Stupid about Elvis (2002–2009)
After 9/11, with the world on the brink, Elvis Stupidity spreads like peanut butter (or kudzu)
(This is the fourth installment in my “Stupid about Elvis” series, covering the period from 2002 to 2009. With decades of well-established Stupid Elvis narratives now firmly in place, there was little to add to the concept. More and more, the only way to express the proper contempt was to double down. Even as legacy media became rapidly replaced by the internet, the Overlords were still paying for the old narratives, so there was no shortage of takers.)
BY THE EARLY 2000s, rock criticism was moribund, professionally, commercially, and culturally. No need to worry: on the Stupid Elvis front, others were more than willing to step up, with Time magazine (who had compared Elvis the Pelvis to a wet sausage in the ’50s) leading the way. Where once the crudest of methods were deemed sufficient, now sophistication took its place. Here’s Lee Siegel, from Time’s August 7, 2002, edition, “celebrating” the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Pelvis’s death:
“But the King will outlive his immortality” is a style of argument only a few can master.
“But the King will outlive his immortality also.”
This is a style of argument only a few can master.
I once took a run at it, just to see if I, too, could work for Time someday. I decided that, with a gun to my head and electrodes strapped to my testicles, I might be able to fake the rest. But that “also” would be forever out of reach, dangling just beyond my feeble comprehension.
From there, the Stupid rolled on, unhindered, gathering speed and force as it went.
From 2002: Martin Amis, the Hank WIlliams, Jr. of the literary world.
Again from 2002, there was Martin Amis, the Hank Williams, Jr. of the literary world (talented son trying to live up to genius father, with the key difference being Hank, Jr. sometimes did) calling Elvis “a talented hick who was destroyed by success: what else is new?” a line that automatically caused me to commune with the spirit of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op, counting how many lies could be spotted in nine words of advertising and reaching four “with promise of more” before he’s interrupted.
Naturally, Amis’s attempt at being hard-boiled was reprinted in a collection called The War on Cliché.
I find Stupidity that has convinced itself of its own striking originality to be sort of touching, but let’s pose some of the more obvious questions:
To prove a “hick” was ever “destroyed by success” wouldn’t you have to prove self-same hick—not some other hick, but the one in question—would not have been destroyed by the absence of success?
And if you’ve posited something as proven, when it can’t be, is it quite kosher to follow up by asking “what else is new?”
On the other hand, if you have access to alternative dimensions where parallel fates can be studied for comparison and contrast—the aforementioned “proof”—should you be wasting valuable time on the fate of hicks, actual or theoretical, successful or otherwise?
Shouldn’t you be concerned with more important things like the existence of God, or the possible end of human suffering, or whether crunchy peanut butter is better than creamy?
Please, Martin, give us the answers!
Among opinion makers, “It may be elitist” is the equivalent of the non-apology apology for politicians. Continuing 2002’s Stupid Elvis hot streak, novelist Steve Erickson came up with an otherwise pretty fine list of the hundred greatest records made in Los Angeles for Los Angeles Magazine. The list deserved its inclusion in Da Capo’s collection of the year’s best music writing. But Elvis Stupidity can creep in anywhere, as in:
“34 “Hound Dog” Big Mama Thornton (1953) It may be elitist to claim this original version is superior to that by a certain Tennessee truck driver a few years later. But given the trucks of money the Tennessee kid drove off with, it may also be justice.
33 “Jailhouse Rock” Elvis Presley (1957) Leiber and Stoller thought they were kidding when they wrote this, after all, weren’t they always kidding? Fortunately, the Tennessee truck driver didn’t get the joke and, for once, in his best moment, in his best movie, branded onto celluloid all his incendiary magnetism.”
The lesson, as always, is that whenever Elvis did something that couldn’t quite be ignored, it wasn’t anything he intended. How could a truck driver get the point of anything sophisticated? But I have to admire the precision with which Erickson equates his own apologetic “elitism”—by which, of course, he means either anti-elitist elitism, or anti-anti-elitism (I never can keep them straight)—with “justice,” in a context where no rational meaning that can be attached to either word makes the least bit of sense.
