MAYBE I'VE A REASON TO BELIEVE WE ALL WILL BE RECEIVED: Elvis Presley is the only individual performer who gets a whole lecture to himself in my course. Why? Well, let's see: a top-10 finisher on lists ranging from VH1's Greatest Artists of Rock & Roll and BBC's Voice of the Century to Rolling Stone's "Immortals" and Variety's Icons of the Century; the best-selling solo artist in American history; the star of 31 feature films; and last year's top-earning dead celebrity. If any pop-culture figure deserves the pretentious label of "icon," Elvis is it. Of course, it's precisely this iconic stature that can make it so difficult (and therefore so important) to recapture the reasons for his initial popularity in the mid-1950s. (The authoritative treatment of Presley's life and impact is Peter Guralnick's two-volume biography, but if you haven't got time for that many pages, check out Guralnick's moving short essay, "Elvis Presley and the American Dream," in his collection Lost Highway.)
Memphis played a crucial role in Elvis's social and musical development, providing not only the studio where he recorded his first hits but also a cultural atmosphere in which white youths were increasingly adopting black singing, speaking, and clothing styles. As with early rock 'n' roll in general, Elvis's music would blend black and white influences, drawing on country and western, rhythm and blues, even gospel. Peter Guralnick notes that even Elvis's earliest nicknames -- "The Hillbilly Cat," "The King of Western Bop" -- revealed this "cultural schizophrenia." He cut his first sides for Sun in July 1954; by November 1955, he'd been signed by RCA; and in 1956, he began his unmatched string of #1 hits, helped by sensational television appearances on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen, and Ed Sullivan shows.
As Guralnick admits, though, this mass-marketed Elvis became less a pioneer and more a "product": "a pop singer of real talent, catholic interests, negligent ease, and magnificent aplomb, but a pop singer nonetheless." His greatest commercial successes still lay ahead in the 1960s and early 1970s, and he even enjoyed a brief critical revival with his 1968 "comeback special." But by the time of his death in 1977, he'd become a sequined, bloated caricature of himself. It was hard (especially for 9-year-olds like me) to understand how he'd ever led a cultural revolution.
Critical reassessments and exhaustive biographies have helped to restore some of Elvis's pre-Vegas stature. Yet 21st-century observers are also more likely to see Elvis as an expropriator of "authentic" black idioms. In Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," Chuck D put it bluntly: "Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me." Let's turn that statement back into question form: What is Elvis to you? What does he mean to you, and why?
Memphis played a crucial role in Elvis's social and musical development, providing not only the studio where he recorded his first hits but also a cultural atmosphere in which white youths were increasingly adopting black singing, speaking, and clothing styles. As with early rock 'n' roll in general, Elvis's music would blend black and white influences, drawing on country and western, rhythm and blues, even gospel. Peter Guralnick notes that even Elvis's earliest nicknames -- "The Hillbilly Cat," "The King of Western Bop" -- revealed this "cultural schizophrenia." He cut his first sides for Sun in July 1954; by November 1955, he'd been signed by RCA; and in 1956, he began his unmatched string of #1 hits, helped by sensational television appearances on the Milton Berle, Steve Allen, and Ed Sullivan shows.
As Guralnick admits, though, this mass-marketed Elvis became less a pioneer and more a "product": "a pop singer of real talent, catholic interests, negligent ease, and magnificent aplomb, but a pop singer nonetheless." His greatest commercial successes still lay ahead in the 1960s and early 1970s, and he even enjoyed a brief critical revival with his 1968 "comeback special." But by the time of his death in 1977, he'd become a sequined, bloated caricature of himself. It was hard (especially for 9-year-olds like me) to understand how he'd ever led a cultural revolution.
Critical reassessments and exhaustive biographies have helped to restore some of Elvis's pre-Vegas stature. Yet 21st-century observers are also more likely to see Elvis as an expropriator of "authentic" black idioms. In Public Enemy's "Fight the Power," Chuck D put it bluntly: "Elvis was a hero to most/But he never meant shit to me." Let's turn that statement back into question form: What is Elvis to you? What does he mean to you, and why?
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