Agreed so far and I been putting in work

How long do you stay on an album if its boring?

Depends on a few different criteria. Costello is a very dense wordsmith so I give him the eggs benefit of the doubt and marinate well after I would've moved on with someone less lyrical. Sometimes I give up after one or two listens.

Watching Midnight Mass. It’s great but Nick Cave should have played the priest.

There are the only two songs you really need to hear before This Years Model

One is this ridiculously tender ballad (for a punk)

And the other is this obscenely gnarly reggae banger

Looking forward to your thoughts

I can see that. Musical stuff always clicks with me way faster than lyrical. I didnt give a s*** about Dylan's earlier folkier stuff til years later.

"Oooohhhhhhhh I get what he's sayin now "

I have a weird paradox in my taste in that I consider myself too stupid to usually pick up on the deeper layers in lyrics but at the same time, as RVI would tell you, I'm more of a lyric guy. I'm starting to think it's not so much the lyrics as it is the vocal performance and the humanity, empathy, rage, etc conveyed through it. It doesn't matter how epic your instrumental is or how complex and genius your lyrics are if your vocal performances weak I'm not into it.

Weird because I find his early stuff is a lot more straightforward than the rock and roll stuff which is pretty f***in ambiguous sometimes

smh its not as good as this year's model but debut is easily his 2nd best that ive heard

imagine disregarding this melody

and calling costello a punk

I said there's only two he really needs to hear

And he didn't dress like a punk but all he listened to was the s***pistols when making those first couple albums. He already had a family and a career and stuff but since when is the real definition of punk being a d***gie skid.

if costello is a punk for that then we can just call any new wave artists punks

if they had some gnarly singles out in 1977 then sure why not

The abstract stuff just hit me faster. (Even though Visions of Johanna is one of my favorite Dylan songs and that's pretty clear I think)

Then I went through my first serious breakup and Freewheelin and Another Side made a lot more sense.

New wave is just an term mtv created to sell more subscriptions. Elvis and the police are more punk than Duran Duran and more disco influenced New Wave artists

To be honest I don't even use the term new wave. Either a punk or synth-pop.

ok they are more influenced by punk but that doesnt mean theyre punk artists

and idc if they were punk in their embryonic stage, nobody thinks the police made punk music

Punk wasn’t around long enough to be this elitist about it. Considering post-punk and hardcore started at almost the same time, there’s gotta be less than 10 “actual” punk artists by your criteria

I could’ve easily have said Devo

We should just call punk “second generation rockabilly”

im not being elitist im just using the definition of actual punk rock music lol

i can name dozens of the standard universally agreed punk bands, im just not gonna pretend the definition applies to the Cars or Costello when they clearly do not have the characteristics of the music other than the fact that it's energetic rock that came out in the late 70s

Costello and Cars have nothing to do with each other at all

i mean surely you can see how Devo's first few albums are a lot more punky than The Police