Elvis Costello, Teflon Artiste™
The Teflon Artiste™ is a once-potent artist, many years—sometimes many decades—departed from his or her peak, or even their last worthwhile work.
However, with the proper PR handling and the participation of hack rock journos, their reputations can be preserved … if certain critical niceties are observed.
Most important: No writer is allowed to state publicly the obvious, that the artist in question hasn’t written a good song in thirty twenty* years.
The WSJ offers a massive submission to the Teflon Artiste™ archive on Elvis Costello. We hear about the singer’s energy and new direction, but nothing about any good songs.
Best part:
[Costello’s] long-term focus on his live act has helped insulate him from the industry-wide plunge in sales of recorded music, including his own. Released in 1998, Mr. Costello’s collaboration album with Burt Bacharach, “Painted From Memory,” sold more than 300,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
By comparison, his album “Momofuku,” which he recorded in a week last year and did little to promote, sold about 48,000 copies. “Any number they sell above zero is good,” he says.
You could say, “No one buys Elvis Costello CDs anymore because they suck”; but it’s so much nicer to say he’s been “focusing on his live act.”
The stats on Momofuku are devastating, but even that is spun as a consequence of a choice on Costello’s part (and, earlier, by the industry downturn). The Journal can’t say the album sucked because no one else did. I dissected the NYT’s comically generous take on it here. And Rolling Stone, in a typical formulation, hailed it as “Among his sharpest sets in years.”
Incredibly, it has a 78 score on Metacritic. (See “What Hath Popism Wrought?” for more on Metacritic scores.)
Continues the Journal:
After a decade under the Universal Music umbrella, Mr. Costello is releasing “Secret, Profane & Sugarcane” on Hear Music, a joint venture between the Concord Music Group and Starbucks Coffee, which will carry the CD in its cafés.
This could have been written differently, too. As, say:
Since Mr. Costello’s records suck and no one buys them or plays any of his new songs on the radio, he’s been dropped by his label. The next step on the road to commercial oblivion would ordinarily be a big push by Starbucks, but the company bailed out of its big music plans (and those costly marketing campaigns) last year, after it turned out that no one was buying the CDs it was purveying. But those who are looking for the new Costello release can probably find it in their local Starbucks, if they poke around a bit.
* I said thirty years originally, meant twenty, my apologies. I don’t find much of interest on Spike, and by the 1990s he’d lurched into that chaotic genre-careering, to my mind, in order to disguise an increasing sense of artistic failure. I elaborate on this theory in detail here.
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48,000 copies? He could do better than that selling it at his shows I’d think. Or a half-decent website. Unless he’s already drained that well. You can only sell so many sucky records before the fans wise up…Well most fans.
A; Elvis Costello is a living deity
B: He is co-owner of a group of successful labels in The UK (Demon, Edsel and various offshoots.
C: He is the most consistently important songwrter to have emerged in the last 30 years.
You can’t characterize a career that has been interesting for 30 years by pointing at low sale figures for a recent effort. how many copies did the first velvet underground album sell when it came out?
I went to see Graham Parker last night and have been ruminating on his career vs. ECs today. EC did something right for all those long years, but sounds like they’re almost even now. If anything, GPs doing better, since we were all so pleased to see him.
Thanks to all for the comments. I made a correction above… it’s been 20 not 30 years since he’s put out a good album.
Burt’s point is valid; sales really don’t mean anything. But: When people like he, or John Mellencamp, or Springsteen, or Tom Petty, complain about not being played on the radio any more, you have to see this in the context of a) they all have big names to play off of, and b) their old stuff *does* get played on the radio. In other words, fans out there sample their new stuff, and reject it. So do radio programmers. And let’s face it, they reject it because it’s subpar.
The critics just refuse to state the obvious. One of my tests, always, is this,. Is there *one song* on the disc I would play for a friend, or include on a mix tape? It’s not foolproof, but, jesus, these guys are supposed to be songwriters! If the answer is no it’s a pretty good sign it’s a dud album. And after a decade or two, one is allowed to make sweeping judgments!
Hey Bill, You really need to listen to the new record before writing him off. As a long time fan who has winced at some of the most recent offerings, the newest one does go a long way to re-establish his hard earned bona fides. My Elvis is still alive.
For once, I am agree with DeRo. Costello is unlistenable. Oversinging, monstrously, and, yes, no good songs. I’d argue at leas none in the last 20 years. I liked “Veronica,” and I probably haven’t listened to it in 5-10 years. I listened to “Beyond Belief” in the last month. There you have it.
Momofuku is really good. Have you heard it? The Delivery Man, North, When I Was Cruel, All This Useless Beauty, they were… okay. But Momofuku is fabulous.
Brutal Youth, the last really first-rate Costello album, was 1994.
For what it’s worth, Costello wasn’t dropped from his label– his deal was up, and he seems to be going it an album-at-a-time now. In fact, there was talk that Lost Highway actually WANTED to release Secret, Profane & Sugarcane (it’s their type of record), but he went with Starbucks instead.
Which has actually turned out to be a pretty smart decision– unlike the sales disaster that was Momofuku, the new album made its debut at #13 on the Billboard 200, his best placing since 1980’s Get Happy. (Even more surprising, it stayed in the top 25 for Week 2, slipping only to #23.)
Now, I’m sure a lot of this has to do with the bar being lowered by the sorry state of record sales overall– it takes a lot less to make the top 20 these days than it might have 10 or 20 years ago. But it’s still a marked improvement over his last effort, and it happened in spite of some pretty mixed reviews. In fact, for a critical darling like Costello, I’d say that the new record got more bad reviews than good ones this time out.
I know that you lost interest in Costello’s music a long time ago, but I’m just wondering– this is the second time you’ve written a piece about a new EC album in which you sort of interpret what you’re perceiving in what other people are writing about the record without you, yourself, actually listening to any of it. Did you ever hear any of Momofuku? Or the new one?
Recommended for your mixtape: “No Hiding Place”, “Harry Worth” and “Turpentine” from Momofuku; “Down Among The Wine And Spirits”, “How Deep Is The Red”, “This Crooked Line” from Secret, Profane & Sugarcane (ALSO: “What Lewis Did Last”, mp3 bonus track available only on Amazon)
All good songs.