Anyway, I'd like to begin a continuing series about Elvis Costello and why he's so goddamn cool. I know I just called Tom Waits the coolest god damned man on planet Earth, and I'm not ready to take that away from him, so Elvis will have to be satisfied with the title of My Personal Hero. So.
Reason #1 Why Elvis Costello is Lots Cooler Than You'll Ever Be
In the late 1970s, on the success of his debut album "My Aim is True", Elvis toured the United States. These days, this album is best known for the song "Alison", but the single that first gained him notoriety was "Less Than Zero", the first of his many erudite, long-winded political rants. While traveling to a show in Dallas, Elvis decided to rewrite the lyrics to be about the JFK assassination, simply because he's lots cooler than you'll ever be. I'm notoriously bad at interpreting lyrics (I, like Homer Simpson, assumed "You Light Up My Life" was about a man), but so far as I can tell, Elvis imagines that the true target of the assassination was one of JFK's bodyguards, whose wife was cheating on him. Among the lyrics:
Jenny takes her clothes off in succession,and
While her husband rides a bumper in the President's procession.
She sees him on the screen as she looks up from giving head.
When he's had enough of that her lover throws her on the bed
to teach her she's alive and suddenly he's dead.
A pistol was still smoking, a man lay on the floor.(Regarding the first couplet of the second exerpt, it warrants mentioning that Elvis is British, so he has that weird way of making "law" rhyme with "floor". Just so you know.)
Mr. Oswald thought he had an understanding with the law.
She's got rubies on her fingers, Jenny turns and looks away.
Her mind upon a basement out of the USA.
She says, "Let's talk about the future now we've put the past away."
And just for the hell of it, here are some facts about Elvis Costello that, while not quite evidence that he's better than you, are nevertheless fun and/or interesting:
- Elvis's backing band for his first album was Clover, which later added a lead singer and changed its name to Huey Lewis and The News.
- The Bret Easton Ellis novel Less Than Zero was named after the Costello song, although the stories have little in common besides some good old moral bankruptcy. Ellis later wrote American Psycho, which you probably didn't read. But you sure did like the movie.
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I completely and totally disagree that the song proposes that the true target of the assassination was one of the bodyguards. I believe you're thinking of the first episode of Monk, "Mr. Monk and the Candidate," in which Monk investigates the attempted assassination of a mayoral candidate and makes a surprising discovery.
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