The Green Shirt Gauntlet

After bragging on Elvis Costello's lyrics, one of our anonymous readers challenged me to interpret "Green Shirt."

I was afraid of this. "Green Shirt" is one of those early songs where the words come fast and quick, but aren't always clear. The main point about lyrics, anyway, is how they sit on a tune, not how they read without it. "Green Shirt," like any Elvis song of this period, has lots of delicious phrases, so even when you have no overall theory, it still sounds great.

In fact, the song has the famous phrase "Quisling clinic," which Elvis claimed in an interview was just a place he saw when he toured the USA, nothing more. Well, perhaps nothing more, but when Elvis saw it he must have thought this is a great term for where they deal with traitors in one of my paranoid songs.

I'll be honest--until today I had never attempted a unified interpretation of the song. I just let the little bits here and there entertain. But looking at it as a whole, it's not necessarily that tough to bring together.

Elvis of this era has three main topics: sex, politics, and sex and politics. And while he throws a lot at you, he's usually not that hard to understand. He's rarely cryptic, like Steely Dan can be. He's rarely surrealistic, like Dylan can be. He's rarely annoying, like Bernie Taupin.

So, "Green Shirt." This is one of Elvis's songs where sex and politics merge. (Dont forget the working title of his Armed Forces album was Emotional Fascism.) Of course, sex to him isn't about silly love songs--it's about lust and hatred and rage and paranoia. The title conjures up the fascistic image of brown shirts, only a little more colorful--the emotional color of green.

The song starts with a woman on a blue screen who comes into the singer's house. The blue screen is TV, but perhaps this is the Orwellian version of TV, where she's watching him. She takes all the colors of the spectrum and turns them into black and white. In this Orwelllian vision, emotions are corrected and simplified.

But there are those in their green shirts, who try to play the game of love their own way, against what Big Sister demands. You don't want to get caught, lest you be tortured in the Quisling clinic. Big Sister listens to the "Venus line"--where people are talking about their own version of love, against the state. If she catches you, they're in trouble. People are trying to please themselves, they're trying to play the game their way, but they get caught up in the game and get in trouble themselves.

Of course, you don't have to read the politics as being anything but metaphorical, and the whole song is about the emotional minefield you get stuck in if you wish to play the game of love.