Maybe Elvis Costello Is Illiterate...

The other day, I read a quote attributed to Elvis Costello: "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture; it's a really stupid thing to want to do." It's a provocative statement and its ambiguity begs for clarification. Is he discussing the music press, music criticism, or any and all intellectual or spiritual writings about music? And what caused him to say this? Was he upset by a record review? Maybe someone wrote that he pales in comparison to his idols -- "You, sir, are no Burt Bacharach."

[My friend Andy just now pointed out that Costello borrowed this from the original line, "Writing about love is like dancing about architecture," which is perhaps taken from the film Playing by Heart, though the film may have lifted it from somewhere before that.]

The question it raises for me -- and I think the question that really needs to be asked -- is what can be written about music that music itself doesn't already say? As a music-lover and musician I hate to think that music is incapable of speaking for itself. But Costello doesn't elucidate why writing about music is "stupid." Perhaps music communicates via different brain receptors where spoken language does not travel. So what, then, is music designed to say? Well, Leonard Bernstein said, "Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable." A very lofty assertion, but maybe that's where Costello was headed.

Taking into account both Bernstein's and Costello's quotes, if music speaks to the unnameable and unknowable, then where indeed can any intersection exist with verbal discourse? Is it possible that music is too primal, too other that verbal analysis is futile? Reminds me of another quote by either Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, or Fats Waller (maybe all three, and anyway I'm paraphrasing): "If you have to ask [what jazz is], you'll never know." In order to understand music one must (at least as a component of that endeavor) experience music in non-verbal ways. In other words, if you haven't interfaced with music on it's own terms, then any rhetoric to explain it is difficult to comprehend.

That said, I do not intend to say that music is understood the same way by everyone. Yet it is in this very disparity where writing about music is important. After all, even if verbal discourse is not capable of distilling music's elemental truths, the dialectic itself can at least engender each participant's journey toward his or her own potential truth. Therefore, one must I believe give props to a reviewer of Elvis Costello's records even if such (lukewarm?) receptions are the cause of Costello's self-aggrandizing witticism. There are certainly many more maddeningly meaningless and unnecessary jobs out there (how does a "personal life coach" sleep at night with his or her conscience howling at the moon?).

And I would further counter to Costello that beautiful architecture can be very dance-like. Architecture can demonstrate a striking shape, the dramatic movement of contour and line, the delicate details, soft or bold, vast or intimate. Maybe Costello needs to get those oversized glasses of his checked because he may be more blind than he realizes.