Elvis

[gridlore]

OK, it's 25 years since Elvis keeled over. So what? He was at best a moderately talented singer. I have never understood the cult surrounding him. You want a King of Rock? Try Mick Jagger! A career that is approaching 40 years of great music and a life that epitomized rock excess. Elvis was a lounge act when he died.

Elvis? feh.

Comments

[bunyip.livejournal.com]

Right on!! Elvis was also an overpaid lounge act.

[lysana.livejournal.com]

Realizing that Elvis was in large part a tool of a conniving manager who ripped off every songwriter he worked with, I think you're neglecting something. Elvis helped make rock and roll palatable to a culture which would have ignored it almost utterly otherwise. He also paved the way for the more explicit performance styles of the artists of the 1960's. Without him, there would have been no Mick Jagger. White artists would've been stuck with Buddy Holly as an archetype. If they were lucky, Jerry Lee Lewis might've had bigger influence without Elvis (and still might have except for the bad move of marrying his teenage cousin). Did Killer deserve it more? Fuck, yeah. He wrote his own stuff, if nothing else. Doesn't change the fact that the Pelvis gained the largest mindshare of any rock artist of his time.

And he'd have become a better musician, I think, if The Colonel hadn't insisted he become a movie star. Gods, what a misapplication of talents.

[thebitterguy]

God, the movies. What were they thinking when they did the movies?

I gotta disagree with Our Humble Host, but The King rocked. I think he had a good voice, and a stage presence you could use to immolate a small country.

Personally, I think Col. Jimmy Hart (no, wait. The other one. The Swede) gets into the top 11 most evil people in the 20th century, after Hitler, Stalin, and Ringo.

[hopeforyou.livejournal.com]

I think lysana has some valid points about the significance of Elvis in music history. And from a social standpoint, I inject that his hip-swivelling antics on TV which nearly got him banned were the beginning of the challenge against the clean-cut 3-piece suit staid appearance of pop musicians up that point. I think Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis had their own wildness about them, but it was markedly different.

From what I understand, being around Elvis in person was a lot like being around certain politicians in person: He had charisma and presence. It doesn't matter how talented he was or what his views were under those circumstances. People were mesmerised by him.

I agree with you on the music itself... He wasn't writing anything exciting, and he was not a great vocalist. I don't understand the cult or the religion. But then, that would be true of a great many cults and religions.

[allens.livejournal.com]

Elvis was a bit more than moderatley talented as a singer..he just had a manager who ripped him off and gave him really bad career advice. I like Elvis...from 1954 to early 1958, and scattered tunes thereafter. what Elvis DID do was become so popular that he overcame the racism inherent in the music charts at that time, and paved the way for Motown, and the British Invasion, and a whole lot of music that came afterwards. Mick Jagger would be among the first to say that Elvis was King when he was in his prime; the kitschy image of the fat guy in the white suit has largely obscured the historical importance of the man who was the first rock idol.

"Anyone who ever saw Elvis and didn't want to be Elvis has to be crazy" (John Lennon)

"I always said if I could find a white man who could sing like a black man, I could make a million dollars." (Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records...he actually ony made a couple hundred thousand, by the way).