Joe Jackson, one-time lounge pianist for the Portsmouth Playboy Club, lies somewhere on the New Wave Continuum between The Knack and Elvis Costello. He combines the intelligence of the former with the melodic and lyrical skills of, well, the former. Not that this has stopped him from selling records.
For me, Joe “I’m the Manque” Jackson has always come to mind when people say the words “New Wave.” Trouble is, I always hated the whole idea of New Wave. I would define New Wave as “The bunch of lame-O bands and artists who came along after punk croaked.” Dull and shallow artists who showed up with synthesizers or (in Joe’s case) without synthesizers, forcing the Minutemen to write “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth?”
Judging by record sales, very few people wanted the truth. On the positive side, Jackson is an activist on smoking bans. He’s against them. I may dislike Joe’s music, but when it comes to Smoking OPs, he’s on the side of the angels. I simply hope I don’t find out he smokes cigars. People who smoke cigars never want to hear the truth.
Jackson came out of the starting blocks with 1979’s successful Look Sharp! It included the pretty darn swell “Is She Really Going Out with Him.” He followed it the very same year with I’m the Man. On the cover, he dolls himself up as what the Brits call a “spiv,” or person who makes his dubiously legal living selling knock-off timepieces and the like, using the inside of his suit jacket as a kind of display window.
Joe even adopted the term “spiv music” to describe what he was doing. He told Rolling Stone, “I think people always want to put a label on what you do, so I thought I’d be one step ahead of them and invent one myself—spiv rock.” It’s a startlingly honest thing to say, because Joe IS a spiv—he’s always specialized in producing knock-offs of songs by his musical betters. I’m guessing he adopted the term as a defiant fuck you to those who accused him of doing just that. But I could be wrong.
Of I’m the Man, Robert Christgau wrote the curt, “Oh yeah? Then get the knack back.” I’ve never been quite sure what he meant by this, but I’m pretty sure that “knack” is a slur—either he’s comparing Jackson to the one-hit wonders, or he’s saying Jackson had lost the knack for writing good songs (although he’s not particularly kind to Jackson’s debut LP either). And Christgau’s review of 1980’s Beat Crazy includes some words I think perfectly summarize the biggest problem with I’m the Man: “The melodies,” he wrote, “escape me as usual…”
I’ve listened to I’m the Man dozens of times—I suffer for my art—and the only one of Jackson’s subpar Costello rips that I can instantly recall is the title track. Christgau once damned Jackson with the backhanded compliment, “Jackson’s done it again—fabricated a creditable facsimile of somebody else’s music.” When it comes to I’m the Man, I would delete that “creditable.”
“Competent,” maybe. But how competent can an artist be when you can’t recall any of his songs? I can’t even hum the melody of “It’s Different for Girls” ten minutes after I’ve heard it, and it was a big hit. I can summon up maybe a hundred Elton John melodies from memory. That’s the difference between a genius and a hack.
You’ve heard of Dad Rock? Jackson plays Alzheimer’s Rock.
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but the flattery falls flat on opener “On the Radio,” a toothless take-off of Elvis Costello’s “Radio Radio.” Jackson’s song not only lacks the hand-biting viciousness of Costello’s bile fest, but it also lacks a truly memorable melody. Joe’s not insulting radio, he’s proud to be on it, because his success is a colossal FU to the bullies who made his childhood an ordeal.
Elias Canetti once wrote, “Whenever you observe an animal closely, you feel as if a human being sitting inside were making fun of you.” Whenever you observe a Joe Jackson song closely, you feel as if an Elvis Costello sitting inside were mocking you for being a sucker.
The literally impossible-to-remember “Geraldine and John” is “Me and Mrs. Jones” for the squash-playing (“gotta keep their bodies supple”) set, and Jackson’s cheap gimmick (aside from the pseudo-reggae and cheesy melodica) is to make you think they’re a married couple. Only to end each chorus with the words “They are married but of course/Not to each other.” The guy’s a veritable O. Henry!
“Kinda Kute” is kinda okay; it edges towards being memorable only to recoil from the light and roll up into a little ball. The chorus SOUNDS memorable when you hear it; you think, “That’s catchy and memorable even if the song lacks a good melody,” but good luck recalling it later. You’ll end up humming the melody of “I’m the Man.” I like Joe’s piano solo—it adds a human touch to the proceedings and proves he didn’t spend those long nights at the Portsmouth Playboy Club in vain. And his self-deprecation (evidently, he dances like a penguin on Thorazine) adds a human touch as well.
“It’s Different for Girls” has these low-key but lovely verses that makes me think of Squeeze and louder choruses that make me think of Elvis C. (the pair are identical adenoidal twins) and there’s no denying it’s the most musically complex and sophisticated song here, and this from a guy who soon enough would be making sophistication (salsa, Louis Jordan, classical music even, and he wrote the classical stuff himself!) his calling card.
