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DON'T SEND ANY MONEY
That Fatal Mailing List #53: "This Offer is Unrepeatable" (1993)
The central conceit of Elvis Costello’s 1994 album The Juliet Letters (with the Brodsky Quartet) involves a professor in Verona who took up the task of replying to letters sent to the city in care of Juliet Capulet, the titular co-star of Shakespeare’s famous play.
This is the star-crossed lover’s equivalent of a child’s letter to Santa Claus, except that kids of a certain age surely believe that their words are being perused by the big red guy, and it seems impossible that any sensible adult could believe a centuries-old fictional character would be receiving their correspondence. As EC himself puts it in the liner notes to Juliet Letters:
After all, these people were writing to an imaginary woman, and a dead imaginary woman at that. Perhaps they were simply scholarly enquiries, or letters of sympathy from others disappointed in love, or even a plea from somebody forced into an unhappy arranged marriage. Whatever was contained in these letters and their replies, the idea of this correspondence provided our initial inspiration.
With the wide remit of “letters from lovers,” Costello and his co-lyricist Paul Cassidy hit upon “This Offer is Unrepeatable” as “a rather extreme form of junk mail,” taking up the subject of a since-lost fixture of the snail mail era: The chain letter.
I remember being roped occasionally into a version of it, sometimes involving books; if I sent seven books to seven people on this list, then 49 books would suddenly show up in my mailbox, or something. Over the pandemic, my kids even got roped into a version that involved stickers.
But what EC is singing about here is a more superstitious version, one that involves sending a chain letter to a certain number of people in order to guarantee prosperity, or ward off disaster, or sometimes both. Of course, that’s since become a popular e-mail format among the older and chronically superstitious, the one you get from your grandmother that insists the Virgin Mary has special things in store if you just show your devotion by forwarding an e-mail to hundreds of people. I would assume Mary’s a little less insecure than that?
Within the context of The Juliet Letters, “This Offer” is a palate cleanser, a moment of snarky comedy amid some torrid emotional turmoil. Costello and the Brodskys don’t shy away from the darkest side of passionate love; there’s a sweep to the piece as a whole that plays on a careful line between sincerity and melodrama. Considering the previous track suggests a possible lover’s suicide and the following track sings about wringing necks, “This Offer” is a breath of fresh, acrid air.
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