Sublime

Consequently when the biological Elvis died, for the brand it was business as usual. Even today fans still buy the King’s posters and albums, radio stations go on paying royalties, and more than half a million pilgrims flock each year to Graceland, the King’s necropolis in Memphis, Tennessee.

Elvis’s life before fame featured repeated experiences with humiliation, but he also experienced something else characteristic of the South and the United States in general: the wages of Whiteness. An effort to place Elvis more accurately in history doesn’t just require a recognition that he saw his indebtedness to Black musicians. It also means th

Elvis Presley wanted to record “Hound Dog,”

Like pharaoh, Elvis was a story, a myth, a brand – and the brand was far more important than the biological body.

But the main thing I dislike about Elvis Presley is the idea of Elvis Presley, and that idea is what keeps Graceland in business. It’s the religiosity of garbage culture; it validates the import of tabloid aesthetics, and it makes our society look stupid.

During Elvis’s lifetime, the brand earned millions of dollars selling records, tickets, posters and rights, but only a small fraction of the necessary work was done by Elvis in person.

When Elvis Presley, in the song “Jailhouse Rock,” sang the lyrics “If you can’t find a partner, grab a wooden chair,” he freed a generation of young people to love furniture and, by extension, to love any inanimate object in a way that heretofore would have been strictly verboten.

(Another view of Elvis, from Billboard magazine in 1958, stated, “In one aspect of America’s cultural life, integration has already taken place.”)

Memphis offers two key points of investigation for rock ’n’ roll forensic experts. The first is Graceland, where Elvis Presley’s heart stopped on a toilet. The second is Mud Island Harbor on the Mississippi River, where Jeff Buckley went for a swim and did not succeed.