“You told the same joke to me too many times…”

And the joke this time – and a not very funny one, at that – is that, for the third time, Elvis Costello’s early catalog…his first 11 albums, to be specific…are being reissued, this time by Universal Music Enterprises. Shockingly, although the albums were previously put out in special editions by Rykodisc and Rhino (the latter including an entire second disc’s worth of bonus tracks), Universal assures us that these will be the “definitive reissues.”

Backed into a corner, Costello admitted he’d spent the money from the Rykodisc and Rhino reissues maintaining his nasty Faberge Egg habit.

Equally, I can assure Universal that, although I have all of Elvis’s albums (and, quite frankly, have had no real aversion to sticking with the Ryko reissues of those initial 11 albums, bonus disc or not) and have seen him live multiple times, there’s just no way in Hell that I’m going to buy these things again.

By the way, the above lyric is from Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ “It’s Time,” from All This Useless Beauty, an album not included in the reissues. (It’s from 1996.) Still, it was that or once again use Morrissey’s all-too-apropros line, “Reissue, repackage, repackage…”