Today is the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis. Although it's sad that he's gone, I'm not one of the 50,000,000 who call themselves Elvis fans. I have some Elvis tunes on my iTunes and I enjoy most of his early work, but I really don't care for most of what he did after his initial spark. Can anyone honestly say that he made any great music past about 1963 or so? "In the Ghetto" is largely unlistenable and would be deleted from my iTunes library were it not so campily bad.

I tend to be overly harsh on his early work, so I'd like to remedy that here. While I'll always contend that black musicians such as Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, and Little Richard could run circles around Elvis musically, there was something undeniably unique and interesting about early Elvis, both in his music and how he could twirl his hips around.

Can anyone deny that Elvis owned the 50's? Better music was being made, sure, but the decade was his. We always think that the social upheavel of the 60's started when the Beatles and Rolling Stones came over to the US, but the winds of social change began with Elvis. He may not have been the first, but he was definitely the most visible middle finger to the norm that had been seen by that point.

There are few instances in pop-culture history where you can see a marked difference in the culture from one day to the next. The Beatles on Ed Sullivan. Star Wars opening. The first Nintendo is sold. Well, Elvis belongs in that category too. You basically went from bands led by stiff people with close, tight haircuts to a man who literally flew across the stage with an open shirt collar and black, greasy hair flying all over the place.

I was thinking about this the other night when I flipped past the channels and saw a clip from the final battle scene of Star Wars. I remarked to Anya that it's virtually impossible for me to comprehend just how much of a leap Star Wars was over everything else at the time both in terms of scope and special effects wizardry. It's easy to take the advances Star Wars made in storytelling for granted.

I think the same applies to Elvis. We see clips of Elvis shaking his hips and realize how tame it seems compared to today's bare all societal standards. But for the time, Elvis' hips swinging and rebel spirit must have been like having cold water splashed over the entire music listening world, causing them to collectively remark "Yes! This is what we've been waiting for."

I think one of the reasons why I tend to come down hard on Elvis is that I get so frustrated that the true pioneers of Rock and Roll tend to get overlooked by "the King," and I sometimes take that out on Elvis instead of placing the blame on the society that made him a star in the first place.

Because if there's one thing our pop-culture loves, it's taking black music away from black musicians and whiting it up. And not only do we white it up, we turn those who are whiting it up into megastars. see Eminem, Elvis, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, et al. It's frustrating to me, mainly because I feel that more deserving musicians are getting overlooked, but also because I think there's an underlying note of racism at play.

But if there's another truism about pop-culture, it's that we love seeing the mighty fall. And there was perhaps no better representation of this than Elvis. We love a good train wreck. We crave it. And let's face it, the fall of Elvis was one for the ages, dwarfed only by the fall of Michael Jackson. From Ed Sullivan in 1956 to dying on a toilet in Graceland in 1977 is a fall of Shakespearean proportions.

But I suppose that deserves its own post on a different post. For now, I'm going to put on some (early) Elvis and get all shook up at work.

-Matt