Core Post # 4 - Cailin O'Brien

Now, I may be a bit too young to have already had this fixed idea of Elvis being the hallmark American rock n’ roll celebrity that Erika Doss seems to believe in, despite being less of a fan and more of an observer. Of course I know who Elvis is; I have heard his music, seen his movies, and seen his pelvic thrust. However, I can recall numerous times in which my friends and I would have conversations regarding Elvis’s claim to fame as the “king of rock n roll”, questioning how Elvis of all great musicians of the time had snagged this title. It was not until reading Doss and Sweeney’s article that I realized it wasn’t really about his talent as a musician as it was about the way he openly and freely manipulated his body to be the center of his each performance. And even further than that it wasn’t really about his freely moving “lower body stratum”, but more about the message this free movement was making in a post Cold War America.

What was particularly intriguing to me was the difference in the way Erika Doss presents Elvis as a working class hero and how Goel Sweeney presents him as the king of White Trash. I think that both of their accounts of what he represented were slightly different. This could be because Doss focused more on his earlier years as a gyrating, eye twinkling teen from Tupelo, Michigan, while Sweeney focused on the overweight, cape bearing drug addict that he transitioned to in the seventies. Doss, while as I said earlier not a true ‘fan’ per say, credits Elvis with providing each fan with a personal relationship that they could hold onto and share in a period dominated by Cold War containment. She describes his story as one of “rags to riches”, where he was more so idolized than others due to his lower class roots. Sweeney approaches the king’s “rags to riches” story with more emphasis on the exact roots he comes from; mainly White Trash. It was easier for me to respect and see how Elvis got his title after reading Doss’s article, but Sweeney’s account of his later use of excess (in every sense of the word) is less ideal. It is not of course that Elvis became overweight and is no longer respectable in my eyes, it is that he turned to a style of living that is unsustainable. Doss’s “ideal American” of the fifties sends his message of freedom against the dominant ideology through performance and his body, but once the seventies hit he is sending a different message; one of excess.