Elvis Costello

For a time the best lyricist and the best singer about a world that would not have him. His early pigeon-toed stance of belligerence was the visual manifestation of one’s secret internal desire to make love to the school bully and then turn that love against him/her. Costello was out of Dickens, the smelly boy in the back row smelling his fingers as he wrote every hurt down, but one can’t imagine Costello reading Dickens–that would take too long, and, besides, Dickens would have explained too much for Costello’s taste, and why should hate be explained? He wasn’t a punk, exactly, because he was a craftsman, first–he would not let his anger get the best of his lyricism–but his resentment got the best of love. In those early albums he sang, over and over again, and very quickly, about lipstick vogue, and watching the detectives, and not getting pumped up with some girl, but what became clear, after a time, is that, like most stars, he resented not being treated like the girl–the star. So, he made his own band, a great one, where he was not so much the frontman as he was the ugly sister to his dream of being beautiful, desired, treasured. He was inconsolable on stage, and in his music, and no amount of love could satiate him, which was why we loved him: we couldn’t fill him up, and that can be a kind of turn on, too.