at the conference Stars Don’t Stand Still in the Sky,
Dia Center for the Arts, New York
14 February 1997
When Elvis Costello released “All This Useless Beauty,” the title song of a 1996 album, the song went right past me; I didn’t really hear it. It wasn’t until Costello put the song out again, in a live version recorded in May 1996 in San Francisco, when he was doing dates around the country accompanied only by his pianist, and then in a version he’d asked the band Lush to record, that I began to hear the song. I was hearing it—particularly the Lush version—as the theme song for this conference, or the anti-theme song, because in this song, stars do stand still. Time stops.
According to “All This Useless Beauty,” time stopped a long time ago. The song begins in a museum. “This is song about a woman who’s walking in a beautiful gallery,” Costello said when he introduced the tune in San Francisco. “It’s full of pictures of classical antiquity and idealized beauty. And she looks across to her less than fabulous, late-twentieth-century lover—and she goes, ‘awwwwwwww . . .’” Costello sings the song full-throated, the words all rounded. I ran into him a few years ago in the Accademia in Florence, both of us staring at Michelangelo’s David—I can’t hear Costello sing this song, this song about all this useless beauty piled up in a museum, without picturing a setting that perfect, that marbled. In the San Francisco performance, Costello even sang a chorus in Italian. You can imagine for yourself what paintings the woman in Costello’s gallery might be looking at—I see Pre-Raphaelite scenes, like Edward Burne-Jones’s The Golden Stairs, with a score of Hellenic maidens descending toward some unseen ceremony, or his Tree of Forgiveness, with Eve clutching Adam and Adam desperately trying to escape from her embrace. Whatever she’s looking at, in the sing-songy, up-and-down-the-stairs cadence of “All This Useless Beauty,” the woman in the gallery, Costello says, “imagines how she might have lived / Back when legends and history collide.”
It’s a striking line, thrown away in the song—Costello just lets it drift out of the story he’s barely telling—and the sense of wonder in the words, their air of loss and surrender, matches Bob Dylan’s comment on Peter Guralnick’s biography of Elvis Presley. “Elvis as he walks the path between heaven and nature,” Dylan said, and those words are as good as any he’s written in two decades. Those words are so balanced and explosive, they turn the next phrases of his comment, which aren’t bad, into clichés: “in an America that was wide open, when anything was possible.”
This is what stopped time for me. “When legends and history collide”—when what we believe to be hard facts and what we know to be dimly remembered and barely describable ideals go to war against each other, or turn into each other. I think that’s what both Costello and Dylan were talking about: history turning into legend, heaven turning into nature, and vice versa, in a painting of an ancient forest or in a new kind of rhythm and blues record. But the promise is there only to be taken away. In this song, the time “when legends and history collide,” that time of all-things-are-possible, is gone, if it ever was. “Those days are recalled on the gallery wall,” the song goes on, but the woman in the gallery was born too late; she missed those days. She missed it—that’s exactly the word Costello uses, like some sixties person telling someone about Woodstock: “I was there, man, and you missed it.” Now all the woman has is a fact, a hard fact in the form of a soft fact, her lump of a boyfriend slumped at her side with all the ideals of the past, recalled on the gallery wall, mocking her. She waits, the singer says, “for passion or humor to strike,” and nothing happens. It’s the collision of history and legend that produced all the useless beauty on the walls—useless because now its only function is to remind whoever looks at it of what’s no longer possible, if you’re stupid enough to believe that anything, or rather everything, ever was.
Costello sings the song as a tragedy; a beautiful tragedy. The irony burns off as he goes on. The words—taken slowly, carefully, as if something in them, or him, might break—seem to shake in his throat on the choruses. It’s painful. But as Lush do the song, it’s altogether different. Over twenty years, a whole constellation of singer’s singers has taken up residence in Elvis Costello’s voice: Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, George Jones, Patsy Cline, Sarah Vaughan, Dusty Springfield, Lotte Lenya. When he goes all the way into a piece of music, it lifts off the ground; in a way, it goes onto that gallery wall, keeping good company with whatever useless beauty is up there at any given time. As a punk he was always a classicist; he was always too much of a record fan to let the world get in the way of his sound for too long. Lush is a much younger band, guitarists and singers Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi leading a two-man rhythm section. As a pop group they’ve always looked for the punk in their sound, and on “All This Useless Beauty” they find it. There’s no pose, no preening; what they do with the song makes Costello seem like an actor. Like that moment in the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me” when the female singer comes in, earnestly telling her story in a manner so naturalistic it’s an effort to remind yourself that she’s singing, what Lush create with “All This Useless Beauty” is the shock of realism.
The tragic cast Costello gives his tales of the worlds that are now behind us is what lifts, what beautifies, his own tale of useless beauty. But Anderson and Berenyi take their places in the gallery like schoolgirls who’ve been brought in on a class trip—for the tenth time. They’re too smart for their own good; that’s what’s always getting them into trouble on trips like this. They’re suspicious, they think too much, they’re always asking questions—and so what was tragic in Costello’s original is now just bitter. These girls, acting out the most ordinary, everyday events in this gallery, in this song, know what the idealized images of classical antiquity are for. Where Costello feels loss, Anderson and Berenyi see a trick—and their thin, reedy, determined voices, pressing through the tune word by word, nothing at all taken for granted, say one thing. This stuff on the wall—do you think you can fool us with that?
A whole world of mystification opens up out of this performance, a whole social con, or a quick, frozen glimpse of an entire society organized around a con: the con of beauty, of idealism, the con that takes reality away from the life you actually live, every day, and delivers that reality up onto a wall, or into the past, for safekeeping. There are moments of coyness in Costello’s performance; there are none in Lush’s. Listen to it more than a few times, and in its restraint, in the way it makes ordinary talk out of Costello’s elegant chorus, Lush’s “All This Useless Beauty” is as hard, as resistant, as betrayed, as anything in “Anarchy in the U.K.” And yet—when you’re sitting around in the limbo of the present age, dreaming of times when history and legend collided, waiting for passion or humor to strike, one of the things you’re waiting for is a song like this, a song that can change shape and color according to who’s singing it, a song that is like a magic lamp. Here Costello’s version and Lush’s collide; so do the past and the present, the tragic and the commonplace, beauty as a useless rebuke and beauty as an inevitable by-product of pressing down on some stray incident or emotion until it seems it can contain the whole of life. Pressing down—that’s all the woman in the gallery does with her disappointment over her boyfriend. With Emma Anderson’s disembodied contralto floating behind Miki Berenyi’s gritty, plain-speech lead on the choruses—with idealism, a legend of how things should or could be, floating behind hard facts, behind anyone’s history of everyday defeats, insults, humiliations—the song is beautiful, and only as useless as your life. It reveals itself as a song about what’s missing when a mythic dimension is missing from life—and what’s missing is a sense of being part of a story that’s bigger than yourself, a story that can take you out of yourself, outside of the pettiness and repetition of your life, circumscribed as it might be by whatever city or town you live in. The fact is, though, that history and legends collide every day, and we are always part of the collision.
Take what is perhaps the greatest and most pervasive of pop myths: the myth of rock ’n’ roll as an agent of social or even revolutionary transformation. As a myth, it isn’t necessarily a false story; whether it is or not, it’s a big story, a story with room in it—room for whoever might want to join the story, for whatever beginning or ending one might want to try to put on it. This story has been told many times; depending upon intellectual or political fashion, it’s told with aggression or apology, hubris or embarrassment, presented as a testament of ambition or naïveté. Recently I came across the most extreme version of the story I’ve ever seen, in Twigs of Folly, an unpublished memoir by the historian Robert Cantwell, the author of When We Were Good, by a long ways the finest book on the folk revival of the fifties and sixties.
One of Cantwell’s themes is that of a type he names “the remorseless spitting American.” He takes the phrase from Fanny Trollope, an Englishwoman who, visiting the new United States in 1830, found herself amazed by the new democratic race she encountered: rounders and roughnecks and women who lived in dugout houses—people who, in Cantwell’s description, had made the leap from “all men are created equal” to “all men are equal.”
For Cantwell, these are the true carriers of the myth of equality, down through the decades: not all of them lawbreakers, exactly, but surely a line of moral outlaws, all of them in some final manner uncivilizable. They scorn all differences and all claims to superiority. They are the romantic, the resentful, the heroic or petty outsider Americans who are nevertheless the only real Americans: the likes of Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson, John Henry and Calamity Jane, Mike Fink and Jack Johnson, Railroad Bill and Georgia O’Keeffe, Louise Brooks and Marlon Brando, James Dean and Charles Starkweather. To give the story over to Cantwell:
If the remorseless spitting American was a flatboatman, or a trapper, or a trader in the 1830s, a blackface minstrel in the 1850s, a Confederate soldier in the 1860s, a western cowboy in the 1880s, a dustbowl refugee in the 1930s, by the 1950s he was singing from every jukebox, radio and record player. Who were Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Sanford Clark, George Hamilton IV, Roy Orbison, if not remorseless spitting Americans all—and, ahead of the rest, Elvis Presley.
The remorseless spitting American had become a rockabilly star.
The opening strains of “Heartbreak Hotel,” which catapulted Presley’s regional popularity into a national hysteria, opened a fissure in the massive mile-thick wall of postwar regimentation, standardization, bureaucratization, and commercialization in American society and let come rushing through the rift a cataract from the immense waters of sheer human pain and frustration that had been building up for ten decades behind it. Elvis was desirable and desiring, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper with no advantages but the God-given erotic force that put the gleam on his 300-horsepower hair, the Hellenic beauty in his face, the genital nerve-endings in his voice, and on his lips a sneer with more naked repudiating ideological power than the writings of Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, and V. I. Lenin put together.
Put aside any thoughts as to whether this myth, this story Cantwell is telling, or retelling, is true or false, a vision of wholeness or self-congratulatory generational nonsense. Whatever it is, as Cantwell sets it out it is a story you can become part of, that can situate you precisely where history and legends collide, can help you perhaps to define your own place in your society, or outside of it. It’s a complex story—a tale of debts coming due, of the return of the repressed, and much more—but first and last it is a myth of liberation, of legacy and starting over all mixed up together.
You could join this myth by listening to or arguing about or buying records, or writing about them, or making them yourself, by aligning yourself for or against this or that pop figure—or by publicly professing allegiance to one such figure while, secretly, maybe in a secret you half kept from yourself, you identified most completely with a figure mocked and scorned by everyone you knew. This was a myth you could join by allowing it to judge the choices you made: between friends, between going to college or not going, studying one thing and not another, between clothes you put on and those you set aside—the choice you made, finally, over just what country, as you defined it, you would be part of, if you were to be part of any country at all.
That is the myth—as it was acted out in the sixties, as it was received, transmitted, invented, codified, and then taken as a natural fact, as a legend of history. In the fifties—Cantwell’s epoch of the flood, of the moment when everything changed—this legend wasn’t present. There were only events. The myth had to wait—and by the time it arrived, history had faded, faded enough for legend to replace it. At bottom, that’s how you join a myth: you join in constructing it, in making it up. Making up this particular myth was to one degree or another the sense or nonsense left to the world by the first generation of pop critics. Does that make the myth untrue? Of course not. It makes it a strange and shadowing standard, a standard all pop music that followed upon the first emergence of rock ’n’ roll has to be seen to match, or overtake, or overthrow, or render irrelevant. It’s a standard every record, every performance, has to somehow affirm or dismiss.
But as Robert Cantwell writes out the myth of pop transformation—which he is writing plainly, if dramatically, as history—it isn’t hard to see another, poisonous myth inside of it, as if biding its time: a germ in the idea of equality, the idea carried forth so ferociously by Cantwell’s “remorseless spitting Americans,” a germ that will emerge not to prove that all might exist on the same plane of legitimacy, but to prove that some people are true and some are false. This is the myth of authenticity, or purity—the idea that true art, or true culture, exists outside of base motives, outside even of individual desires, particular egos, any form of selfishness, let alone mendacity, let alone greed.
This myth rewrites the past no less than the myth of pop transformation does, and more violently. The earliest version of this myth wasn’t written out; it wasn’t a story. It was acted out. It was the payola investigations of the late fifties and early sixties, all based in the certainty, on the part of certain guardians of public morals, and politicians who knew a good horse to ride when they saw one, that the only reason the airwaves were filled with garbage, and that decent children, white children, had turned away from decent culture, was that someone was paying disc jockeys and radio programmers to play what otherwise would have never been heard. Rock ’n’ roll, in other words, was itself payola: a conspiracy. It was a trick, not unlike that other fifties media panic, subliminal advertising. Both the fear of payola and of subliminal advertising were versions of the ruling postwar myth: that, like the seedpods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, communism could creep up on America as it slept. At the time, in the late fifties, this argument—which was itself vaguely subliminal—didn’t even feel like a metaphor. Communist messages secreted in Hollywood movies, like fluoride in public water systems, would weaken the will or the brain tissue itself, until Americans were powerless to resist. And on the radio, among teenagers everywhere, it had already happened.
A different version of this argument came out of the folk revival that took shape concurrently with the payola scandals. Pop music, rock ’n’ roll, was looked on as trash, the adolescent indulgence society at large said it was, something to grow out of. It was corrupt; it was all about money; it was all about imitation, every emotion a counterfeit, every gesture second hand. But with folk music—old mountain music, blues, reels, and story songs, ballads that sounded as if they’d been written by the wind—the soul of the singer came forth. Stripped of artifice in its performance, the music produced a naked person, who could not lie. The speech that issued from his or her mouth was pure; the motive, simply to tell the truth, was pure; and the performance made both singer and listener into authentic beings, who could not lie because they could not want to.
A present-day version of this version of the anti-pop myth comes in Fred Goodman’s book The Mansion on the Hill, which is about the presumed clash between art and commerce in contemporary pop music. Here, because pop music takes shape in a capitalist milieu, it is inevitably deformed and corrupted, until nether performer nor listener can tell truth from lie. Never mind that pop music might as usefully be seen as a form of capitalism as any kind of art—Goodman’s version of this myth is bizarre.
Before Bob Dylan stepped from folk music into rock ’n’ roll in 1965, Goodman argues, rock ’n’ roll was a “pop-trivial medium.” There was no such thing as expressiveness, no authenticity of any kind, just—stuff. Money and sounds. But rather than a resurgent, Beatle-driven rock ’n’ roll wiping folk music off the cultural map—as the story is usually told—Goldman argues that, through Dylan’s agency, folk music completely rewrote the rules of pop music. Now, according to Goldman, suddenly the rock ’n’ roll sound could carry truth: true messages and true beings. You could be true to yourself; to thine own self you had to be true. But because there was still money to be made off of rock ’n’ roll—in fact, more than ever before—a fatal contradiction loomed.
Despite suggestions in The Mansion on the Hill that the man who once wrote “Money doesn’t talk it swears” kind of likes to, you know, swear, Bob Dylan, Goodman said on the radio in an interview about his book, had stayed pure. “There’s Dylan and there’s everybody else,” he said. “He’s never made a record to make money; he’s never made a record to make a hit.” Any good pop fan should answer that with, “Well, if Bob Dylan never made a record to get a hit, he ought to. It’s not too late.” But the whole concept, the whole division, is ludicrous—and still this myth of purity, this folk virus, is today as defining a pop myth as any other. In England it defined punk from the beginning, with some fans all but demanding written proof of working-class status before a record might be considered, and it defines much of the punk milieu today. That’s the world Adam Duritz of Counting Crows came out of in Berkeley—and it was this myth, far more than anything that can be reduced to an attitude, that drove him out of town. He wrote his songs, formed this band and then that one, made his music, followed where it led, and his music hit—and then, in a drama that Kurt Cobain acted out within himself, arguing with himself, raining abuse on himself, Duritz found himself a pariah on the streets of his own city, cursed by those onetime friends and fellow scenesters who did not cross the street or turn their backs and walk the other way when they saw him coming. Not only had he betrayed the purity of the Berkeley punk community, he was like a disease: get too close, and you could catch it. It all goes back, so seamlessly, to the folkies who decided that the Kingston Trio, never mind that they’d somehow gotten the word out first, were phonies.
Given the weight of pop myths—and there are scores of them, intertwined and overlapping stories about what it means to be a performer or part of an audience, about love and death, identity and facelessness, and on and on—it can be a shock to encounter performances that seem utterly free of myth, that seem to come forth completely on their own terms, as if they came out of themselves. That this might be possible is perhaps the most alluring pop myth of all. Myth or not, it’s what I heard on Golden Vanity, a Bob Dylan bootleg a friend in Germany sent me.
Bob Dylan acted out an odd, to many incomprehensible or irrelevant little cultural drama in the early and mid-nineties. Onstage, he offered often shockingly powerful versions of his old songs, performed with a tight, relentless band, with himself as lead guitarist, to the point that long, snaking instrumental passages, doubling back and descending into near silence, and then, like the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” erupting into a greater noise, would overwhelm the parts of the song that were actually sung. Sine 1990 he has issued no new songs of his own, instead substituting records of old blues and folk standards. It’s these sorts of songs that are collected on Golden Vanity—the oldest of the old songs, ballads, and airs that are hundreds and hundreds of years old, collected in the form of audience recordings made at Dylan shows from 1988 through 1992. Some of the songs are common coin, numbers everyone sang in the days of the folk revival, “Barbara Allen” or “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Some are obscure, at least to me: “Eileen Aroon.” These are the sort of songs Bob Dylan recorded in St. Paul and Minneapolis in 1960 and 1961, on cheap tape recorders in cheaper student or dropout apartments, because in those days these songs seemed like a key: a key to another country or another self, a strange music carrying, like all strange music, the call of another life.
