Is Elvis Presley Really Considered Tame by Today’s Standards?

Elvis was just under 6 feet tall (he wore lifts in his shoes) and he was in Army fit health.

Looking at Elvis with other average guys of his day, he does have a blend in quality.

Elvis was a charlie male and happier as part of a group than a loner. In High School he’d joined ROTC the paramilitary training that was and in some places in the USA, never stopped being part of the high school experience. The military after all, has always had a poverty draft, even when there’s no conscription.

ALASKA, UNITED STATES – MARCH 1958: Wearing only underwear, singing star turned US Army Pvt. Elvis Presley (3L) raises his arms along with several other inductees during an inspection at Ft. Chaffee. (Photo by Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)

But Elvis did more than blend the existing R&B with the existing Country, something that was happening at the overlapped edges of these genres in any event.

Elvis was the spark – the purest spark – of pure ambition and raw talent.

He was just the right balance of sexual innocence, giving rise to the purity of his most sentimental weepies with sexual threat, it remains hard I think for anyone to look at Elvis in his glorious moments and not have your fingers twitch to wreck that hair and find out what it would feel like to be pelvis to pelvis with him. What a ride.

Something you do not get with the direct impersonators, oh yes, people do get carried away in the moment, but then awareness of the context and it not being the King….

Most of the world is not as uptight as america about moving onesself in dance and being fully of the song, the rhythm, the beat the beat the beat,

The purpose of The Dance is of course the Foreplay to the horizational one – Can you spot Elvis’ erection in this scene from Girls Girls Girls – apparently no one in the production did.

Did Presley inspire the Paparazzi in the New World?

this image is rather surprising of Europeans being more sophisticated, eh?

the media was just massing in the 1950s on television and Elvis was one of the earliest TV Stars not in that he was on tv shows, but his guest appearances became legendary and cemented the variety/talk show genre as evening entertainment

the media had to wait until the Beatles to really demonstrate their power to frenzy the spectacle

with the meta media mass globally professional audiences being lost to the on the location bloggers and live time streaming – there is unlikely to ever be another Elvis just on sheer numbers

When Elvis died there was 3.5 billion people and easily a third of them knew of him, even in remote places without tv – he was one of the top Celebs who had fansite made to him in web 1.0 because most Elvis fans could write a book about him and their fan experience.

Some of the interesting people I met on line either were in photos of Elvis that I’d seen for years or had ones never published of them getting kisses or scarves.

I do not find overproduced productions shocking or provocative.  Shock for it’s own sake is as boring as it gets.

Elvis Presley was too authentic to be; so then he wasn’t.

it wasn’t just Elvis

it was the EFFECT he had

more than screaming

he directed revival orgies

not caterwauling whining self pitying country blues

but

ROCK N ROLL

joyful eager full of emotional promises of anything

just.to.get.laid

sex.drugs.rnr, eh?