The power of words and influences.

By HARRY BROWNE, Irish Times, 07/27/2002

It's hard to believe it's really 25 years since Elvis departed, and Elvis arrived. But there it was, fateful 1977, when Presley was despatched to the great rock 'n' roll party in the sky, and in came Costello declaring "My Aim is True", the album cover inscribed with the words, cheeky and repeated ad nauseum, "Elvis is King".

And it's been a case, happily, of "long live Elvis!", with the bespectacled pretender now having enjoyed a longer (dare I say "better"?) recording career than his illustrious royal predecessor. And while one should never pretend to know what goes on in the heart and soul of another being, you could at least venture to suggest that Declan Patrick MacManus, the boy Elvis, now does a more convincing job of appearing content and well-adjusted than did the bloated monarch of Vegas. But if you reckon there was an unseemly cockiness about young Costello ("Elvis is King" indeed, and in the silver jubilee year too), you might have heard echoes of it last Saturday when he turned up on Under the Influence (RTE Radio 1). It's not a lot of interviewees, after all, who come into the studio and push Joe Jackson around. But that sure sounded like what Elvis was doing, and enjoying it too.

Maybe that's a slight overstatement: let's just say that Elvis Costello made himself at home. And why wouldn't he? Not only has he been living in Dublin for years, but he's been a frequent guest and occasional presenter on Mystery Train (RTE Radio 1, Monday to Friday), where John Kelly gives him the run of the place. It must be said that on Under the Influence, Joe Jackson was also an absolute model host, skipping quickly and unobtrusively through any potentially awkward personal questions so that Costello could do what he wanted to do: talk about music, play a few favourite songs, plug his latest album. So you think you know something about pop 'n' rock? Let me tell you, I don't think you want to be matching wits with these guys, as the chat moves from the Mamas and the Papas to Please Please Me to Frank Sinatra to Charles Aznavour to the Small Faces, ending up with Costello himself singing like Bob Dylan (another man who had his definite pseudo-Elvis moments).

As Joe goes to play a song, arrogant Elvis cuts across him, mostly friendly, half-joking, but definitely taking charge: "You know what I think would be a better one? Let me remind you of the theme of the programme, it's about influencing". No harm at all, because the song he insists upon is John Lennon singing, with the Beatles, the great Smokey Robinson song, You Really Got a Hold on Me. Good man, Elvis, that covers a couple of influences at once and gives us three incredible minutes of radio to boot. What with the Dungannon roots and the Dublin home, can we count Costello now as one of Ireland's precious musical resources? Joe Jackson, of course, is something like that already, a great unlocker of the mysteries of the muse. (Even if Costello did accuse him of sounding "for all the world like Eamonn Andrews ...") Elvis and Joe might well say that when they get on the radio they just want "to play rock 'n' roll and tell the truth", but that phrase belongs, at least in recent incarnation, to the young people who in 1989 founded radio station B92 in Belgrade, where truth-telling, whatever about rock 'n' roll playing, could get you into all sorts of trouble.

This oft-told story of B92, shut down four times by the government and caught under NATO bombs to boot, is told again in a new book by Matthew Collin, Guerrilla Radio, to a chorus of "right ons" from all over the Western world. However, before we get caught up in the romance of resistance radio, of the wireless as the perfect mode of popular mobilisation, let's remind ourselves of the flip side to that particular chorus, whereby the mobilising power of radio helped deliver death to hundreds of thousands of people. Assignment: Rwanda (BBC World Service), broadcast earlier this month, was provocatively subtitled Can Journalism Kill? Reporter Jon Silverman investigated the responsibility of Radio Tele Libre Mille Collines - a private station established as part of the country's economic liberalisation policy in 1993 - for the 1994 genocide in that country, "the most sustained bloodletting since the second World War". At the international tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, the station's two founders, plus Hassan Ngeze, editor of newspaper Kangura, have been on trial for genocidal conspiracy.

According to Silverman: "For the first time since 1945, an international tribunal will determine the limits of journalistic licence." For the prosecutors, it appears that licence would extend unproblematically to mere wartime propaganda, the sort of demonisation of the enemy that has characterised so much Western media in recent months. According to a Human Rights Watch witness for the prosecution, the line has been drawn much further down the road toward active bloodletting: "This was a station which did more than broadcast propaganda. It was a station which also broadcast direct orders, which singled out individuals, which said where those individuals were located, which referred, in a passage we read in court, to the Tutsi who had taken shelter at the Qaddafi Mosque like 'cows at a slaughterhouse, waiting to be slaughtered'." So is that war-talk or incitement to genocide? The defence lawyers are sticking with "war-talk", and excusing it in terms that should make honest journalists cringe: "A country which feels itself at war must be bound to use a different language in order to mobilise the population against the enemy which is attacking from outside ... in the context of war, language may be more forceful, more direct."

One defence lawyer, an African-American, goes further, saying the defendants were "intellectuals" with a duty to try to educate the Rwandan people, and a free-speech right to do so. It is "paternalistic and incipiently racist ... saying that people from Rwanda don't have the same right as people from America or the United Kingdom, that the Africans are too ignorant to understand an intellectual argument." Just so we wouldn't wallow in ignorance ourselves, the documentary played us a clip from RTLM, so we could sample the intellectual argument: "it is necessary to look at the stature and physical appearance of a person," we heard a commentator say in French. "It is necessary to look at those with small noses, and destroy them ..." Did this sort of broadcast contribute to the genocide? Government policy had been to promote radio, with the number of sets increasing tenfold in the few years prior to the genocide. Even though RTLM was privately owned, people were in the habit of seeing the radio as an extension of the state authority. Eyewitnesses tell how every dreaded militia roadblocks, where Tutsis and sympathetic Hutus were picked out for slaughter, had at least one transistor radio, tuned to RTLM.

So much for the truth; what about the rock 'n'roll? RTLM played plenty of music, and we heard a snippet of one of its greatest hits, a catchy little tune that goes something like this: "I hate those Hutus, those Hutus who deny their true identity, those Hutus who walk about wearing blinkers, those fat, boastful arrogant Hutus who don't understand the causes of the war we're fighting." The singer is now being prosecuted. "People must take responsibility for words that are used to cause the deaths of other people," says a prosecutor. Indeed they must, but my free-speech gene squirms in its double-helix at the notion of states, or even international tribunals, deciding which words are OK. Today in Rwanda, journalists continue to be expelled, arrested, interrogated. When a government minister there talks about the need for a "free, responsible, accountable media", I reach for my keyboard.