Reflecting on the Canonicity of Elvis Presley

 

Introduction: In the upcoming series, I’m going to be writing reflections on the canonicity of the most important artists in the history of rock and roll. The series will cover a wide variety of attributes or parts of the artists’ legacies and their recorded outputs, including popularity, awards, critical acclaim, longevity, influence, etc. It will be a lengthy series, if I manage to be consistent about writing it, but I think it will also be an interesting read for readers who have any interest in rock and roll as an art form, and the future of it at the current time (2022). It works as an outgrowth of my recent Twitter polling about this (The Top 2000 Most Important Artists in the History of Rock and Roll Re-ranking Project at www.twitter.com/ArtOfTheComment).

 

I’m planning on beginning from the top of the list with Elvis Presley and working my way to #2000 and perhaps beyond that. The entry for an artist will begin from a freewheeling reflection on that artist’s canonicity in my view, and will then proceed to looking at a few of the more quantitative facts relating to their popularity, influence, critical acclaim, and career longevity. If you like the entry, please feel free to let me know on Twitter @ArtOfTheComment or in the comments section here. Please also feel free to give any constructive criticism that you think would make the project better or more interesting.

 

Elvis Presley

 

There have been a lot of lists of the biggest or best artists in rock and roll over the years that have placed Presley at the top, and there was a time in the early history of rock journalism that this was taken almost for granted, but the top few spots in my list here would be shuffled all over for many journalists and fans in the past two decades. There are many rock critics who think of The Beatles as an easy and unparalleled #1 today, and who place Elvis Presley at #2 or even lower, though it feels very rare to see him positioned lower than #8.

 

The big question here is the following: What will be the legacy of Elvis Presley as rock and roll recedes into the rearview of American and global popular culture in the years to come? Will his popularity wax and wane periodically, or will there later be a consistent movement to position the 1950s (and his output in that era) as a pre-rock decade culturally?

 

I’m writing at an interesting cultural moment to think about that (5/31/2022), as this week a trailer for the upcoming Baz Luhrmann biopic Elvis began circulating online, and reviving interest in Presley’s output and career. It is tough to judge how big of an effect that forthcoming movie will be having on his popularity, but it is clear that there is still a significant familiarity with Elvis Presley in many English-speaking cultures (and beyond them), and that most people who think of themselves as rock and roll fans have at least a bit of awareness of his work.

 

The main reasoning a lot of writers have used for positioning Elvis Presley as the most significant rock and roll artist relates to his tremendous influence on American and global culture. That extends far beyond music into image/fashion and film. Of course, Presley was an actor for most of his career as a recording artist (from the 1956 release of Love Me Tender to the 1969 film Change of Habit), and that career in acting is a huge part of how he came to be thought of as an inspiration for film or television portrayals of masculinity and rebelliousness in numerous films up to the current century. When his breakthrough singles became hits in 1956, it was clear to Americans that rock and roll would be a major cultural force and more than just a momentary anomaly in youth culture.

 

There have been many historians and other scholars who have written extensively on Elvis Presley’s relationship to race in America. He was raised as a white boy in a part of Mississippi with large numbers of African Americans, and his fame has frequently been attributed to his whiteness and the coupling of his race with his capacity to perform in an African American style. He was palatable for many white listeners who feared African (or perhaps any non-European) influence in popular music, while also garnering listeners who were also enjoying his contemporaries like Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Frankie Lymon, or Fats Domino. And some of his fans from the 1950s-1970s were black, too. This is a very complex cultural topic to explore, and there are biographers of Presley, like Peter Guralnick, who have tried much more thoroughly than I am here, but I wanted to mention that complex legacy of his whiteness because it will affect the full history of rock and roll as we understand it in the future. As long as we are willing to face that complex legacy.

 

There are many adjectives that Elvis Presley made synonymous with the phrase “rock and roll”: youthful, powerful, longing, rebellious, uptempo, frantic, anxious, achy, relational, romantic, enigmatic. I think that perhaps the most significant of them is “cool.” (Here is where I am ducking a posthumous proverbial banana peel thrown by the inimitable Lester Bangs.) For generations of listeners, Elvis was the coolest. The major rock stars of the 1970s looked up to him from their youngest days turning on the TV in the 1950s and the early 1960s when he was appearing on The Steve Allen Show. The average listener wanted to look like him or pictured what it would be like to meet him. The millions of fans who gathered at Graceland in the late 1970s through to the 1990s thought—truly, at least in some cases—that he would make a reappearance for them when they showed up. The catchphrase from tabloid media of “Elvis is alive!” began to feel very kitschy in the 1990s, but that only magnified its attractiveness to the American imagination. When Quentin Tarantino came to popular attention in the early 1990s, writing films where characters reflected on being a fan of Elvis Presley, it was only after he got an early acting gig portraying an Elvis impersonator in an episode of The Golden Girls in the late 1980s.

 

There are very few other pop cultural figures for whom an entire career as an impersonator has grown to wide public knowledge, and there are only a handful of artists on this list that are frequently referred to on a first name basis where that wasn’t their official stage name. While his fame and popularity in English-language media waned a bit in the 2000s, there were brief moments that his legacy became the primary topic of attention for a few weeks or months: the remix of “A Little Less Conversation” from JXL, the biographical miniseries Elvis from 2005, the release of 30 #1 Hits in 2002, the follow-up 2nd to None in 2003. In the 2010s, the HBO documentary film Elvis Presley: The Searcher received critical acclaim. It appears that there are many listeners and historians who continue to have a huge interest in Elvis Presley’s legacy.

 

Biographical Information: born on 1/8/1935 in Tupelo, Mississippi, died on 8/16/1977 in Memphis, Tennessee

 

Chart History:

·         Hot 100 singles in Billboard: 149 (including prior overlapping charts)

·         Top 40 singles in Billboard: 114

·         Top 10 singles in Billboard: 40

·         #1 singles in Billboard: 18 (for 79 weeks cumulatively)

·         Top 200 albums in Billboard: 126

·         #1 Country Songs in Billboard: 11

·         #1 R&B Songs in Billboard: 6

·         #1 Adult Contemporary Songs in Billboard: 5

·         Top 40 singles in Cashbox: 20

·         Total singles on ARIA charts: 120

·         Monthly listeners on Spotify on 5/31/2022: 12,369,406

 

RIAA Certifications: 171 Gold certifications, 94 Platinum certifications, 34 Multi-Platinum certifications

 

Halls of Fame: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1986), Country Music Hall of Fame (1998), Gospel Music Hall of Fame (2001), Rockabilly Hall of Fame (2007), Memphis Music Hall of Fame (2012)

 

Total Releases: 352 albums, 968 singles and EPs, 2274 compilations, 72 videos

 

Major Awards: 3 Grammys and Lifetime Achievement Award, American Music Award of Merit (1987), 3 nominations for ACM Awards