ABSTRACT
When Elvis Costello lampooned a socially conservative sound recording broadcasting industry on his album This Year’s Model in 1978 (just months after the Sex Pistols’ 1977 mock anthem “God Save the Queen” raised a media furor during Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver jubilee year), he might well have been thinking of British radio’s discursively complex infancy. Costello’s lyrics to the album’s last song are manifestly about censorship and the ideology of nationhood in the 1970s. A closer look, though, reveals a latent content of a particularly resonant type with respect to the early history of radio, as his lyrics harmonize with several of early radio’s keynotes. Costello was undoubtedly not pondering this history when he penned the lyrics to “Radio, Radio;” nevertheless, these lyrics uncannily evoke several of the discourses that had produced and nourished the British Broadcasting Company more than half a century earlier. Radio broadcasters in 1978, Costello thought, were “saying things that I can hardly believe/They really think we’re getting out of control.” He continues, in the bitterly ironic tone characteristic of so much punk and post-punk popular music:
The final verse drives home Costello’s epidemiological attribution of social disaffection in 1970s British youth at least in part to the system of music production and distribution that, as he puts it in the opening verse, had succeeded in bringing “tears to my eyes”:
In this brief song, Costello engages with the discourses of anarchy (“They really think we’re getting out of control”), rationality (“the voice of reason”), nationhood and it discontents (“they think that it’s treason”), aesthetics and emotion (“a lot of fools/Tryin’ to anaesthetize the way that you feel”), and, above all, technocultural messianism (“Radio is a sound salvation”). His lyrics are at once surgically precise, conspiratorially vague (Who exactly are “they” who “don’t wanna hear about it”? Who are the “fools”?), and sweeping in their social scope. Costello’s overt purpose is to criticize the contemporary British popular music recording industry. But read as historical allegory, “Radio, Radio” appears as an inadvertent and indirect but tightly condensed and highly relevant punk-era commentary on the birth of broadcasting itself and on the residual ideological influence that British broadcasting’s founders continued to exert into the later twentieth century.
