From the WSJ Opinion Archives
REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Long Lives the King
By today's standards, Elvis was something of a conservative.
Even as the guardians of America's public morality were assailing Elvis Presley in the 1950s, his appeal was obvious. For while his swiveling hips screamed sex, his face was pure apple pie. Today, the 25th anniversary of his death, it is a combination that still sells: Forbes reports that Elvis remains the top-grossing dead celebrity.
This cultural tension within Elvis--the star who never smoked or swore and took good care of his mama vs. the puffed-up celebrity who overdosed on women and prescription drugs--made for great music. But the fame that came with it created a fantasy world that would prove his undoing. No wonder that, to so many, he remains an icon of the dark side of the American Dream: corrupted innocence.
In higher circles, Elvis has become a synonym for tackiness. Such condescension has a long pedigree: After one television appearance, a certain sophisticated New York daily newspaper dismissed him as a no-talent "virtuoso of the hootchy-kootchy." But it was precisely Elvis's ability to combine forms eschewed by others--primarily gospel, black rhythm-and-blues and country--that accounted for his extraordinary appeal. "When we were kids growing up in Liverpool," Paul McCartney once said, "all we wanted to be was Elvis Presley."
In a day when Britney Spears is more famous for her navel than her voice and the Osbournes parade their pathologies on television, it's hard to imagine the sensation that Elvis caused with his arrival. Even his much-maligned films of the 1960s now seem almost virginal. And they have their moments, such as the obvious chemistry in "Viva Las Vegas" when Ann-Margret and Elvis sing their poolside duet, "The Lady Loves Me."
Elvis's early difficulties with American moralists make it tempting to suggest that he was but an earlier version of, say, Eminem, another white boy who hit the big time using black musical forms. But unlike the notorious Eminem, in both his lyrics and tastes Elvis was pure Middle America. This was a man who bought his parents the first home they owned, served his country in uniform overseas, refused to denounce Vietnam, loved gospel music (he recorded a pretty decent album) and volunteered his services to President Nixon in 1970, telling the president that he was just a poor boy from Tennessee who wanted to repay America for what it had given him and "restore some respect for the flag."
The critics who gleefully zero in on the glaring gap between the Nixon-deputized antidrug crusader and the addict whose prescription drugs ended up killing him miss the point. Elvis may have been a sinner, but he and his music were too much steeped in a Pentecostal upbringing ever to deny the reality of sin itself. In short, he was a nice Southern boy who got in way over his head.
In a recent interview about his novel "Elvis in the Morning," William F. Buckley noted that Elvis might even be thought conservative today, ironically opposing a 1960s culture of liberation that in some senses he helped create and that ended up killing him. Which only tells us that American culture changed far more than Elvis ever did.
