PowellsBooks.Blog

[Editor's Note: In honor of our 33 1/3 sale — buy two new (not used or sale) books from Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series, featuring critical writing on seminal albums, and get a third free — we're pleased to feature blog posts from some of the people behind the 33 1/3 series.]

There's probably some text up above this sentence making introductions redundant, but because I value clarity above all things: today's dispatch from the album-obsessed today comes to you from Franklin Bruno, which is to say the foolhardy soul who held forth on the subject of Elvis Costello and the Attractions' Armed Forces for Continuum Books, series editor David Barker, and a reading public starved for a detailed analysis of the relationship between the piano parts of "Oliver's Army" and "Dancing Queen." We've been told that this space is ours for the day to fill as we wish, so I guess I'll do the most straightforward thing possible to repay (or sustain) your gracious attention, and let you know a bit about my contribution to this fine series.

If you haven't seen the book, the first thing worth mentioning may be that it's arranged as a bunch of alphabetical entries: song titles, allusions in the lyrics, other songs or artists related in one way or another to the material on the album, and some abstract notions like "language" or "authoritarian personality." Some are essentially one-liners, some run several pages. I lucked out in taking on the assignment relatively early in the series, before any one else had happened on this head-slappingly obvious organizational trick. In my case, it came about because of the character of EC's songwriting, especially on the album at hand: I realized early on that glossing all the lyrics' historical and topical reference made everything I was writing a convoluted mess. "Ok, we were talking about 'Green Shirt'? Well, here's a little sidebar on the Norwegian fascist leader Vikdun Quisling, and the medical office that semi-coincidentally bears his name in Madison, which EC saw out a tour bus window in 1978. Now about the next line...." So I decided to write these "insertions" separately, and eventually noticed that I could make practically an entire book out of them; better yet, I could pretend to have been motivated by EC's own obsession with both language and regimentation. (And, come to think of it, knowing that I had a readymade "Q" to work with didn't hurt.)

So much for the form, what about the content? (I know, I know, they're inseparable, tell someone who doesn't work with deadlines.) Well, I have a hard time writing anything unless I know what I'm not going to do, and I suppose one of the first decisions I made was that this book wasn't going to be a memoir. A lot of authors in the series have done this incredibly well (howdy, Matos!), but they have more interesting lives than me. And, in any case, I was pretty sure that my subjectivity, I believe it's called, would show up in the book whether I placed it there in the form of direct autobiography or not. Trust me: I have as personal and life-shaping a set of associations with my artist of choice as anyone who's contributed to the series. Not, funnily enough, with Armed Forces, but with EC in general: it's Get Happy! and Imperial Bedroom, in particular, that I used to subvocalize entire sides of to myself during the less inspiring stretches of my high school civics class.

Much later, I realized that a great deal of what I knew about soul, R&B, and a lot of other black music that wasn't either jazz proper or hip-hop came not just from EC, but from white English artists of his generation: I'm not absolutely certain I heard The Clash's "Time Is Tight" before Booker T.'s, or The Jam's "Heat Wave" before Martha and the Vandella's, but I sure knew the covers better than the originals, and I doubt I'd ever have encountered Sam and Dave's "I Can't Stand Up for Falling Down" without Elvis'. That fact began to strike me as a pretty strange and unnatural feature of my musical background, especially when I found myself, from my college radio days on, heavily involved in a independent rock scene that had remarkably little use for either African-American or "black English" popular music (in other words, everything coming out of calypso, reggae and ska), and that also seemed peculiarly untroubled by that fact. It was only well after getting some distance from both the self-congratulation and self-abnegation of "indie-rock" as it stood in the ‘90s that I was able to admit in mixed — actually, not to put too fine a point on it, unmixed — company that, even though I liked Sonic Youth just fine, they were never, ever going to mean as much to me, or swing as hard, as integrated, rhythmically open-eared groups like The English Beat. So I suppose that the parts of the book that go to some lengths to make the depth and breadth of the influence of black music on this allegedly "new wave" album, are my way of making belated peace with my own ignorance and willingness, for a few years anyway, to go along with the crowd.

