Word: costello
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...GOOD to be true; you knew it. Three years ago everyone was listening to ELO and Jimmy Buffett and all of a sudden there was this guy Elvis Costello singing about the end of the world. Elvis became, like his eponym, the King of Rock and Roll, only now they didn't call it rock and roll, they called it the New Wave. Because it was new--that was what made it great, that somehow from this extraordinarily restricted and limited form, when all the possibilities seemed exhausted, these lunatic geniuses brought forth the rock and roll Lazarus...
...Everything means less than zero." Elvis Costello...
Along with Lou Reed and Blondie and eventually The Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello--plus a whole new wave of bands from The Ramones to The Clash--Patti Smith brought home a new message, and it had nothing to do with war or the draft...
...stuff Jim Morrison mumbled in The Soft Parade. But it is all worth looking at, because Patti Smith was a precursor and now a survivor of a unique generation of rock'n' rollers, a generation which is now evolving and turning in new expressive directions. Enter Elvis Costello...
Facile condemnations of this sort of thing clearly won't do. It's hard to get a handle on the punk fascination with Nazism: Elvis Costello talks about emotional fascism, Johnny Rotten sings about Belsen, and the swastika is the dominant icon in punk life, but what does it all add up to? With Rotten, it may just be the shock value, as when he used to tell people he cut out his hemmorhoids with a razor. And just how is one supposed to react to something like Belsen, anyway...