the way through his seventh album, EC’s best long player (and my favorite album of all time, by anyone), Imperial Bedroom. (And, yes, I know…I’m cheating by skipping over streakbreaker Almost Blue, Costello’s mostly failed country experiment.) Serious question: Besides the Beatles and, maybe, Dylan, who else has ever achieved such protracted five-star perfection?
What really got me to thinking, though, was Carl’s claim that we should stop measuring Costello by his own highwater marks. My first reaction was to second the emotion, but then Carl’s own Dylan example left me not so sure. After all, recent Dylan efforts such as Love And Theft and Time Out Of Mind lack plenty in zeitgeist punch, but, if critics’ polls are any indication, many of us still hear those Dylan albums as coming within at least hailing distance of the man’s musical glory days, albeit in their whole-different-thing latter-day way.
So I don’t know anymore… On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to Carl’s point. It seems completely unfair to expect Costello to match again and again those early standards — and precisely for Carl’s reasons: We will never be able to hear that unique Attractions sound again for the first time (and, as an aside, I’d say it’s definitely the sound and, increasingly, the singing, not the songs, that have left me feeling dissapointed with Costello these last — yikes! — twenty years). What’s more, even those curious kids who today come to those records fresh will nevertheless be hearing them in a culture where they don’t mean nearly as much. In a culture, in fact, where “meaning much” doesn’t even mean what it once did.
Significance is such a twentieth-century game, one more unexpected casualty of affordable recording techology, ever-nichier niche marketing, and more good new music released each year than a normal human being can digest in a lifetime. Killed off, in other words, by the very state-of-the-art possibilites that also now limit our sense of the possible altogether, at least as far as old-school significance goes.
So Carl’s right, as usual, but perhaps we can push his point still further. It’s not simply that you can’t fairly expect Costello or Dylan or whoever to, as Carl says, once again fit “into and alter the spirit of” a generation. No, it’s that nowadays people no longer look to music to scratch that particular collective itch. Our aims remain true, but we’ve all programmed different shuffles.
*****
A programming note: Besides writing here at No Depression, I also contribute to Livinginstereo, where I am currently blogging my way through the Nashville Sound era’s country chart-toppers and where my colleague Charles Hughes has recently essayed the latest from the Roots and memorialized Bo Diddley. Check it out.