The lesson, as always, is that whenever Elvis did something that couldn’t quite be ignored, it wasn’t anything he intended.
With 2002 safely in the books, the decade was primed for Stupid to go full Kudzu.
And it did, indeed, sprout everywhere:
Even a great book can be dragged down by Elvis Stupidity. 2003 brought Devin McKinney’s often superb rumination Magic Circles: The Beatles in Dream and History a great book dragged down by a tired restatement of the Crit-Illuminati's pet theme: that, in order for the Beatles to be exalted, the Elvis dragon must be ritually slain.
“But my modest suggestion is that this [the arrival of the Beatles] may be where the first wave of rock broke and fell back, why in its first great push it never quite reached the shore to cover the earth; there was no unifying talent complete and obsessive enough to work the transformation it made its fan desire.
“Its geniuses could not do all it took. Elvis was early rock’s godhead and figure of broadest appeal; though his audiences remained segregated, he was the first to suggest such a broad comity of taste among people who presumably had nothing to say to one another. But from the start there was lard at the heart of his judgment (the ersatz jazz of “Heartbreak Hotel”), schmaltz in the boil (“Love Me Tender”), and aside from two aberrant skirmishes with need and doubt in later years (his 1968 comeback music, side one of How Great Thou Art) he did not extend his pioneer moves into music of psychological complexity.”
When confronting Elvis Stupidity, it’s always best to treat with due caution any immodest suggestion that begins with the author proclaiming its modesty.
The shame about McKinney’s Elvis Stupidity is that he’s one of the few modern critics who is not moribund. In Magic Circles, he practices some original thinking well worth getting acquainted with—so long as he sticks to the Beatles, who are Everything.
For the record: There’s no objective evidence, now or ever, that the Beatles were “bigger” than Elvis.
Moribund or no, there are problems with this style of thought, even if its practitioners can count on their premises being accepted in the best company.
Such as:
The Beatles were somehow “bigger” than Elvis, here exemplified by phrases like, They “covered the earth” (as he did not).
They were “a unifying talent complete and obsessive enough to work the transformation,” i.e., the transformation the Beatles-Are-Everything syndrome deems valuable (as he was not).
And while “His audiences remained segregated” theirs did not.
And, oh by the way (merely implied here but made explicit in the main text of the book), they were unquestioned musical geniuses with real vision, while Elvis’s music and vision were suspect “from the start.”
Any later, lasting, achievements were, of course, “aberrant.”
For the record: There’s no objective evidence, now or ever, that the Beatles were “bigger” than Elvis. Outside of academia and its attendant, late-’60s, branch-and-root in the counterculture, there’s no part of the earth they covered that he didn’t cover first.
Elvis reached Black America. Some intellectuals have never forgiven him for it. And don’t tell Ishmael Reed, but one rather significant part of the earth that he reached was Black America, which — if we’re to go by the record charts, where they never placed a single record on any R&B chart, while Elvis, somehow appealing to his segregated-in-southern-concert-halls audience, was the second-ranked R&B performer of the ‘50s after Fats Domino, who, as it happens, McKinney also thinks was no big deal — rejected the Beatles out of hand.
Then there was Hillbilly America, where the Beatles never came close to denting the Country & Western charts Elvis had topped repeatedly before the suits in Nashville used his convenient absence in the Army to put a stop to it.
Granted, Elvis had an advantage there, being one of them — and by “them” I mean those who McKinney would rather see written out of history anyway.
It’s easier that way. Then you don’t have to answer questions like why “lard-hearted” Elvis, who had failed to “cover the earth,” sold so much better in Liverpool than the Beatles did in Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta.
For evidence of that, we have the Beatles themselves, who realized that “No Elvis, No Beatles” was not a matter of conjecture.
The Beatles themselves realized that “No Elvis, No Beatles” was not a matter of conjecture.
