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"You don't have to be a genius to work quite effectively within the confines of pop music," says Elvis Costello, the protean popster who never met a confine he didn't dislike.
Even his real name, Declan MacManus, proved too limiting for the restless expansionist. So, he adopted and shed aliases as grandiose as his vision — King of America and Napoleon Dynamite.
"There are no geniuses in rock 'n' roll," he says with his cocky but respected brashness.
But wait. Hold Costello's new album up to the "deep, dark truthful mirror" he sings about and you'll find unmistakable glimmers of genius. After almost three years, an eternity for pop's prolific bard, Costello is back on the charts with Spike, his 12th album in 12 years.
The No. 5 compact disc, it's No. 33 and his eighth to crack Billboard's Top 40 in this decade (only Kenny Rogers has more).
He launched a monthlong solo tour March 31, and the rock press continues to heap hosannas on his work. But the junior Elvis (not the one who keeps cropping up in Midwest laundromats) isn't keen on becoming a media pet or this year's model of pop commercialism.
"Records that want to be everything to everybody is rather like someone wanting to be the president of the United States," Costello says. "Anybody who wants the job should automatically be disqualified.
"The same goes for wanting to be the most famous person in the world. If all I wanted to be is famous and very rich, I could have done that years ago. It doesn't take intelligence. You only have to look at Donald Trump. You only have to be cunning and ruthless."
Like his willfully trend-bucking music, Costello is unapologetically indignant and opinionated. "It's a success if it's a success in my view when it leaves the studio." That may keep the mainstream at bay. But it's precisely his outrageousness — and the way it spikes his songs — that endears him to fans.
The 33-year-old Liverpudlian who's explored every hook and cranny on the musical map since 1977's My Aim Is True debut, offers a stylistic atlas on Spike, recorded in Dublin, London, Hollywood and New Orleans. Costello's Delphic tales are cloaked in luscious instrumentation and neatly tailored arrangements of jazz, rock and folk with cameos by Paul McCartney, Allen Toussaint, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Chrissie Hynde, Roger McGuinn and Irish folkies, the Chieftains.
Lyrically, he bounces from heart-tugging tenderness to spitting anger: "Veronica," co-written with McCartney, is a disquieting portrait of an old woman losing her cherished memories; "Let Him Dangle" is a fulmination on capital punishment. Elsewhere, he dreams of stomping on Margaret Thatcher's grave and finds God sipping cola on a water-bed.
Brazenly showy (the cover depicts him as a grinning Harlequin) but without forfeiting the bile and irony that energize his lyrics, Spike is Costello's most critically acclaimed work in a decade.
Historically his own harshest critic (he's confessed to penning "patronizing pop songs"), Costello for the moment seems in accord with his admirers. "It's pretty much the record I wanted to hear," he says.
Once Costello overcame a twinge of intimidation, writing with McCartney was relaxed and productive. "You have to be prepared to make fun of the other person's way of saying something; that's the way you get to the good stuff," he says. "If you act like 'This is my art, you can't touch it,' you're in trouble.
"Paul's very good at getting the job done. We were finished with the songs before we had time to labor over them. It was like ping-pong."
Spike's 15 cuts, flavored with fiddles, bagpipes, glockenspiels and horns, take on starker proportions in Costello's current one-man show. "It's quite a contrast to the album," he says. "It's a good way of taking the song back to where it started. It's important to me that people absorb the songs through the recording, then hear them nakedly on the tour. This tour is more in the spirit of rock 'n' roll than a band show, which is bound to certain conventions of spectacle and ritual."
Some spectacle remains. Costello shares the stage with a 6-foot satin heart inscribed with 13 and one-half deadly sins, "the original seven and another 6 and one-half that we've researched."
Spectators are nudged onstage by wolf-costumed ushers, blindfolded and instructed to pierce the heart with a spike.
"Once they've elected their sin, they have a moral dilemma," he says wryly. "They have to decide whether to commit that sin onstage — and we'll have an array of paraphernalia to assist them — or whether to name a song that represents that sin. And I play the song." Any song, he says, "I know millions of songs."
Many from Linda Ronstadt to Johnny Cash have covered his songs. But he adamantly refuses to lend his tunes to advertisements. He's refused $100,000 in endorsement offers this year alone.
"Someone offered me a lot of money to use my song in a commercial," he says, declining to name the company. "It wasn't a disgusting product, but I turned it down because I don't want my song associated with something I had nothing to do with. I don't want my songs carved up into bite-size snippets."
He's perplexed by pop stars who sell out. The "fairly slightly talented" Madonna risks tarnishing her carefully constructed stardom with exposure as a Pepsi mascot, Costello says.
"Madonna can't really sing that well," he contends. "It's her imagery that sells. Having established such a potent image, prostrating it in front of a can of soda pop seems to be an amazingly self-effacing thing to do. The only reward is a large amount of money, which she already has."
He's also concerned that career boosts rather than moral commitment inspire pop icons like Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston to donate their time to causes.
Jackson "seems to love children and animals. If he loves animals so much, why doesn't he get on TV and say, 'Hey kids, why don't you stop buying McDonald's?' McDonald's is one of the main contributors to the demise of the environment. Michael could be genuinely heroic and he's cheating himself of the opportunity to do something really memorable.
"He's a great singer, a terrific dancer, and yet he's limiting his imagery and his music, because he has to stay inside some corporate conception of his music.
"I firmly believe he'll be forgotten in 50 years completely, except statistically. I think he'll be like (Woody Allen's) Zelig or Rudy Vallee or Al Jolson, someone who was massively famous but in 50 years' time is completely forgotten. People will remember the Beatles because they moved us. They may remember Elvis Presley. "
And the alternative Elvis?
Whether his music endures is anyone's guess. But he rests easier knowing 21st-century archivists won't unearth his face on cereal boxes.
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