Of course, Costello would end up doing much the same thing. Rule One: Never trust a rocker turned sophisticate—by putting on airs, they’re out to make you think they have class, but to quote Repo Man, “You’re just a white suburban punk just like me.”
As for I’m the Man as a whole, I blame society.
“I’m the Man” is the winner—it has “That’s What I Like About You” power pop punch, proceeds at a breakneck pace, and both verses and chorus stick with you. Jackson can sell you “Anything from a thin safety pin, to a pork pie hat,” but I admit to being a bit disappointed to learn he’s not your run-of-the-mill spiv but a straw man for the great advertising industrial complex, always on the lookout for the next big trend, given voice:
“I’ll speak, to the masses through the media
And if you got anything to say to me
You can say it with cash.”
Rather turns it into a toothless and bitter snarl—if it’s Elvis Costello bile and bite you’re looking for, there’s this guy named Elvis Costello I suggest you check out. Before he rejoined the human race and took to palling around with Burt Bacharach, that is.
“Don’t Wanna Be Like That” is another punchy one, but the punch is purely musical: the lyrics are a collection of lunkheaded shots at easy targets–the “cocaine club,” who hang out at the pool (Joe prefers to go to work, besides, “L.A. sun can turn your brains/To scrambled eggs it’s true.”)
Now I have no problem with the sun over El Lay, and the town is full of people whose brains aren’t scrambled eggs, and I dated a woman who worked behind the bar once, and if you ordered scrambled eggs, she’d shout “Chucklefruit, wreck ‘em!” Which always cracked me up, but has nothing to do with this song.
As for the song, even the amusing lines “American girls that put their tongue in your ear/When they talk on the telephone” reek of scowling puritanism, and it’s both amusing and disagreeable to hear Jackson deliver the lines: “And the Playboy centerfold leaves me cold/And that ain’t ’cause I’m a fag” cuz like I’ve said twice he’s a Playboy Club alum himself. And that second line is ambiguous—is Joe (who is bisexual) in denial or proudly out?
Jackson’s comments on his sexuality have always been confusing. He once said, “Sex seemed to me, and to a great extent still seems, an ocean of mysteries. In that ocean, I was a plankton that could have as easily been straight or gay, male or female, animal, vegetable, or mineral.” At the risk of sounding mean, he rather looks like a plankton, or Golem. And to say he’s a plankton (and who compares themselves to a plankton?) is one thing, but a mineral? That’s not even a life form! This muddleheaded thinking all too often makes its way into his lyrics, which makes me think he could be a vegetable. A confused head of iceberg lettuce, perhaps.
“Amateur Hour” is an amateur hour ballad that tries to do too much at the expense of a simple and likable melody—call it death by songcraft. It’s the most forgettable song on the album, by which I mean both negligible and impossible to recall. “Get That Girl” has propulsion going for it and not much else, and Joe kills the propulsion at regular intervals. Joe’s dancing with your girl, but unlike the guy in “The Kids Are Alright,” you should be concerned that Joe’s giving her a whirl, because he means “to make her mine.”
The kids aren’t alright, they’re cads!
“Friday” opens with a gallop the way a song about Friday should, but once again Jackson overthinks it, and beyond the loping bass, I just don’t care—the song comes up short in both the verse and chorus departments, and is so busy it may as well be a progressive rock song.
In the great Friday sweepstakes, it comes limping across the finish line well behind “Friday I’m in Love,” “Friday on My Mind,” “Black Friday,” Loverboy’s “Friday Night,” and Bell & James’ “Livin’ It Up (Friday Night).” And it doesn’t help that the song’s jejune. What to make of a song that begins:
“Lazy Gilly was a flower child
All the summer
Calmly running wild
She’d be silly and her friends just smiled
Pass the bottle
Wash the pills down – what went wrong
What went wrong.”
Flower child? It’s 1979, Joe! “Calmly running wild”? How does that work? And that “What went wrong”—which we get twice—is pretty obvious, isn’t it? The atavistic flower child mixed booze and pills, and so much for the Summer of Love, twelve years too late!
Do you want New Wave or do you want the truth? I prefer the truth, and part of the truth is that the nebulous of rock genres (I would never include the likes of Joy Division, PiL, or the Talking Heads, as many do) produced more unlistenable music than any other nebulous genre than progressive rock. There are plenty of New Wave bands that annoy me more than Joe Jackson, but few have as little to say or expended more energy dissipating the energy of a good pop song than Mr. Jumpin’ Jive.
The kids are alright, always have been, always will be, but they can do better. What’s better? Just head down to the local pub on any Friday night and find out.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
D+
