MC Costello

I won't lean too hard into this thesis, but one thing that Elvis Costello's collaboration with the Roots on Wise Up Ghost made me hear was the natural affinity between some of his wordier songcraft and the lexical buzz of hip-hop—his frequent tendency, among his many other talents and proclivities, to stack rhymes over grooves, to prioritize diction over melody. I'm thinking of tracks as various as "Lover's Walk," "Beyond Belief," "Watch Your Step," "Bedlam," "Tokyo Storm Warning," "Episode of Blonde," "Luxembourg," "Pump It Up," "Chewing Gum," "(I Don't Want to Go to) Chelsea"—some of these are more vocalized than others, and many are arguably closer to Dylanesque blues rock, a tradition with its own faint but vestigial links to hip-hop. And though, like Stephen Sondheim, Costello often gets overlooked as a composer because of his prodigious talents as a lyricist, there's no escaping that he often has more words to say than things to say, thematically or musically. This logorrhea is not a deficit or a demerit, just one of the many things that make him who he is as an artist.

I'm reminded again of this strain of his work because he's just come out with two new songs, purportedly not as teasers for a whole new album but standalone tracks, "No Flag" and "Hetty O'Hara Confidential." Both have a tossed-off, homemade quality, possibly pandemic-lockdown-related, and both can be heard as new entries in the words-over-music vein of his catalogue. (The sound of them also reminds me of 2002's When I Was Cruel, which he seems to have built, and often performed the songs from, with the help of a little looping rig, pedals, etc.) I suppose "No Flag" has more affinity with punk than hip-hop, with its grabby double-negative chorus, "No God for the damn that I don't give" (a dim echo of "You never gave me the chance that I took"). But to my ears the odd, needling guitar riff that pops up between lines of the verse (first an A-minor, then in C-minor, though over the same bass chord) does have the insistent, head-clearing feel of a sample, a very un-punk device.

"Hetty" is even more nakedly a rap festooned with intentionally jarring, cloying keyboard blips. It has a literate, garrulous, well-turned lyric the likes of which few would or could write, unfurling a masterful drama in miniature, complete with a nasty twist and a bitter moral, about a celebrity gossip columnist hoisted on her own petard (or as its author has so helpfully summed up, "The tale of a tattler who outlives her time"). Honestly, I can think of very few lyricists who are as satisfying to read as listen to (or in this case, since I don't much care for the music, more satisfying). To pick just one stanza:

Those were different days
Those were different drugs
From a gold-plated palace with the half-mast flags
To a chalk-lined body that was full of slugs
She was trading favors for footnote plugs
Who's got the needle?
Who is fit to burst?
A morphine tattoo on an unquenchable thirst
Who's got your girlfriend?
And who had her first?

That packs so many sharp turns of phrase into so few lines, with a characteristically paradoxical Costelloan mix of economy and overflow. You get the feeling he could do this for 12 more lines and be just as brilliant and mean (which he then basically does). And no, rhyme cops, I don't mind the seeming misfire of "flags" against "slugs" and "plugs"; as with many of Costello's best slant rhymes, this isn't laziness but the kind of linguistic abandon only a master wordsmith can pull off. And such "lapses" are more than compensated for by the metrical punch of the whole thing, and by such silly/clever wordplay as "a snooping peeper in a coat of trench." Even with a minor work that verges on a novelty song, the man brings the thunder.