Many books come out each year deconstructing rock music: The musicians, their albums, their songs, their showering habits, and their other habits. It’s here where we’ll take an excerpt of a book for you to check out before you make the purchase. As of now these will exclusively feature the venerable 33 1/3 series, which picks apart an album by a band or musician. In the future, we hope to include more rock books of all varieties.

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Unlike Sam Cooke and, later, Aretha Franklin and Al Green, Ray Charles did not cross over to secular stardom from a sig­nificant gospel career. But in combining a spiritual melody (“My Jesus Is All the World to Me”) with a worldly R&B lyric—and a vocal style that split the difference—his 1954 recording of “I Got a Woman” became the template for modern soul. His 1962 album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music was no less innovative. Dressing a genre often viewed as crude in lush string arrangements and vocal choruses would have been bold for a white performer of the time; for a black singer to wring a #1 pop hit (“I Can’t Stop Loving You”) from this synthesis was revolutionary.

Elvis Costello’s own trawl through the country repertoire, 1981’s Almost Blue, was widely viewed as an outsider’s attempt to annex foreign territory; how much it owes to Charles’ more successful one has gone unnoticed. Produced by Billy Sherrill, who got his start in the Muscle Shoals soul scene before heading to Nashville, Almost Blue again sets a rough vocal presence against the sort of smoothed-out backing that Charles introduced to the genre (and which Sherrill brought back home). This, at least, was the idea; EC later expressed disappointment that the countrypolitan polish was not more liberally applied. The album ends by confounding the distinction between black and white vernacular music with “Honey Hush”, previously recorded both as jump blues (Joe Turner) and rocka­billy (Johnny Burnette).

No stranger to career reversals, Charles forgave—“excused” is the better word—EC for his behavior in Columbus not long after the episode (see Columbus, p. 6). His on-the-record com­ment: “Anyone could get drunk at least once. Drunken talk isn’t meant to be printed in the paper and people should judge Mr. Costello by his songs rather than his stupid bar talk.” This leaves what the appropriate judgment ought to be entirely open.

Even more than on “Green Shirt”, the arrangement and pro­duction of “Chemistry Class” seem imposed on the song from without. The verses alternate strictly between two instrumental textures, linked by an eight-note pulse carried first by piano, then by toms. The third verse switches the order of these units, setting up a dramatic approach into the final chorus. The cho­ruses combine these opposing registers, and thicken the sound with an acoustic strum (and some precise piano/electric guitar interplay); ABBA’s influence is, if anything, more pervasive than on “Oliver’s Army.” Dub/psychedelic touches from early in the album return: Tremoloed guitar clouds the mix, and an atonal, arrhythmic howl of uncertain provenance dominates the fade.

The repetition of “if it wasn’t for some acciden—accidents, some would never, ever learn,” turns 4/4 time into 5/4 for exactly one measure—not that you have to count the beats to register this as a tear in the fabric. The Attractions could have learned to play the song this way, but they didn’t. Bechirian cre­ated the effect by a tape splice of two copies of the recorded performance. “It was just an idea I had—I didn’t know what any­one else would think of it. So I took a rough mix home, did the splice on a Revox, and brought it in. Nick and the band thought it was great, so we ran another copy of the master and spliced it into the final mix.” Such touches are not exactly an EC trade­mark, though there have been others: On Blood & Chocolate, Lowe assembled “Battered Old Bird” from three performances in different tempos. In this case, the effect is self-referential—it sounds like an accident. Along with the darkness and wetness of the mix, it also ties the album’s penultimate song to its open­ing track, with “Two Little Hitlers” as a dried-out coda. This is less evident in the US track order, where “Chemistry Class” sits next to “Moods for Moderns” in middle-of-Side-Two purgatory.

Beneath the disruption and ornamentation lies a simple form: Three verses, three choruses. The verses are in EC’s “knocked-together” mode, running over a five-chord progression with little effort to regulate meter or rhyme scheme. (The second verse is eight bars longer and cycles through the chords twice, but its harmonic relation to the chorus is identical to the others’.) The verse melody is conversational, contrasting with the richer chorus. The harmony opens up at the title, but this line and the next (“you don’t know what you’ve started”) are based on what has come before; what differs is EC’s smoother phrasing, and the elaborate melisma on “mine.” This sets the stage for the song’s central melodic—and verbal—event: “Are you ready for the final solution?” The notes are held longer; “lu-tion” leaps up nearly an octave from “so,” landing on the sophisticated sounding major seventh of the underlying (and out-of-key) C chord. The phrase subsides with a drawn-out “oh”—very much a pop-rock “oh,” not a R&B/soul “ooh”—as a standard IIm–V–I transition leads back to the verse.

Even if we’ve already assimilated “white niggers,” “Quisling Clinic,” and “you’ll never make a lampshade out of me,” this hook is as disturbing as it is meant to be—genocide set to a wide-open pop tune, with a family resemblance to “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Worse, it appears to be a near-pun; by asso­ciation with the title, “solution” carries the sense of “combination of liquids” as well as the blander “answer.” We can hear what EC is asking us all too well, but it is not obvious why. Through­out AF, EC tests popular music’s lab equipment and his own growing mastery of it; here, this amounts to seeing just how bitter a pill he can sugarcoat.

In the Rolling Stone/Ranters interview, EC dismissed parts of AF as “glib,” and commented further on its “charged language” in the Rhino notes: “Personal and global matters are spoken of with the same vocabulary; perhaps this was a mistake.” Or, as Pamela Thurschwell has written, “One of Costello’s most dubi­ous and interesting moves is to take the imagery bequeathed by the Holocaust as the metaphorical fodder of modern existence.” But with this song, set late in the album, it’s no longer clear which way this metaphor is supposed to run. The surrounding verses, vivid but diffuse, are no help, touching on (among other things) scientific imagery, bad jokes about vocational school, and an oblique sense of sexual threat. Are the matters spoken of here personal, or global—or is asking this our first mistake?

The early live version—so early that the third verse is miss­ing—on the Rhino bonus disc seems to have been included to back up EC’s claim, in the liner notes, that the song reflected his disaffection with American audiences, particularly collegiate ones. The crowd is noisy, ignoring the dressing down they paid to hear. For all they care, he could be singing anything from “Cha-Dooky-Doo” to “Deutschland Über Alles”; no wonder he sounds like he wants to ruin their lives.

This extra information is interesting in retrospect, but it wasn’t available to most listeners; even now, the AF version is more effective if its origins are left opaque. If there’s more than a stunt here, it’s what the stunt demonstrates: That the language, if not the fact, of atrocity has become so commonplace that it can be pulled from its proper context and incorporated into the triviality of a pop record, a mass market artifact disseminated indiscrimi­nately to the many—very many, if all goes as planned—who will hear it. We ought decently to recoil from the chorus, and to some degree we do, thinking, “He’s gone too far.” But most of us—EC’s audience—let him get away with it, though we’ve just heard what we would normally agree to be the unique, unas­similable, unrepresentable tragedy of twentieth century history made, as Barthes would say, “childish, sophisticated, obscure.” To the extent that we hear this question and keep listening, our implicit answer is “Yes.”