Junk food and caviar, or loving and hating the seventies: Note on Elton John's breakthrough album, "Elton John" (1970)

Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin wound up writing a lot of songs that were quite cynical (consider, for example: “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting,” “Jamaica Jerk-off,” or even “Bennie and the Jets”), and Elton came to enjoy being a performer and performing on stage and in life a coked-out and insouciant flamboyance. Their songs dominated pop music in the first half of the seventies, a fact that may be as underappreciated in the long aftermath, obviously totally eclipsed by punk and the new wave music that emerged in that decade's second half and that was so much more strident and socially resonant. Punk was, they say, political.

And Elton's star also was outshown in many ways by his fellow glam rock and ambiguous or bending gender contemporary David Bowie, who was not a greater melodic compositional talent by any means (hardly anyone in rock music history is or was), but had a canny sense of the pulse of the time and how to engage with it, in songs that were interventions in the ethos of the time, which is what a pop music song should be; that’s what it makes it are and not just entertainment. That does not mean it has to take a “political” stance in the banal government-and-media sense of the contestable character of social life as reduced to the possible policies enforced by police, welfare agencies, and the rest of the benevolent bureaucracy that gives tolerable employments and directives for compliance to keep busy so many people. Our time may be one of the primacy of the political, but how this works often is through art’s participation in “culture” as both repository of its works, like a great museum (and movies, television, and pop music are together the great museum people in societies as advanced as ours spend much of their life wandering through, usually neither having nor wanting as useful key an Ariadne’s thread; we would rather find the way out of work, school, and boredom), and something like “the form of life” as Italian philosophers now speak of, or what used to be called “lifestyle,” which is perhaps the form of life particular to every individual or individual social group or clique, that one would essentially buy and then show off to others, while enjoying it oneself. Music is something to get into; it’s an art that has beauty and it can be contemplated, but like films and novels, tends above all to be enjoyed; you can get lost in it. If there still is (should we want this? does anyone today?) a “reality” unworked over or interpreted by art, our uses of art for entertainment paper it over and preferably, because artworks are an intensified and focused window onto some world or experience, and in the sense of reality as something that goes missing and wanted, and is demanded as supplement or replacement, artistic worlds seem more real than life. Like the Talking Heads, among bands that flourished in the punk period, Bowie was a songwriter/performer for the art world, in ways that characteristically diverged from more pure entertainment. For art to do this, it must occupy a threshold, a liminal space perhaps, half consisting of the interior design of a world it presents for involved experience, and half the stance of one who is, like the performed, and often the listener or viewer, half in that world and half outside it, looking in; that is, aware that art is a strange copy of something that is not art, and whatever its function or meaning, it must be somehow in that relationship.

Elton and the almost equally formidable writing talent Taupin both seem like wasted talents in some ways, geniuses who could both churn out their respective assigned parts of a song in about 20 minutes. Call this the fluent and agile plasticity of an Early Style, contrasting to the wisdom, coldness, and distant rather than innocently engaged stance of a Late Style. Rock has been in a late style since punk and its precursors, like the Velvet Underground and, I think, Bowie. The other thing I find so striking about this Early Style was the combination in some songs of great melodic beauty and bitterly ironic lyrics. This was a feature of some of the very greatest songs of the time, like the Eagles's Hotel California and Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. The early seventies, a time I remember well as I was a kid, coming of age at a very weird time, was like the sixties turning rancid like into vinegar. That's why we punks so hated "hippies," though the ones we knew were not the Woodstock kind. It was an anxious time desperate to believe itself solidly engaged or en route in the pursuit of happiness. It was the time of the New Age, who to a lefty punk sensibility like mine were just right-wing liberals enchanted with some kind of vaguely maternal ethos and garbage like recycling so that ecological pretensions would make you holy by way of the new rituals and codes of use and consumption of goods. The shift is perhaps best indicated by drugs: soon the drugs of choice ceased to be pot and hallucinogens and became coke. Looking back, at a time when pleasures could be flamboyant because in this something was, if not being protested, announced. Perhaps it was a style pretending to be something important. In all of this, I have to say that Elton's second album, named simply after him, is full of soulful sings of touching sincerity. The year it was released, Elton showed up at an LA club wearing pink hot pants. One year after Stonewall enabled sex, through gay and gender queerness, to become the new question that was destined to displace vegetarianism and laundry detergents made kosher for middle class people who wished they had sloshed in the mud at Woodstock or demonstrated at Kent State, one of the best minds in pop music ever who may or may not have been half lost to coke and narcissism, and who maybe would come to think that freedom is watching some chick win a tennis match in Philly under the happy gaze of the United States' flag, this queer prick, a classically-trained musical conservatory child prodigy pianist, who liked provocatively stage-designed clotheses and poses, would record an album that still moves me as being as soulful and mature as the music of Elvis Costello a few years later. (Note: for better or worse, Elton and Taupin’s songs of love and longing work pretty much with any assignments of roles by gender.) I let myself drown a bit in sugary pop in the days, I will admit, like many of us I'm a sucker for prettiness of any kind, but as much as I thrilled then and still like some of the others, I think it may be his best little oeuvre.