The Green Shirt Gauntlet

from Thursday, March 23, 2006

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.

by LAGuy