Even if you accept John Lennon’s “Before Elvis there was nothing,” as a touch hyperbolic, there’s still George Harrison’s description of his only acknowledged musical influence (from the documentary Living in the Material World):
“The only root I can think of is one day riding my bike down a street in Liverpool and hearing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ playing out of an open window.”
If there’s anything worse than kudzu, it’s dead kudzu. After the rush of entries in the early 2000s, Elvis Stupidity, perhaps understandably, soon grew tired and stale.
If there’s anything worse than kudzu, it’s dead kudzu.
Here’s J. Hoberman, recycling Charlie Gillett, in Village Voice, Nov. 13, 2007:
Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock ’n’ roll.
No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world’s first and greatest rock ’n’ roll beatnik bard and then — having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning — vanish into a folk tradition of his own making.
Gillet had settled for the dream that Elvis “never met Sam Phillips.” Hooberman trades in subtler forms of thought control and goes straight to the heart of Crit-Illuminati wish-fulfillment:
Never been born.
He gets points, though, for being Stupid about Elvis and Bob Dylan all at once.
And so it’s on to Ishmael Reed, in Counterpunch, March 15, 2008:
There would be no Rock and Roll without Ike Turner, James Brown, Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, etc. Fake ghetto books and fake ghetto music. Elvis Presley, whom they idolize, is merely a karaoke makeover of James Brown and Chuck Berry.
Elsewhere in the interview, Reed brought the Rock &Roll Hall of Fame into it, evidently unaware that all the men he mentioned had been inducted years earlier (Fats, Chuck, and James Brown in the first class, with Elvis), or that, except for Fats and Ike Turner, the men he mentioned made their first records after Elvis made his. I wonder how Reed would react if someone accused Chuck Berry of doing a “karaoke makeover” of Elvis?
Just how did Elvis feel about Fats Domino, anyway? And, of course, Elvis once introduced Fats Domino as “the real King of Rock & Roll.” The introduction took place at an obscure little international press conference in the hideaway village of Las Vegas forty years before Ishmael Reed (a black intellectual who, unlike Elvis, didn’t know his history, and, unlike Elvis, clearly related to the very specific “black people” he mentions as something other than people) got Fats mixed up with a lot of other guys because he was giving an interview in which he spent the bulk of his time criticizing (rightly, it should be said) a lot of other people for getting mixed up.
Reed’s no fool, ordinarily, but Elvis Stupidity tends to flip the script.
And if Ishmael Reed can be a fool, why not James Taylor, who was born to foolishness, and got back to Stupidity 101 in a Neil Young documentary circa 2009:
“You look at Elvis Presley and he got two good years and then occasionally some great stuff, a lot of it great because it’s camp, but really they just did their best to shellac him.”
It’s getting late and the Stupid is weighing on me, so I’ll leave aside whether or not something can be great “because” it’s camp (though I’ll state categorically that if such a thing does exist, it can’t be found where James Taylor claims to have found it).
But at least his statement makes grammatical sense. It begins with a Principle Stupidity (“he got two good years”) and then proceeds directly to a Corollary Stupidity (everything after that).
Marked for Death. As the end of our series draws near, basic literacy from a man “marked for death” (Lester Bangs on JT) is not to be taken for granted.
Finally, “Sweet Baby James” Taylor is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Maybe Ishmael Reed should worry about him! Lester Bangs, critic of genius, once wrote a column titled “James Taylor Marked for Death.” These days, he could get a lot of support for the idea from Elvis fans.
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Thanks for reading! Below are links to three articles that are essential to knowing what Tell It Like It Was is all about. “Blogging with Tell It Like It Was” is my attempt to keep readers abreast of any changes happening here while “Introduction to Tell It Like It Was” is our mission statement for this publication.
And “Introduction to The Toppermost of the Poppermost” explains the project that John, Lew, and I embarked upon months before launching this publication: a series of articles that review every record to make it all the way to #1 on the Cash Box Top 100 charts from 1960 through 1969.
