As I establish my routines here, I find that I often have to create my personal rules on the spot. And then I forget about them, as my brain is a memory sieve, a task bulemic. So time passes and what I said I’d do in writing doesn’t come to pass, except in my head I haven’t quite figured out what to do despite my promise to do it. See, I’m the type that can’t sit down to write the paper until it’s already written in my head; any attempt I make before that is as pointless as picking fruit in early spring – yeah, you might get something, but it’s not going to be very well developed, there’s not going to be much there, and frankly won’t really taste very good.
So today’s task is determining just what constitutes a flashback. I remember a noontime drive sometime in Spring of 2000, when, having just come in range of the venerable KROQ, I was appalled that they were playing Pearl Jam during the Flashback Lunch. Weren’t Flashbacks, in the Alternative milieu, strictly limited to synth-pop and other abominations of the 80s? These songs they were now playing were from my high school years – surely, that doesn’t count as a Flashback, right? I mean, that was just a few years ago by that point…
KROQ’s metric may have been the previous decade, but I don’t think that will work all that well for me. For one, my 90s years were the least eclectic and most mainstream of my sonic library, and what’s the point of bringing people’s attention to music everyone already knows? Secondly, music seems to move so quickly these days that last summer’s favorites seem like a distant memory. Did the last Arcade Fire, Stars, and National CDs only come out last year? So a compromise must be reached. 1 year is far too short; 10 far too long. About 3 should be fine, I guess. Coincides pretty well with my move out here, when music research began in earnest.
Whew.
Now that that’s set, it’s onto the Flashback for today. Of course, I ignored the fact that I could pick something from 05 and call it a day, and I’m reaching back to a 1978 live performance from Elvis Costello (taken from the second disc of the reissued Armed Forces CD).
Elvis Costello – Lipstick Vogue (live)
The plea of a spurned lover, this version finds Costello breaking the shackles of studio restraint on the original version. He really is disgusted by the snobbish ex-lover who’s cast him aside, who traffics in rumor, not love, and who is looking on to the next shiny thing on the horizon – never noticing that it’s all fake, lipstick on a pig.
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