In 1981, Elvis Costello kept up his album-a-year pace and released Trust. The album was the polar opposite of Get Happy!! — the focused and consistent R&B of the earlier record replaced by a stylistic smorgasbord.
Trust skips between pop, rock, jazz and country, occasionally within the same song. It’s an explosion of creativity that paved the way for Costello’s future musical experimentation and, for my money, his fourth or fifth best album.
Back in April, I posted a song by Marah titled ‘Barstool Boys.’ I used them to illustrate how sometimes expectations get in the way of your enjoyment of an album, a film, whatever.
In Marah’s case, the band came highly recommended by author Nick Hornby but initially failed to live up to his hype. Around the time of that post, however, I’d rediscovered their music (through the album Kids in Philly) and was starting to understand all the praise.
Well, since then I’ve jumped fully on the Marah bandwagon. I haven’t gotten any more of their albums (yet) but I definitely plan to. Kids in Philly, though, has emerged as one of the best records I’ve heard in recent years.
When I counted down my favorite 80s songs last year, I assumed I’d follow up with my favorite 90s songs shortly thereafter.
But it never happened, partly because it’s time-consuming to come up with lists like that and partly because I just didn’t feel as strong a connection to 90s songs as I did to those from the 80s.
I chalk some of that up to my age. The 80s encompassed 8-17 for me… from elementary school through my first semester of college, a formative span when every song has great meaning and great impact. And more important, a time when I took in (via MTV and the radio) what was popular at the time.
In writing advance posts for my Elvis Costello Weekends, I recently revisited Almost Blue, his 1981 album of country covers.
It was five years before he would infuse those country influences into his own songs on King of America. It was 18 years after that that he explored country blues on The Delivery Man. And four years later he paired up with rootsy producer T Bone Burnett for the country/bluegrass album Secret, Profane and Sugarcane.
Costello doesn’t like to repeat himself. If you want an inkling of what to expect from him next, the very last place you should start is whatever it is he just finished.
I don’t own much rap music. I can probably count on one hand the rap artists in my collection: Eminem, Public Enemy, Outkast, Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, maybe one or two more I’m not thinking of.
Looking at that list, Snoop Dogg is the one that stands out as unlike the others. The rest are groundbreaking in one way or another… Public Enemy’s outspoken politics, Outkast’s prog-rock ambitions, Kanye’s alternative musicality, Eminem’s lyricism (and the color of his skin).
But Snoop Dogg is just another L.A. gangsta who raps about scoring bitches and getting high. He kind of epitomizes the macho excess that typifies that sub-culture. If he has a standout trait, it’s probably that he smokes more weed than any of his contemporaries.
