Elmo
The Best of Elmo
[CTW; 1996]
6.4
Can we admit that the “best of” compilation still serves a purpose, even in this day and age of custom playlists and genre-dissolving mash-ups? After all, we’ve had 30 years to improve upon the transcendent sequencing of “Al Green’s Greatest Hits” and haven’t come close. Even the tired old “Hot Rocks” remains a perfectly convenient gateway to the riches of “Exile on Main Street.”
Still, the best argument for holding on to this hoary tradition may be to enjoy what happens when it is inevitably applied to those artists least suitable for it. Case in point: Elmo, who has arguably done more to thwart commercial and fan expectations than any pop figure since post-Blood on the Tracks Dylan. If “The Best of Elmo” fails to make artistic or historical sense of the Red One’s willfully enigmatic career trajectory, it nonetheless produces some the most jarring, pleasurable juxtapositions this side of a Girl Talk set.
As if sensing the impossibility of the task at hand, the producers seek to impose coherence via an overarching interstitial narrative: some claptrap about Elmo needing to decide which of his drawings to submit to the “Monster Art Show” (ironic indeed, given Elmo’s emphatic rejection of early attempts to align him with the then-burgeoning “Fur n’ Fang” scene). But this seemingly benign conceit can’t contain the paranoia that suffuses the Elmo oeuvre, and it soon warps into a metaphor for our muppet’s famously fraught relationship with his audience. Adoring friend after friend steps forward to claim the drawings for themselves, until their maker is left empty-handed, stripped of his gifts.
And what of those gifts? The one indisputable hit, “Elmo’s Song,” is here, of course. Placed as it is at the very end, it’s hard not to read its blunt declaration of creative autonomy (“I wrote the music / I wrote the words”) as an unapologetic disclaimer concerning the tracks preceding it. Certainly, bizarre song-and-dance nostalgia piece “Happy Tappin’ with Elmo” is nothing if not the declaration of someone willing to follow his muse where it leads him, entertainment-value (not to say dignity) be damned. A far more interesting failure is “Five,” a misguided foray into hip-hop that has miraculously become (slightly) less embarrassing with age. Is there not a touch of Gaga in his deft appropriation of those Hammer pants?
Oddly enough, the inclusion of these fiascos illuminates the more canonical work, attuning us to frequencies we may have missed the first time around: the melancholy corporeality of Ernie duet “One Fine Face,” the joyous savagery lurking beneath pastoral hymn “The Sound That’s in the Air,” the Rimbaudesque derangement powering psychedelic party jam “In Your Imagination.”
“It’s Elmo’s World,” goes the slogan — “and we just live with it,” one is tempted to add, the high-pitched cackle still lingering in the ears long after the most recalcitrant child has toddled off to bed. But even the most familiar neighborhood occasionally offers the opportunity to get lost. This collection, for all its flaws, may be just the hidden, junk-strewn alley we need.
