Just A Soft Soap Story

“I found America hiding in the corner of my walletIt’s a well-kept secret; thought that I had better swallow it” 

Somehow, Elvis Costello manages to cram an album’s worth of themes into two lines. 

“B-Movie” is a great example of Costello’s frequent scattershot approach to lyrics. Couplets hang together, but those couplets don’t always connect with one another. There’s the fantastical image of a country in a wallet, and later the more straightforward threat of “It’s not your heart I want/to break.” The brutality of the latter suffocates any whimsy in the former. 

The chorus seems to suggest that the song’s about a girl, and that the metaphor of the title is about how little the singer seems to care about her. (“I can’t stand it when it goes from reel to real,” as clever a pun as the man has ever penned.) That puts the violence in a darker light, while at the same time casting those opening lines as a nonsequiter; how do they fit together? 

It’s tempting to find one single thread of reality that neatly ties together a song like “B-Movie,” and many of Costello’s tunes. America, wallets and violence seem to suggest the fallout of Costello’s run-in with Ray Charles’ band in Columbus, OH. The “you” he speaks to could be his wife, or any woman he was seeing at the time. 

Detached from the literal, those opening lines pack serious punch. The idea of an America so small it can fit into a wallet; the country hiding where money lives, a handy metaphor for capitalism’s hold on the US; Costello swallowing the country whole as a way of explaining the sound of “B-Movie” and the rest of Get Happy!!, which is run through with appropriated American soul and R&B. 

Like Bob Dylan, Costello often isn’t trying to tell just one story, or convey one set of meaning; he’s trying to leave the right pieces on the table for the listener to assemble as they will.