Got it stuck in my head; can't get it out. So here it is.
Not Elvis Costello's greatest song, nor his greatest video (that would be this rarity, I'd say), but it's pretty cool all the same. But what's with the jokes at the expense of Charles and Diana? Were they so obviously deserving of mockery as early as 1983? I guess Mr. MacManus was just ahead of his time here.
The video was, at the time, ironic. Everyone was so gushingly overboard on the 'storybook wedding of the century', that Elvis had to go the other way: they're just an ordinary British couple cramped into a small apt and she's unhappy.
ReplyDeleteHow prescient he turned out to be...
Dave, that makes perfect sense. I hadn't thought of it that way at all, and I should have; I just showed clips from The Queen in my Comparative Politics class, and I was attempting to explain to the students why the death of Princess Diana was such a huge public deal...and that required I explain about her history and the wedding, and they just couldn't relate. It was a different world--and in that world, Costello's video is fabulously apt. Thanks for helping me see it.
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