Word: elvises
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Elvis has a deeper reservoir of hatred and bitterness than anyone in popular music, or even the Viet Cong, driving him, they say, to compose madly into the night, compressing his rage into song after song, until this: music with a pulse sustained by passion and fear, energy driven by...
Get Happy!! doesn't obscure Elvis's problems, though. Sometimes, as on "Love for Tender," he seems like a rock and roll Noel Coward. His lyrics often get tangled in their own trickery, he mixes metaphors, he uses personal pronouns interchangeably and his enunciation is appalling. (I realize that these...
In Get Happy!!, Elvis Costello pays homage to his American musical influences--soul, blues, much Motown and Stax, as well as reggae. Costello, in Lou Reed's phrase, "wants to be Black." One of the two covers is an old Sam and Dave song, the rousing, "I Can't Stand...
One side of the album is preoccupied with prostitutes, meaning all women, from the cheerily impersonal, pun-riddles "Love For Tender," to the spare, sprightly "Opportunity," with Steve Naive's organ bouncing brightly around the upper register as Elvis sings of the War, the baby boom, no jobs, and women...
Suicide runs through Get Happy!!, sometimes surfacing directly, always thumping as an unheard thematic backbeat, life's metaphor for despair. It's the message of "Five Gears in Reverse," shouted inside a garage, sounds like it, in a voice choked with carbon monoxide. Elvis sings: