Bob Dylan gives his thoughts on the brilliance of Pump It Up, and Costello in general. Game recognizes game.
"Pump It Up" is intense and as well-groomed as can be. With tender hooks and dirty looks, heaven-sent propaganda and slander that you wouldn't understand. Torture her and talk to her, bought for her, temperature, was a rhyming scheme long before Biggie Smalls or Jay Z. Submission and transmission, pressure pin and other sin, just rattled through this song. It's relentless, as all of his songs from this period are. Trouble is, he exhausted people. Too much in his songs for anybody to actually land on. Too many thoughts, way too wordy. Too many ideas that just bang up against themselves. Here, however, it's all compacted into one long song. Elvis is hard edged with that belligerence that somehow he is able to streamline into his work. The songs are at top speed and this is among his very best. In time Elvis would prove he had a gigantic musical soul. Too big for this type of aggressive music to contain. He went all over the place and it was hard for an audience to get a fix on him.
From here he went on to play chamber music, write songs with Burt Bacharach, do country records, cover records, soul records, ballet and orchestral music. When you are writing songs with Burt Bacharach, you obviously don't give a fuck what people think. Elvis blows through all kinds of genres like they are not even there. "Pump It Up" is what gives him a license to do all these things.
@CaldronPool “The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers.”- Clive James
"[J.K. Rowling] believes... that if you're born a man, you can't ever be a woman."
Labour MP Carolyn Harris: "Biologically, she's correct, but... when you introduce this level of hate into a debate, rationality goes out of the window."
Which do you find more irrational? The statement of biological facts, or the belief that males can become females? 🤔
@TheExtremeMusi1 Do you know something…no, I don’t.
I have some Eno.
Although I don’t own a single Roxy Music track or album.
Can’t stand ‘em.
But this is brilliant.
https://t.co/2Mkuy4jatz
Amongst the many, many amazing things about The Beatles, one of the most insane things is that it was pretty much always just these four guys. Aye, Billy Preston played on a few, George Martin on a lot more. They had the odd guest, and classical musicians played things they couldn’t. But, when you put on a Beatles album, it’s mainly the same four guys making the music, whatever it might sound like. I know people will say “well, that’s what most bands do” But, most bands aren’t creating albums where they change genres multiple times. In fact, most bands don’t change sound from album to album, and instead find a style and run with it. Or if they do, they take their time with it. Radiohead might jump from OK Computer to Kid A, but they take 3 years to do it. The Beatles released all their albums in 7! Not only that, Radiohead use the roadmap of others, “let’s make this like Aphex Twin” “let’s make this like DJ Shadow” The Beatles were the roadmap. When they turn up at the studio and create Tomorrow Never Knows, there’s no precedent for that. It’s mind blowing how they did it. They always set out to make every song different, and pretty much succeed. That takes a special kind of genius, to write that many songs in that short a time without repeating themselves. This is one of the reasons they are actually underrated if anything.