This Song by Richard Thompson.
These lines:
They came in the thousands
From the whole human race
To pay their respects at his last resting place
I have always had a bit of contempt for Elvis. I grew up in the 1960’s (born in 1956) and Elvis, to me, was a mere pop artist, a performer of other peoples’ songs, a teen idol, and a ridiculously bad actor. By the time I was 12, I was listening to Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and had just been introduced to Leonard Cohen’s brooding debut album, “Songs of Leonard Cohen”. I loved poetry, and songwriters. I loved the lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Homeward Bound”, “Suzanne”. Elvis, in comparison, seemed trite. Elvis, in comparison, was trite.
The Beatles began to earn my respect with “Rubber Soul”; clearly influenced by Dylan, songs like “Girl” and “Norwegian Wood” showed a growing artistic maturity that Elvis never evidenced. Elvis, by this time, was playing Las Vegas, a monument to crass consumerism and treacly kitsch. He was singing “My Way”, the consummate boring establishment hymn to self-sufficiency and arrogance.
That hasn’t changed a lot. His body of work still seems trite to me. And the massive public adoration, to me, is a testimony to his insignificance: the majority of people are superficial and easily led and manipulated. Elvis was the product of the “star-maker machinery” and never transcended that existence. He became rich– though his managers and agents siphoned off most of his fortune– and built a mansion and drove a Cadillac and surrounded himself with parasites and embraced all the worst symbols of capitalist privilege. Some biographers find it tragic that he continued to perform long after his health began to fail. He continued to perform because he was stupid and greedy.
He died, appropriately enough, on the toilet, exerting himself against massive constipation, tanked to the gills with prescription drugs, which one doctor said he prescribed to him in order to keep him away from illicit drugs. On the toilet, he had a heart attack and fell forward. He weighed 158 kilograms (350 pounds). Even more ridiculous than Elvis himself, is the weird regard in which fans consider his last fatal moments.
His only Grammy awards were, weirdly, in the category of gospel. The man famous for arousing the sexual desire of millions of young women, only received awards for hymns to the almighty. I thought that was trivial too. And ridiculous– what does a man like that really believe about God and religion? What does it say about God and religion that it meant so much to a man like Elvis, who bought more than 100 Cadillacs in his lifetime and wore religious jewelry because he thought it might, in a pinch, ensure his salvation?
I’m not sure what Richard Thompson thinks of Elvis. (I just found– to my shock– that Nick Cave, for example, is a fan of “Superstar” by the Carpenters, and “To Love Somebody” by the BeeGees, two of the most anemic pop hits ever recorded). I’m not even sure– given this song– what he thinks of Elvis’ fanatical followers: he’s too good of a songwriter to lay it on thick. If anything, he seems sympathetic, if you ignore the subtleties. But she puts on a pink dress as if she was young again (which makes her seem ridiculous in the imagination) and she is clearly delusional (she thinks she’s married to Elvis) and, finally, they have to drag her away.
All right– maybe that’s not so subtle.
In 2019, we are confronted with large numbers of peoples denying that global warming is real, embracing Donald Trump and Brexit and neo-fascism and every idiocy imaginable– the thousands from the whole human race. They are frightening. They adore Elvis and their massive pick-up trucks and their guns and ATVs and lottery tickets and beer. “Deplorable” is not the right word for them: it suggests we expect better of them. But Trump and Fox News have convinced them that their ill-formed conceptions of the world are true and right and deserve to prevail in the political sphere, and that complex information that confuses them is fake. They are convinced that those intellectual elites who used to be deferred to because they were intellectual elites are only out to trick them out of their pick-up trucks and guns and Elvis and even their genders.