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night_owl 's review for:
Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink
by Elvis Costello
It has the potential to be a good book, but alas, it is merely a good manuscript in search of a decent editor.
Costello has myriad interesting anecdotes to share about his roughly 5 decades in the music biz, ranging from inspirational and touching stories of accompanying Allen Toussaint back to NoLa for the first time after Katrina to funny little asides about the clever comments dropped backstage from someone like Johnny Cash, Paul McCartney, Bonnie Raitt, or George Jones.
The main problem is that it is just incredibly disorganized. A memoir need not be linear, but it should at least give the reader some sense of context, and many of this anecdotes raise more questions than they answer before they end abruptly or guilelessly segue into another seemingly unrelated anecdote from a seemingly unrelated incident or person. He often doesn't give the context for a story until the story is almost done, leaving you confused to the last, or sometimes he just doesn't bother at all and you can only take it as a non sequitor. He often quotes or makes vague allusions to his own or other artists' bodies of work, expecting the reader to share his own encyclopedic knowledge of every lyric, song title, or reference from the last 70 years or so of British and American pop music. And the callbacks are multitude. He expects you to connect the one anecdote on page 668 to the one on page 2xx with alacrity, apparently. It is tiresome, to be kind. Perhaps a reader like Nick Hornby who is a little bit more "cut from the same cloth" and shares more musical context with the author would relate better, but as someone who has grown up with Costello being a constant presence in my musical life since I was old enough to understand what music was, I felt overwhelmed. I've never encountered anyone besides my own mother who has a bigger fondness and familiarity with his entire catalog, but I still found myself completely overwhelmed by this book, I felt like it is truly reserved for the most hardcore Costellophiles or music journalists alone. This is not for a casual fan.
On a similar topic, I found that I have long had a fundamental disagreement with Costello about his identity and talent. He really seems to see himself as a songwriter and singer par excellence, deeply absorbed in his own cleverness of lyric and the sound of his own voice, who also happens to play some guitar, piano or other instruments as needed. whereas I had always perceived of him as a musician who also sings and writes songs. The difference being that he goes to great pains to quote himself frequently (often without citing the name of the song or album it comes from, or only doing so in the most obtuse manner, leaving the reader to turn to google to piece it together) and detail the inspirations and thoughts behind every ballad or lyric written in collaboration with another artists, but spends little time talking about the MUSIC itself. He also seems to spend considerable page count denigrating his most popular and successful early albums as amateurish and hackneyed, nearly painting himself and the Attractions as little more than cover artists who just cobbled together different pieces of songs that inspired them to create their biggest hits.
Well those early records (the first 4 LPs) are IMHO far and away the best stuff he's ever produced, but he essentially brushed them off as rough attempts at learning how to make music and get a career off the ground. Meanwhile he goes into great detail about all the emotions and personal history that went into writing some of the most boring and unexciting work of his mid-career when he produced many forgettable and downright dull records. He is self-deprecating about his best work, while self-aggrandizing about his worst.
I guess I can understand where he is coming from, perhaps wanting to give recognition where it is has been denied, but it left me with a sour taste in my mouth: he essentially gives the message that I have poor taste because I prefer his early "bad" records over his later mid-period "good" records.
Costello has myriad interesting anecdotes to share about his roughly 5 decades in the music biz, ranging from inspirational and touching stories of accompanying Allen Toussaint back to NoLa for the first time after Katrina to funny little asides about the clever comments dropped backstage from someone like Johnny Cash, Paul McCartney, Bonnie Raitt, or George Jones.
The main problem is that it is just incredibly disorganized. A memoir need not be linear, but it should at least give the reader some sense of context, and many of this anecdotes raise more questions than they answer before they end abruptly or guilelessly segue into another seemingly unrelated anecdote from a seemingly unrelated incident or person. He often doesn't give the context for a story until the story is almost done, leaving you confused to the last, or sometimes he just doesn't bother at all and you can only take it as a non sequitor. He often quotes or makes vague allusions to his own or other artists' bodies of work, expecting the reader to share his own encyclopedic knowledge of every lyric, song title, or reference from the last 70 years or so of British and American pop music. And the callbacks are multitude. He expects you to connect the one anecdote on page 668 to the one on page 2xx with alacrity, apparently. It is tiresome, to be kind. Perhaps a reader like Nick Hornby who is a little bit more "cut from the same cloth" and shares more musical context with the author would relate better, but as someone who has grown up with Costello being a constant presence in my musical life since I was old enough to understand what music was, I felt overwhelmed. I've never encountered anyone besides my own mother who has a bigger fondness and familiarity with his entire catalog, but I still found myself completely overwhelmed by this book, I felt like it is truly reserved for the most hardcore Costellophiles or music journalists alone. This is not for a casual fan.
On a similar topic, I found that I have long had a fundamental disagreement with Costello about his identity and talent. He really seems to see himself as a songwriter and singer par excellence, deeply absorbed in his own cleverness of lyric and the sound of his own voice, who also happens to play some guitar, piano or other instruments as needed. whereas I had always perceived of him as a musician who also sings and writes songs. The difference being that he goes to great pains to quote himself frequently (often without citing the name of the song or album it comes from, or only doing so in the most obtuse manner, leaving the reader to turn to google to piece it together) and detail the inspirations and thoughts behind every ballad or lyric written in collaboration with another artists, but spends little time talking about the MUSIC itself. He also seems to spend considerable page count denigrating his most popular and successful early albums as amateurish and hackneyed, nearly painting himself and the Attractions as little more than cover artists who just cobbled together different pieces of songs that inspired them to create their biggest hits.
Well those early records (the first 4 LPs) are IMHO far and away the best stuff he's ever produced, but he essentially brushed them off as rough attempts at learning how to make music and get a career off the ground. Meanwhile he goes into great detail about all the emotions and personal history that went into writing some of the most boring and unexciting work of his mid-career when he produced many forgettable and downright dull records. He is self-deprecating about his best work, while self-aggrandizing about his worst.
I guess I can understand where he is coming from, perhaps wanting to give recognition where it is has been denied, but it left me with a sour taste in my mouth: he essentially gives the message that I have poor taste because I prefer his early "bad" records over his later mid-period "good" records.