The King At 80

With Elvis Presley's eightieth birthday anniversary this week (January 8), one must wonder what the King would think of today's popular music.  I don't know if he would have cared that much, because had he lived - and had he had the guts to defy his manager Colonel Tom Parker - he would have forsaken his title as King of Rock and Roll and moved on to gospel full-time, which would have been a good idea.  While it is possible for some rock and rollers to continue to well into late-middle age, it is not possible for all of them to do so.  Rock and roll is mostly for the young and hungry, and most rockers who are neither ought to move on to a more age-proof musical form.  Billy Joel has come to the closest to that ideal; though he still performs pop concerts, he hasn't issued a pop-rock album since 1993, and he has mostly composed classical pieces since then (with one classical album to his credit so far).  Similarly, folk rockers Crosby, Stills and Nash have been more folk than rock these days, settling comfortably into making music more suitable for NPR shows on Sunday mornings than Top Forty radio.  And though they're called dinosaurs, at least they don't look ridiculous going on stage, because they're not trying to be ageless golden gods like some geriatric rock stars (not Neil Young, though) that I could mention.   

Meanwhile, the possibilities in rock for the younger generations are, as always, even dimmer.  There are young rock bands out there, but they don't have record companies rushing to sign them, they don't get enough airplay on terrestrial radio even if they do have a record deal, and if you have heard them, you probably can't name any of the members.  As for the Avett Brothers, I keep forgetting their first names.  Part of the problem may be Taylor Swift and a slew of rappers sucking up all the oxygen, but another problem has been the sight of aging rock veterans still trudging on, refusing to get off the stage and give the music back to the kids.  Presley, as a full-time gospel singer, could have shown rockers of the 1960s and 1970s how to age gracefully and, as he did in 1964 for the Beatles, pass the torch to the next ones in line.  But Colonel Parker kept him performing as a pop star, and so Presley had to keep being "Elvis," that self-parodying, jump-suited character who appeared onstage and crooned "My Way," a character to be re-created by a slew of impersonators in Las Vegas.  (If not for Colonel Parker, Elvis would never have played Las Vegas.)  Being Elvis the character literally killed Elvis the man.   

So what would the King think of pop today, assuming he'd care?  Well, he'd probably appreciate Taylor Swift's success; like Elvis before her, Swift is rooted in country, she crossed over with a pop sound, and she plays up her sexuality in her performances.  Appreciating is not the same as liking, and so I don't necessarily think Presley would have dug Swift's music.  He wouldn't have gotten rap at all.  Like today's white rap fans, Elvis listened to black records as a teenager; unlike today's white rap fans, Elvis listened to black music as a teenager.  Big difference there.  Elvis wouldn't have liked rap, not by a long shot, and he would have been perplexed at the sight of so many white kids in hip-hop's audience but not on its stage.  He would have found the whole thing too exclusionary.

So, yes, I think we would have been better off if Presley had lived and had invested his talent in later years into making more mature music.  He would have encouraged subsequent acts - the Who, Van Halen - to learn how to know when to quit.  He would have championed generational change.  He might have even liked punk; it likely would have reminded him of how his own music was a shock to the system in 1956 and appreciated (as well as liked) rock's capacity to renew itself.  And he would have made some astonishing gospel records that would have made him more of a musical institution in life than he is in death today.                      

Johnny Carson got it right so many years ago when he said that, in a perfect world, Elvis would still be alive and the impersonators would be dead.  We're  all the poorer for losing Presley when he died at the age of 42.