The 500 - #98 - This Year's Model - Elvis Costello & The Attractions

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by New York-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

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Album: #98

Album Title: This Year's Model

Artist: Elvis Costello and The Attractions

Genre: Pop Punk, New Wave, Power Pop, Garage Punk

Recorded: Eden Studios, London, England

Released: March, 1978

My age at release: 12

How familiar was I with it before this week: Somewhat

Is it on the 2020 list? Yes, at #121 - dropping 23 spots

Song I am putting on my Spotify Playlist: This Year's Girl

"I want you." Three simple words. Depending on who's saying them, "I want you" can sound romantic, desperate, manipulative, or terrifying. 

Yet, the words "I want you" echo through the history of popular music. From The Beatles' I Want You (She's So Heavy) in 1969 to Cody Johnson's I Want You in 2026, artists across genres and generations have built entire songs around that declaration. A quick search reveals a surprisingly long list of titles that either use the phrase directly or place it at the heart of the song's message, including four records on The 500

Every week as I work my way through a different record on Rolling Stone Magazine's list of The 500 Greatest Albums, I discover an album with lyrics that feel surprisingly current. This week that album is Elvis Costello's This Year's Model. Released in 1978, it arrived at a fascinating moment in popular music when the anger and urgency of punk began rubbing shoulders with the bright, buoyant pop energy of new wave. As I found out, the debate surrounding its lyrics feels right at home in 2026.

The Attractions (l-r) Steve Nieve, Costello, Bruce Thomas, Pete
Thomas (no relation).

Some critics have argued that Costello's lyrics portray women as little more than prizes, possessions, or objects of male desire. Costello has long pushed back against this premise. Discussing the second album track, This Year's Girl, he argued that the song's real subject is not women themselves but the way men look at them. As he put it: "Everything in the song is about the way men see women and what they desire from them." In Costello's view, the song is less an expression of misogyny than a critique of the unrealistic fantasies and expectations that shape attraction in the first place.

This Year's Girl single release.

Part of the debate may stem from a common assumption that the narrator of a song speaks directly for the songwriter. Yet, as I often share with my middle school students, poets and songwriters, like novelists and playwrights, often write from the perspective of characters whose beliefs and actions they do not personally endorse. Many of the men who populate This Year's Model are insecure, jealous, judgmental, and obsessive. The question listeners have wrestled with for nearly 50 years is whether Costello is giving voice to those attitudes or exposing them. His answer has consistently been the latter.

Poring over the lyrics of This Year's Model, immersed in the album's long history, it was this debate, and Costello's thoughtful response to it, that resonated the most. Modern audiences are still wrestling with many of the same issues from half a century ago. Whether in a 1978 new wave album or the 2025 thriller Obsession, which my wife and I recently watched, we're often drawn to stories that ask uncomfortable questions: Where does affection end and obsession begin? At what point does attraction stop being about another person and start becoming a projection of our own wants, needs, and desires?

Poster for Obsession.

Commentators, such as New York University professor and podcaster Scott Galloway, have pointed to a growing crisis of connection among young men. He has argued that many are dating less, socializing less, and increasingly turning to screens rather than real-world relationships. At the same time, dating apps can create the perception that a small number of highly desirable people receive the majority of attention, leaving others feeling invisible or rejected.  

The Lost Boys Podcast, on which hosts Galloway and Scaramucci
explore practical ways for young men to eschew the rhetoric 
of toxic masculine / Manosphere influencers to build resilience
purpose and success.

Most young men do not respond to the manosphere frustrations in unhealthy ways, of course. But together with the rise of online "incel" communities, force-fed negativism directed at males can, and sometimes does, result in loneliness hardening into resentment, and resentment into distorted views of relationships. In that light, both This Year's Model and Obsession are important cultural commentaries. They remind us that the danger isn't desire itself; it's what happens when another person stops being a person and becomes an object onto which fantasies, expectations and disappointments are projected.

Earlier, I mentioned how three simple words, "I Want You", can mean so many different things. Eight years after This Year's Model,  Costello challenged his listeners to confront toxic romantic fixations with the song I Want You. The track, from his 1986 album Blood and Chocolate dives even deeper, turning a familiar expression of affection into a haunting study of obsession and possessiveness.

Album cover for Blood and Chocolate (1986)

I believe that we need to be mindful of these dark poetic portrayals of obsession, jealousy and misguided desire to illustrate that love is not supposed to consume us. By showing relationships at their most unhealthy and destructive, songs, films and stories can help us appreciate the qualities that make love worth pursuing in the first place: trust, respect, honesty, and genuine connection.

Perhaps the ultimate value of Costello's darkest songs is not that they celebrate undesirable impulses, but that they illuminate them, allowing us to choose something better.