"Pump It Up" (Elvis Costello)

Kind of sad to admit, but up until a few years ago, I had only a passing acquaintance with Elvis Costello's music from the late 70s.  I'd heard his reggae-tinged "Watching the Detectives" used on T.V. in various ways over the years.  (Never really cared for the song, actually.)  But all I really knew about the guy was that he'd recorded some stuff with Burt Bacharach in the late 90s and was married to jazz artist Diana Krall.
It wasn't until the mid-2000s when I was living in Charlotte that I sort of stumbled upon Costello's early New Wave stuff.
There's this classic rock/deep cuts station called 95.7 "The Ride" that broadcasts in the city.  The station is what FM radio should be: no stupid morning teams trying (and failing) to be funny, no dumb contests, and zero hype—even their station ID bumpers are just this dude with a weathered voice saying, "95.7: The Riiiiiide."  The disc jockeys simply play music, and they never talk over the tracks.  It's awesome.
One DJ in particular named Harriet Coffey always had a knack for playing stuff that I liked.  And she always seemed to enjoy and know a lot about the stuff she played, too, which made me a fast fan.
One afternoon, I was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in suburban Charlotte, watching the traffic lights ahead change from green to red at least 6 times without anyone moving an inch, when here came Harriet to save the day.  She announced that her next song was "Pump It Up" from Elvis Costello's album This Year's Model (1978), and this jam with thudding drums, throbbing bass, cranked up guitar, and squeaky Vox Continental organ came springing from my speakers.  I was floored.  This was definitely not the Costello who'd made a cameo in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, strumming his guitar and crooning mildly with a grinning Bacharach backing him on piano.  No, this was a manic punk with brains, come to shake us up and shimmy down.
Speaking of brains, it's a wickedly clever song from a wickedly good album.  On the surface, "Pump It Up" is a terse little rocker about hanging out with girls and listening to music with the volume cranked up.  But a closer read reveals a biting satire of the club scene of the late 70s: the pills, the powders, the booze, the sex.  Basically, the tableau he presents is one where everyone is looking for some sort of gratification but only gets frustration instead.
To expand on that, I recently ran across a quote from Costello from an interview with SPIN from 2008, where he was discussing his 70s image and songwriting.  
"I didn't feel like a rock 'n' roll star.  I was just some guy working in an office who'd written some songs.  And the fact that I had this absurd name and was posing like a rock 'n' roller with these splayed legs [on the cover of My Aim Is True]—it was a satire.  That's kind of the same thing in 'Pump It Up' [from This Year's Model]: If you listen to the lyrics, it kind of goes against the grain of hedonism."