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One response to “02 Elvis Presley – Elvis Presley”

1. Fred

   February 12, 2025

   I know this is an important record and I know it has to be on this list. But the world has moved past this sound and I personally find it pretty basic and if I hear that generic rockabilly riff that has been used in 8 billion songs one more time I’m going to kill myself. That being said, if I was a teeny-bopper in 1956 I’d be losing my fucking shit over this album.

   Also, Elvis is one lucky motherfucker. Race is a social construct but culture is real. And while cultural appropriation – in the sense of just adopting signifiers of other cultures as a fashion accessory – is wrong; cultural exchange is admirable and is how you get basically every genre of music. Different cultures are constantly mixing and blending and stealing from one another’s musical traditions and creating new types of music from the weird Frankenstein babies that they make, and its great.

   Cut to the 1950’s and there is a giant blockage in the mixed streams that lead to new music being created and shared because colonizers and slave traders invented the concept of race in the 1660’s to justify their rape and pillaging of other peoples in the name of profit. And almost 300 years later, there was still this artificial separation between musical traditions in America. That left millions of white teenagers with no idea that black Americans had invented a new sound called Rock & Roll.

   So who comes along but a talented boy singer from Memphis who had charisma and a unique vocal style and a pretty face and could dance. But more importantly, he could do pretty decent versions of all this great music that those millions of teenagers hadn’t heard yet and that allowed him to become the best selling artist of all time based on a decent amount of talent, but no more than thousands of other artists who were nowhere near as successful.

   Congratulations Elvis, the Atlantic slave trade allowed you to become famous enough to spend twenty years popping pills, having pillow fights with 14-year old girls, making shitty low-budget movies, posing with Nixon and then dying on a toilet in your huge tacky mansion.

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