Now, of course, this influence is something EC has never for a moment denied — but it's something that he arguably betrayed, for the few moments that it took him to offend Bonnie Bramlett and Stephen Stills in a Columbus, Ohio Holiday Inn on the Armed Forces tour, by applying the most highly charged racial epiphets in our language to Ray Charles and James Brown. It's one of my book's themes — one I hope is obvious to the reader though I never state it quite as flatly as I'm doing here — that this incident in EC's career was more than a passing scandal (though it did defuse his momentum as a hitmaker in America), but an event without which many of his later artistic choices can hardly be understood. Get Happy!, perhaps obviously, is in part one long mea culpa (even though "I Stand Accused" was written by a minor white Merseybeat singer), but references to both the incident itself and the failure of what might be called EC's "American campaign" crop up on numerous later albums. To some extent, figuring out how to deal with all this actually is his own way of dealing with the relation between the personal and political. It's even possible that I wrote this book to treat some of the difficulties surrounding my own relationship to black music in a parallel way. And given this level of pretentiousness about the relation between artist and critic, maybe I don't need any further explanation of why I didn't think a book about "Armed Forces and ME" would be an appealing read.

I haven't even mentioned the immediate political context of the album, the pitched battles between the neo-fascist National Front and the left-leaning Rock Against Racism coalition, throughout England but especially in London, in the months leading up to the election of Margaret Thatcher. And I haven't been entirely candid about the fact that there are big chunks that are less about politics than they are about the craft of record-making and, especially, songwriting. It's not the most musically "technical" of the 33 1/3 books, but it's not the least: there's maybe 10-15% of the text that won't be of much utility to someone who doesn't know the names of a few guitar chords. (A nice feature of the A-Z organization is that you can skip a lot of this.) I always feel a little defensive discussing this issue, because there are many critics I respect who avoid all mention of such things, and some who even think it elitist to do so. All I can say is that anything vaguely "musicological" in the book is really just practical knowledge that I picked up from a few years of desultory piano lessons and some later (and more satisfying) attempts to teach myself guitar. And it's knowledge that many people of many classes share and use to communicate their musical ideas to one another. It's not the only way people do this, not by a long shot. I'm not even trying to tell you it's the best. But as far as I know, it's not a kind of knowledge that "the man" is keeping from anyone — except, I suppose, by underfunding public schools that would otherwise have significant music education programs. In any case, I did figure that if you can't write about the weird way that the chorus of "Green Shirt" gets back to the verse, and the way the simple-minded drum loop hides the dropped beats EC wrote into the song, for an audience willing to sit still for a whole damn book about one album, well, what's the point?

It's probably fair to say that, as rock criticism goes, mine is a relatively "analytical" piece of work. But I hope it's not dryly written — man, you should see my actual academic papers! There are jokes, and, at least for me, it's hard to retain objectivity when reading (much less writing) about freaking jerks like Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell. (No relation!) If there are potential readers out there who worry that the fact that I wanted to get at some of the meanings of this album by thinking about it means that I must not feel much, well, please contact me care of the publishers and I will send along a vial of my bitter, bitter tears.

Oh, and most of the prose is less baggy than this blog entry, at least I hope so. Thanks for your time. Who's next?

÷ ÷ ÷

Franklin Bruno's criticism has appeared in The Believer, Slate, Salon, Best Music Writing 2003 (Da Capo), and Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music (Duke University Press). After several records as a member of Nothing Painted Blue and as a solo artist, his most recent musical project is Civics, the debut CD by The Human Hearts (Tight Ship); he is also a recording and occasional touring member of The Mountain Goats. He has taught philosophy at UCLA, Pomona College, and Northwestern University; currently, he is Visiting Assistant Professor at Bard College.

Books mentioned in this post

1. 
   $4.50 Used Trade Paper add to wish list

   Da Capo Best Music Writing 2003: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Pop, Jazz, Country, & More

   Matt Groening and Paul Bresnick
2. 
   $83.25 New Hardcover add to wish list

   Listen Again: A Momentary History of Pop Music

   Eric Weisbard
3. 
   $10.95 New Trade Paper add to wish list

   Elvis Costello: Armed Forces (33 1/3 Series)

   Franklin Bruno

Franklin Bruno is the author of Elvis Costello: Armed Forces (33 1/3 Series)