Today is the 28th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley. I heard about it while browsing in a bookstore near Five Points, in Columbia, SC, while "back home" on a family visit. My charming wife-to-be didn't really understand then why it was so significant. Maybe I didn't either. Maybe we still don't.
Critic Greil Marcus once described the complex, mysterious, protean King of Rock & Roll this way.
There's something about Elvis that a single ethnic or racial identity cannot contain. So you have a figure who is, at least in the common imagination, Christian and not Christian; part Pagan, because of the nature of his music, but devout; black and white; and in terms of the way he looks and moves, male and female, masculine and feminine. You have a figure who breaks down if you fix him narrowly.Posted by Alan at August 16, 2005 10:21 PMThen you add to that the way he looked, how gorgeous he was, and the way he sounded, with a seductiveness, a thrill that threatened to break out at any time that really no singer had ever had before, and you have a mystery that nobody can solve. But you also have a figure that everybody can recognize, everybody can relate to, maybe with hate and fear, maybe with love and envy and desire. No one can be indifferent. This is not the sort of person who comes along very often.
This is not sociology. This is someone who comes along and becomes a mirror for all of our desires and our fears, someone to whom we can all connect on very basic levels, whether negatively or positively. He is a fulcrum of American culture, regardless of how cheesy, tiresome, redundant, and repetitious the idea or the reality of Elvis Presley becomes. He will always reemerge as a way to talk about who we are and how we got here. He'll always be around.