There was no room for geeks in the seventies. Especially in music. If you were going to release a rock album during the Me Decade, you could be The Demon, The Starchild, The Spaceman, The Cat, The Iguana, The Boss, The Man in Black, The Belfast Cowboy, The Jewish Elvis, The Biggest Band in the World, God, The Prince of Darkness, The Glimmer Twins, Dr. Winston O' Boogie, The Sultan of Smooth Soul, The Thin White Duke or one of the Ramones. But not a geek.

Lou Reed may have studied poetry in college, but he was too trashy to be counted in the milieu. Led Zeppelin wrote songs about hobbits, but did it in such a bone-rattling manner that they still managed to get epic amounts of ass. You had the Talking Heads, but they weren't so much geeks as they were weirdo art school dropouts, beatniks with synths. You had Billy Joel, but he was just simply the wrong kind of geek. Listen to “Piano Man”, and visualize Joel closing his eyes really hard, taking himself way too seriously as he sings the words. You know what I mean.

But until 1977 there just wasn't a guy like Elvis Costello. A former data-entry clerk with a penchant for country music, the Costello of 1977 seems like a hard fellow to classify. He was too well-mannered for punk, too clean-cut for glam, too raw for the “Sunny California” sounds dominating the pop charts back then, too basic for prog, and too literate for the pub rock scene he crawled his way out of. He just didn't fit in anywhere, and continues to not. Who the hell else in the rock world deigns to collaborate unironically with a lounge rat like Burt Bacharach and comes out the other side still as cool as he's always been?

By now songs like “Alison” and “Radio Radio” are so ubiquitous to the rock/pop gourmand that we tend to not necessarily think of them as ingenious songcraft. But, considered in its context, the early work of Elvis Costello is practically pioneering. With its eclectic range, restrained production, and a deftness in lyricism that makes room for the complex and the honest to stand together uncrowded, Costello's catalog may be classified among the first efforts of the New Wave movement - but all New Wave meant back then was that you didn't pack arenas, and showered too often to be true punk rock. In reality, My Aim is True might be the very first Geek Rock record . That is not to say that it is comparable to Rivers Cuomo's fetishistic odes to Japanese women or Nerf Herder's Yankovic-Meets-NOFX brand of humor. Rather, the way Costello straddles the liminal space between the primal sounds of rock and roll and savvy sensibilities of the gentleman and scholar places him in a rare position of unbridled emotional honesty, refreshing in the pretense ridden world of pop, and usually reserved only for people with a realistic view of themselves – in other words, geeks. He attains this position right from the get-go with “Welcome to the Working Week”, the visceral, cynical, and literate opener from his 1977 debut, My Aim is True.

Unlike his punk rock contemporaries, Costello doesn't attempt to peacock his misanthropy right away with loud distorted guitars and bombastic drums. Rather, the song jumps from a quick flirtation with neo doo wop into a kind of rock and roll that combines passionate grit with a sort of gentlemanly croon. Costello subtly utilizes the trademark glottal stops of Buddy Holly while at the same time allowing an unaffected growl to permeate his performance. Half-baritone and half-tenor, the vocals practically carry the song, channeling a gritty combo of Holly, Tom Jones, mild prescription uppers and a few coffin nails, sucked down in haste prior to the recording.

Such singing, enthusiastic and inviting, is an appropriate camouflage for the lyrics, which seem to detail a disgust on Costello's part with quotidian living. Such scorn is particularly detailed in the second verse. Costello describes a family which has had to “kill to survive”, ostensibly to earn a reward for which they are still waiting. Simultaneously, he sets himself (or the Narrator) apart by pointing out that this selfsame family would bury him alive for his views. What those views entail is not explicitly stated. However, one can easily infer an existential crisis, namely the one that occurs when a man finally asks himself “to what end am I frittering away my life with meaningless work.” Commonplace in terms of dilemmas, to be sure - but nonetheless taxing. Costello elaborates on his iconoclastic position in society, describing a person too wrapped up in fiction and distractions to notice the true depressing state of their being. “Sometimes I wonder if we're living in the same land,” he opines – but given the direct object of his invective, he very might be muttering this to himself.

As the basic guitar, bass, and drum work is joined by back-up singers and claps, one gets the impression of a busy cityscape, clogged with commuters. Meanwhile, the chorus, which begins with the titular “welcome to the working week”, expresses condolences for the drudgery and a hope that it doesn't kill us, before cyclically reverting back to another “welcome to the working week”. This repetition, given the context, communicates the rapidity with which a life of toil and transit passes – by the time that working week is over, it's already started again. Of course, at a minute and twenty-four seconds, by the time the listener begins to form this interpretation, the song is over. A final chord rings out, followed closely by a final slam on the drums – perhaps meant to represent the death rattle that ends the wasted, unexamined existence. Fade out to silence.

While the brevity of the piece may be considered a structural component of its overarching theme, the fact that the song is so short is also a large portion of its inherent charm. In fact, one can go so far as to say that “Welcome to the Working Week” invites repetitive play and thusly invites comparisons to that relentless Monday-thru-Friday itself. Of course, the Costello's concision may be just a demonstration of his natural sense of economy – why prolong a song unnecessarily when there are eleven more gems to listen to?