Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession - Hardcover

Marcus, Greil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385417187 ISBN 13: 9780385417181

Publisher: Doubleday, 1991

Synopsis

A look at the cultural obsession with Elvis Presley describes how many of his fans could not come to terms with his death and, thus, remade history

About this title

Reviews

In this consistently amazing analysis, Marcus proposes that rock king Elvis Presley (1935-1977) has been more important dead than alive and in the process makes readers care about far more cultural trivia than they might have thought possible. A philosopher and critic with a novelist's passion and creativity (his Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century was dauntingly dense but compelling), Marcus writes with flash and style. Scanning the American scene, he finds Elvis omnipresent, from the cult TV show Twin Peaks (he killed Laura Palmer) to the star's life, which to many embodied the American dream. While the premise may seem far-fetched, Marcus's assessment of the American psyche and the 60 disturbing illustrations, including the cover of the album Disgraceland by the rock group Elvis Hitler, bear him out. Perhaps "nothing but a hound dog" in life, in memory Elvis proves very much more. 40,000 first printing; author tour; first serial to Interview.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Probing--at times beyond the pale--ponderings on Elvis as the ultimate American icon. Fourteen years dead, Elvis lives on--at least in the exuberant critical imagination of Marcus (Lipstick Traces, 1989; Mystery Train, 1975), who in this intemperate but dazzling hodgepodge of essays and commentaries (some seen in earlier form in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, etc.) finds the singer to be nothing less than an example of ``the necessity existing in every culture to produce a perfect, all-inclusive metaphor for itself.'' This claim and others (e.g., that Elvis ``signified'' an ``unfathomable multiplicity''; that, like Moby-Dick and Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, one of Elvis's TV spots offered ``a fantasy of what the deepest and most extreme possibilities and dangers of our national identity are'') at first seem the wispiest flights of fancy--but they gain flesh as Marcus nourishes them with an astonishing array of testimony to Elvis's stature as an American legend. It's not only the bestselling Elvis books the author critiques; the media's Elvismania he despairs of; the Elvis imitators and fans he marvels at (with a knowing appreciation of their religious fervor: ``The identification of Elvis with Jesus has been a secret theme...at least since 1956''); above all, it's the hundreds of posthumous Elvis-references he nets from the American cultural jungles and here pins to the page like so many butterflies. Culled from comic- strips, street-rumors, posters, record art, song lyrics, tabloid headlines, novels, interviews, public addresses, etc., they give some backbone at least to Marcus's overarching claim ``that `So much for Elvis Presley' is a sentence no serious person has yet been able to write with a straight face.'' With 50 b&w and 10 color illustrations syncopated throughout the text (which itself features numerous typefaces), it's a graphically as well as intellectually stimulating foray into the farthest reaches of Elvisdom. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1991
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385417187
• ISBN 13: 9780385417181
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 233