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"The strangeness of man," according to Czeslaw Milosz, "rises against the wisest of theories." And the men who populate albums like Imperial Bedroom ("All pride and no joy") and King of America ("So contrary / Like a chainsaw running through a dictionary") are the kind who but slenderly know themselves. The protagonist of "Man Out of Time" has "a mind like a sewer and a heart like a fridge," and the casualties who struggle in the wake of these personalities tell their stories in "Long Honeymoon" and "Sleep of the Just." Exposing the skewed intentions of such would-be romantics is Costello's expertise, and his treatments are usually in the first person. It's in this spirit of self-examination and hilarity at his own expense that we might best appreciate his latest offering, When I Was Cruel.
The opening track, "45," is what Costello describes as "autobiographical arithmetic." Commemorating the end of World War II, his obsessively compiled record collection, and his own journey past middle -age, he even takes a shot at his earlier vocal style which was only occasionally coherent: "The words are a mystery, I've heard / 'Til you turn it down to thirty-three and a third." With his rock-star persona firmly asserted and deflated, he returns to one of his favored targets: a shameless industry that entertains men by making women appear to be the sweet nothings men think they require. "Spooky Girlfriend" ("When she does as she's told / We'll all turn platinum and gold") undermines the latest image exploitation of a character type, while "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)" explores the lobotomizing possibilities of a successfully executed advertising campaign.
"Soul for Hire" features a mercenary lawyer feeling like a sucker for believing he could fight injustice without becoming what he beheld. And dizzying numbers like "15 Petals" and "Dissolve," for the moment, resist scrutiny, but this is happily typical of so much of Costello's work. As he puts the matter himself, "People are always asking me: 'What does that song mean?' And if I could say it in other words, or in the song, I would have written another song."
Nevertheless, I'd like to a hazard a word on "Dust … " and "Dust2 … " I don't doubt that with repeated listens these two tracks (differing primarily in style) will yield strange new meanings, but, for now, it appears that Costello is waxing eschatological as he contemplates an already underway resurrection of dust, its incontrovertible testimony, and an emergence from its heretofore silent witness concerning all goings-on everywhere all of the time: "If dust could only cry / If dust could only scream / For it's the single witness that might testify." He wonders if such worldwide, all-consuming revelation is something any of us have the wit to even desire, and in a variant of James Joyce's "Here comes everybody," he floats the notion that everything that is and was is also, somehow, coming back—a provocative metaphysical proposal to be filed somewhere between The Great Divorce and U2's "If God Will Send His Angels."
With "Radio Silence," the album closes in less speculative territory. To his credit, our man was no less scathing in 1979's "Radio, Radio" when he announced, "Radio is in the hands of such a lot of fools trying to anesthetize the way that you feel." And in those days, he was actually featured on commercial radio. But in the age of boy bands and what Costello refers to as "look-at-my-wounds" music, it's only NPR affiliates and college radio who still have the freedom to select their own playlist. Even the success of the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack depended upon the interest of NPR stations until it was too large a phenomenon for the country music industry to ignore.
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