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Elvis Costello will say whatever. He doesn't care. In the past, that tendency has gotten him into trouble. He was famously banned from Saturday Night Live earlier in his career, and he once said some drunken, racist stuff against Ray Charles that he's still apologizing for decades later. (Don't Google that. It'll bum you out.) Today, Costello is a beloved figure of the rock 'n' roll establishment; he just sang one of his songs with Stephen Colbert on Colbert's final Late Show last month. But Costello is still just saying whatever, even about British national heroes Oasis.
In a Liverpool Echo interview interview last week, Costello brought up Oasis completely unbidden. He was talking about his own tendency to follow his artistic muse to places that his fans might not always appreciate, and he used Oasis as an example of a band who don't necessarily come up with their own ideas. Costello tries to stay evenhanded, but it's been a while since I've seen anything short of deification for Oasis. Here's what he says:
This is probably an heretical thing to say to Mancunians, but I think that Oasis are a simplification of the La's. There was a purity to Lee [Mavers]'s songs and the whole attitude of that. [Oasis} is much more ruthless, and undoubtedly effective, so I'm not going to knock it.
It's not for me, never has been. Sometimes that happens. Someone has a good idea, and someone takes that idea and turns it into something that communicates to more people. If they're happy with it, then that's great.
But Costello isn't opposed to artists iterating on each other's ideas, and that includes the moments that the artist being iterated upon is him. After Olivia Rodrigo released her debut album Sour in 2021, backroom machinations caused Rodrigo to give retroactive songwriting credits to Taylor Swift and Paramore. Rodrigo's song "Brutal" uses the same riff that Costello deployed on his 1978 classic "Pump It Up," so he certainly could've sought the same kind of credit. He did not. At the time, he tweeted, "It’s how rock & roll works. You take the broken pieces of another thrill and make a brand new toy. That’s what I did," pointing out that the "Pump It Up" riff was inspired by Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," which in turn was inspired by Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business."
Olivia Rodrigo has a new album out today, so people are once again asking Elvis Costello about that decision. In a recent Times interview, Costello reiterated his point and recounted a conversation with Rodrigo:
That’s too silly to talk about. Well, I met Olivia, and she was lovely. I said, 'Look, this is just a riff, and how could I be arrogant enough to sue on the basis of originality when my song is based on 'Subterranean Homesick Blues'?...
Did Bob Dylan sue me? He teased me about it but didn’t sue. And did Chuck Berry sue Bob because his song was like 'Too Much Monkey Business'?
What you're not clocking is that Elvis Costello is standing on business.
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