In my recent review of Pop Classics’ installment on “Twin Peaks”, I mentioned that the new series is yet another in the vein of mini-book
lines like Continuum’s 33 1/3. With just the fourth Pop Classics entry, rock
journalist Richard Crouse gets even deeper into 33 1/3’s action by devoting
his book to a single album. He also shows that increasingly self-indulgent and
unsatisfying long-running line how to do it. There’s no pretentious
navel-gazing or “how do I fill 100 pages?” tangents in Elvis Is King: Costello’s My Aim Is True. Like that no-bullshit
debut album released at the end of a decade infamous for its poses and pomposity,
Crouse’s book says what’s necessary in fast, furious fashion, covering
Costello’s musical upbringing, his debut’s recording, its marketing, its songs,
and subsequent stage and TV support appearances. Never does he lapse into
obnoxious and very un-Rock & Roll pseudo-academic blather. Basically, he does
what we always want 33 1/3’s writers to do. This isn’t a perfect book— Crouse’s
disdain for all Rock & Roll made before 1976 gets tiresome quickly, he
relies a bit too much on quoting a limited number of sources (particularly
Elvis’s own liner notes to the 2001 reissue of My Aim Is True), and like Andy Burns’s Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks, his very short book suffers a bit
from bad timing, since it comes so close on the heels of Richard Balls’
thorough Stiff Records Story—but as a
pocket making-of/history/analysis of one of the
great freshman records, Elvis Is King
satisfies. When was the last time you could say that about a 33 1/3 book?