In the early sixties, Dylan, then twenty, twenty-one, could invest these songs with flesh and blood. As he sang, men and women, lords and ladies, ghosts and demons, all the figures of the old ballads appeared before you. But now, as Dylan sang these same songs in his late forties, in his early fifties, all that these songs once meant, as talismans of the folk revival, charm pieces of purity and authenticity, as keys to a kingdom, has been forgotten. As knowledge, as rules, what the songs once meant has been passed down in the form of punk, not in the form of “Little Moses” or “Two Soldiers” or “The Wagoner’s Lad”—and so these songs appear, on a bootleg CD, not as culture at all, but as some sort of contradiction, anomaly, or disruption, coming out of nowhere: speech without context, a foreign language.
In a dark, bitter, chastened voice, Dylan sings these old songs as if he knows they contain the truth of being, from birth to death, and as if that truth would be plain to all if only the songs could be sung as they were meant to be sung, or heard as they were meant to be heard—if only the world were, for an instant, in perfect balance. Passion lifts the songs, a yearning so fierce it’s hard to credit, hard to listen to. A retreat, a withdrawal in the face of a world that was always the way it is and that will never be any different, backs the singer away from himself, and he seems barely to sing at all. But inside the audience, where these recordings were made with handheld microphones and hidden tape recorders, there is an utterly different world, and people live in it.
People are shouting, cackling, growling like dogs, yelping Deadhead yelps and whooping hippie whoops, imitating each other, vocally high-fiving, barking and drunk. It’s the weirdest thing. This is no collision of history and legend—the collision from which myths arise, the myth emerging as a new language no one has to learn, as with teenagers and rock ’n’ roll in the fifties, or whether the collision was arranged, the myth set forth as a new language everyone has to learn. Here, in these recordings, as what the singer is doing and what the crowd is doing cancel each other out, there is no history and there is no legend. The centuries of persistence in the ancient songs Dylan is singing, and the ancient singer he appears to be, make the noise of the crowd seem like vandalism; the refusal of the crowd to listen makes the wisdom of the songs, and the passionate body of the singer, seem like vanity. The result is the most compelling music, or the most compelling event, I’ve heard, or become part of, in a long time: irritating, confusing, impossible to hear and in moments impossible to pull away from. You hear someone struggling to turn what he believes to be timeless, outside of historical time, back into ordinary time, and the instinctive effort of others to stop him.
There’s no myth I can pull out of that or drape around it. It’s a new incident, without a story, so far—like the two shouts that open Sleater-Kinney’s “Little Mouth,” the film-noir theme in DJ Shadow’s “Stem/Long Stem,” or a thousand other things anyone could name.
Elvis Costello, “All This Useless Beauty,” on All This Useless Beauty (Warner Bros., 1996). Costello writes in his notes to a 2001 reissue that the song was written for the British folk singer June Tabor, who recorded it for her 1992 album Angel Tiger (Green Linnet), where it was “actually delivered with more anger than on my version”—though to my ears it’s a concert recital in a long dress. “None of these lyrics,” Costello wrote of “All This Useless Beauty,” “Little Atoms,” “You Bowed Down,” and other songs, “contained any anger toward the characters, only disappointment that they had settled for so little.”
———. “All This Useless Beauty,” from Costello & Nieve, on “San Francisco Live at the Fillmore (15 May 1996),” from Los Angeles San Francisco Chicago Boston New York (Warner Bros., 1996). A unique document of a unique tour: a box of five short CDs (five or six songs per city) drawn from live radio broadcasts of shows by Costello and Attractions pianist Steve Nieve from May 1996. The highlight might be a more than seven-minute version of “My Dark Life,” also from San Francisco. Throughout the performances are at once pristine and explosive, reserved and inviting, private and common, with crowd noise that is by turns fawning and obnoxious, responsive and hushed, the real ambiance of real rooms. “It’s not a record of well-produced, high-tech concerts,” Costello said at the time. “It’s a record of overheard concerts.”
Lush, “All This Useless Beauty,” included on Elvis Costello & the Attractions, You Bowed Down (Warner Bros., 1996).
Robert Cantwell, “Twigs of Folly” (unpublished, 1997).
Fred Goodman, The Mansion on the Hill. New York: Times Books, 1996.
Bob Dylan, Golden Vanity (Wanted Man bootleg). Songs include “The Girl on the Green Briar Shore,” “When First Unto This Country,” “Trail of the Buffalo,” “Man of Constant Sorrow,” and “Lakes of Pontchartrain.” Courtesy Fritz Schneider.