Carousel Corner.(The Music)

 
Carousel Corner 
 
   And when I die and go to pure pop heaven 
   The angels will gather around 
   And ask me for my whole life story 
   And ask for that fabulous sound 
   But I know they're gonna stop me 
   As I start going through every line 
   And say please not the whole damn album 
   Nobody has that much time 
 
   Please ... just the hit single 
   You gotta love that number one 

Joe Jackson, "Hit Single"

It's a bit of weird karma, except for the brief mention (Live in Tokyo and Steppin' Out, The Video Collection in No. 90), that has kept Joe Jackson's new music out of this column since its inception. Jackson's last pop album of consequence, Laughter and Lust, was already in the cut-out bins when the "Carousel Corner" debuted, and his output until the three discs in this month's issue either didn't inspire or didn't fit into whatever we were ranting about at the time.

Of all Britain's "angry young men," including Elvis Costello and Graham Parker, we've harbored a voracious appetite and not a wee bit of anticipatory drool for Joe Jackson. From 1978's Look Sharp! to 1992's Laughter and Lust, Jackson offered up an eclectic potpourri of styles and bands, always guaranteeing smart lyrics brimming with pathos and irony, impeccable musicianship, and catchy tunes. A Joe Jackson disc, like those from Steely Dan, would offer a fabulous ride and, when all was put away, leaving one wanting just one more song. Then strangely he disappeared completely from pop music, releasing two ambitious compositions, Heaven and Hell and Symphony No. 1. "[A] composer ... is what I wanted to be in the first place," Jackson semi-explains in his 1999 autobiography, A Cure for Gravity, and considering the molds he'd shattered during his pop career, the works were oddly solid and in hindsight predictable, if not the trenchant slices of pop innovation he'd served up before.

Jackson's returned to the pop arena with a series of outings, dating back to 1999, amount to a summing up of his career, a slow arcing flare over the bow of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and perhaps a portent for his future. Then again, for someone for whom the present is the all, whose musical tastes and directions are only predicted at considerable risk, and for whom a certain circularity is fitting, we'll not to try to make too much of it.

Joe Jackson, A Cure for Gravity (A Musical Pilgrimage) (Da Capo Press, 1999)

The very notion of thinking man's rock is borderline oxymoronic. Rock'n'roll is glands, angst, chops, nerve, sweat, cars, and frantic coupling. But if Joe Jackson has insisted on nothing else from the post-punk edge of Look Sharp! to the shimmering homages to Tin Pan Alley and New York of Night and Day II, it's that you take him, his music, and his lyrics seriously. Jackson, like Dylan, Springsteen, Becker and Fagan, and Lennon and McCartney, doesn't pen one syllable or place one note that doesn't mean something, all within the context of a pop song. One would posit further that the thinking man's rock musician and song writer would at some point fairly well along in his career stand back and reflect on where he's been, what he's accomplished, and what remains to be done, unconsciously summoning Kierkegaard's dictum, "The unreflected life is not worth living." Sometimes this reflection indicates a career turn accompanied, or not, by a receding hairline or the first fleck of gray. In Jackson's case I believe it is all of the above, an abject gaze into the rear view mirror--just as we see him on the cover of Night and Day II, maybe or maybe not an intended irony.