In my last entry here, in a call-and-response with Carl Wilson at Zoilus, I conjectured a bit about the evolution of, or more accurately the dissapearance of, old-school signifcance in rock-n-pop music. Following Carl’s lead, I was using Elvis Costello as my example, and in the end, I concluded that, per Carl, it was unfair to expect EC ever to match his late 70s output. I didn’t mean that it was unfair to expect the same quality of work, but that it would be nigh on to impossible for him to connect that work to a larger cultural context as he once had. Indeed, I’d argue that no one today can do that because, in a world where everyone has his or her own idiosyncratic favorites and can effectively avoid everyone else’s favorites if they wish (and will wind up doing so perhaps even they don’t wish it), significance no longer seems on the menu.
A Costello fan par excellence, Steve Pick responded to my column with several interesting points of his own, some of which I’ve already engaged in the comments section, but I’d like to pursue others of them here in greater detail.
Amidst several other smart comments, Mr. Pick wondered:
“Was Costello ever really tapped into the spirit of a generation? While he did, indeed, have more commercial impact than most of his peers in the New Wave of ’77-78, he was despised by more people than those who loved him. I fought in the trenches in that war, and there were moments of actual physical danger just for preferring Costello to Led Zeppelin or the Outlaws.”
In 1979, I bought Led Zeppelin’s In Through The Out Door, which was the top selling album in the country that fall, but I’d also purchased Costello’s Armed Forces, which Joel Whitburn informs me, to my astonishment, had actually climbed to #10 on the Billboard album chart earlier that same year. So, for whatever reason, I was fortunate to belong to a peer group that felt no need to choose between the two–an attitude reinforced by a radio station (KY102 in Kansas City, Missouri) that had both “Accidents Will Happen” and “Fool in the Rain” in heavy rotation.
But, as Steve attests, there certainly were lots of people who did feel that imperative. Costello arrived at a moment in which the mainstream was at last being challenged by punk and new wave, the musics that would soon lead us to college radio and, much later, alternative rock–all pieces of what I think Robert Christgau meant by his term “semi-popular.” So, no, EC never was a voice of a generation; he was never that big. Costello, like his contemporaries in this not-really-a-movement, couldn’t touch the Led Zeppelins and Fleetwoods Macs in sales. But–as they amounted to just about the only other option going–they did have an impact, did force people like Steve and so many others to make choices and take sides–and to view all of this as a kind of war. And those choices had consequences.
It’s very different today. There are so many options and semipopular cultures to pop in and out of from, and as the mainstream has been so effectively reduced to just one more larger than most niche…well, cultivating and guarding your own small little taste zone is just what every one does. SIgnficance–that state where we might all care about others’ musical choices–can’t exist if we don’t really care about other’s choices. What act today would earn you the threat of a beat down simply because you professed your admiration for it? And how far down into what subgenre would we have to dig in order to find it?
Obviously, a world where we can all feel happy just liking what we like is a big imporovement over snobbery and ass kickings, as is a world where the focus might be increasingly upon developing individual distinctiveness. But within the “You like what you like, I’ll like what I like” attitude lurks a potential for I-don’t-care-about-your-concerns disengagement and Just-get-the-fuck-out-my-face-and-leave-me-alone misanthropy.
That sort of political and spiritual harm is why I think all of this matters. As Craig Werner wrote in his A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America, “real dialogue requires a shared vocabulary.” For it is that dialogue, made possible only when we speak in some sense the same language, that is really what we mean, I think, when we talk about “signficance” in the first place. And it’s that topic I want to take up in my next post here at ND.
Meanwhile, over at Livinginstereo, I’ve written about the late George Carlin. Please drop by and check it out.
