Words Are Enough: Elvis Costello

Lyricists work within the same straightjacketed constraints as poets. Unlike authors — who have hundreds of pages to play around with — lyricists usually have a page, at most, to make their point. When you've got 2 minutes and 43 seconds to say something profound, meaning's not expressed in paragraphs or sentences — it's pounded out by the syllable.

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If you want to be a good lyricist, you've got to figure out how to make a big point on a small canvas, avoiding the cheap efficiency of cliches and the everpresent temptation to tell a story that's already been learned and understood by millions.

But if your goal is to be a great lyricist, you do what Elvis Costello does: you transform fluffy cliches into pitiless scalpels. You mix innuendo, wordplay and a blend of sex and violence into an intoxicating brew. And you pick your verbal weapons with surgical precision, snapping together the syllables like links of a chain.

Including singles, collaborations, solo works, albums put out with the Attractions, etc., etc., Costello's put out a staggering body of work, maturing over the years from a twenty-something firebrand into the eminently respectable songsmith and ever-questing scholar of The Juliet Letters and My Flame Burns Blue.

But it's in his early years that his lyrical brilliance burned with a pure white heat, expressing itself in a Tasmanian Devil-like tornado of furious wordplay, unmitigated by any grown-up notions of restraint. Looking back on the era, he's described himself in interviews as "rock and roll's Scrabble champion." In that respect, he's like an old-school Craig Finn; or is Craig Finn the modern day Elvis Costello?

Whichever. It's the Elvis Costello of My Aim is True, This Year's Model and Armed Forces that still defines the man to many of his fans — a badass Buddy Holly using stripped-down rock-n-roll melodies and pounding keyboards to give his words ample room to kick all available ass.

As a young man, Costello was the living epitome of the punk rock/New Wave bad boy. In tracks such as "You Belong to Me," he slung raw innuendo with Shakespearean verve and agility:

Your eyes are absent, your mouth is silent/ pumping like a fire hydrant/ things you see are getting hard to swallow/ you're easily led, but you're much too scared to follow

On Imperial Bedroom's "Beyond Belief," Costello used an acid-dipped brush to depict the battle of the sexes amid the gilded barbed wire of high society:

My hands were clammy and cunning/ she's been suitably stunning/ but I know there's not a hope in Hades/ all the laddies cat call and wolf whistle/ so-called gentlemen and ladies/ dog fight like rose and thistle

But he turned his lyrical guns on political targets, too — with "Night Rally," he mapped out the long but direct road from mindless patriotism to extermination camps:

Everybody's singing with their hand on their heart/ about deeds done in the darkest hours/ that's just the sort of catchy little melody/ to get you singing in the showers

"Green Shirt" taps into a similarly dark and political vein, alluding to an interogation of a sinister nature:

Better cut off all identifying labels/ before they put you on the torture table

Among the other evils Costello tackled with relish, mindless conformity held an especially prominent position. His track "Radio Radio" could just have easily been written in the runup to the 2004 presidential election:

Some of my friends sit around every evening/ and they worry about the times ahead/ but everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference/ and the promise of an early bed

But it's "Oliver's Army" on Armed Forces that marks Costello's high-water mark as a political lyricist; its description of the Troubles in Northern Ireland stands among music's hardest hitting and most cuttingly written protest songs.

In one short burst of words, Costello nailed the grim mind-set of the men fighting against the IRA, and the cheapness of life that distinguished the conflict:

There was a checkpoint Charlie/ he didn't crack a smile/ but it's no laughing party/ when you've been on the murder mile

only takes one itchy trigger/ one more widow, one less white nigger

His words aren't minced; they're practically shot from a gun.

From song to song, the young Costello moved from omniscient narrator to spurned lover to film noir outlaw, seamlessly switching from raw anger to weaving an aura of bemused menace that says "you poor schmendrick, you have no idea what you've gotten yourself into, do you?"

But throughout his many modes, one thing remained constant: words were his weapons, and they were always razor sharp.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)