Poetry is about saying it as it seems. Saying it "like
it is" assumes the Romantic trap of thinking that the final state of
things can be deigned by the poet’s sense of what cannot be accurately or
concisely phrased. The permanent significance some poets attempt to capture is
an illusion: word meanings change, cultural habits change, reading habits
change, world views change, the meanings of what was formally thought to be a
settled affair changes as well. Or rather our attitudes change to the subject
changes. The object is inert, bereft of meaning. The poet, attempting a verse
that reaches years , decades beyond it's time, is better served getting his her
own properly and artfully qualified perception of events and ideas right. One
might not trust met narratives anymore, but brilliant individual responses are
always illuminating.
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Barry Alfonso, noted essayist and Traveling Man, had this to say in a note regarding the manufacturing of Hip Consensus:
It seems to me that the heyday of rock criticism almost
precisely followed the arc of the counter culture of the late ‘60s/early ‘70s,
when the exalted arrogance of The Young (or at least the “hip” segment of it)
believed in a unified code of ideals and ethics, built around misty notions of
revolution, self-liberation and hirsute hedonism. There was a cleanly-drawn
line between Cool and Uncool in those days and the leading rock critics of the
time fell in line with the prevailing ethos. The rise of the underground press
rewarded the music scribes with small change, psychic cachet and innumerable
promo albums, creating an ambiguous symbiotic relationship with a music
business that didn’t want to change the world so much as make lots and lots of
$$$. It became something of a Ponzi scheme of the collective mind, crashing
somewhere between the rise of Jimmy Carter and the fall of disco. The rhetoric of
Marsh, Nelson, etc. did get seriously inflated and hyperbolic, straining to
pump up a few hirsute entertainers into the reincarnations of Byron and Keats.
The work of too many of these critics seems myopic, jejune and often
pretentious by current standards, the detritus of a time when the economy was
booming and youngsters could afford to imagine something as unsustainable as a
Woodstock Nation. Still, there are moments of colorful, cogent writing to be
found as well. The golden era of rock criticism was more than a make-work
project or a sustained act of wankery – in fact, I think the first Rolling
Stone Record Review anthology is just as good a read as your typical WPA Guide.
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I’d agree that Costello has
spread himself too thin in his efforts to become the most versatile rock
songwriter of his generation, but what has diluted his later work isn’t variety
so much as ambition. His work was already diverse in the styles it
employed—Motown, gospel, Brill building power-sob-ballading, folk traditions,
guitar-centered rock power chording, effortlessly melodic and melancholy
ballads—a habit gained from his other principle influence, the Beatles, and as
the wide swath of approaches has given him to write an amazingly solid set of
poetic/obscure/ brilliantly hard nosed lyrics that could accommodate several
themes and subterranean intellection in
the space of a compelling song. Doubtless the dips, curves and marvelously
detailed turns of the songs forced him to work a mite harder with a lyric. Some
of it was, of course, a grueling strangeness that was more alienating than
alienated, but the records he produced from My
Aim is True through Imperial Bedroom
were overall a dazzling array of stanzas and catchy choruses that would seduce
the sensibility in a masterful variety of styles. Costello, though, is a pop
songwriter for all the subtlety his music contains, and he been seduced by the
notion that he should be an artiste— as the pieces got longer, the styles taken
from a broader sample, the variety more dress-up make believe than convinced of
its own primacy, the good man reveals himself a talented musician in a hurry
for a more impressive reputation. What I think Dylan would have benefited from
is the sort of range the earlier work of Costello shared; his lyrics would have
been sharper more often.
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Most popular music is theme
songs for losers and their moron cousins, dreamers. Dreamers just haven't yet
received the memo. Who would listen to it if it were a winner's game. A room
full of Bud Collier clones in Groucho glasses.
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The basic flaw in the auteur theory is that it preferred
hero worship over art, which was a convenient way to overlook the wooden set
ups otherwise hack directors presented audiences. There was the misconception
that just because someone would film situations similar from film to film , it
constituted an aesthetic and constituted a style; some were artful in their
familiar scenes and scenarios, but far more were merely fashioning a way to
work quick and under budget.
