Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession

by Greil Marcus

Dead Elvis: A Chronicle o...

by
Greil Marcus

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57 ratings, 3.39 average rating, 1 review (more data...)

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published

February 27th 1992 (first published 1991) by Viking

binding

Hardcover, 256 pages

isbn

0670838462 (isbn13: 9780670838462)

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Nate rated it:

(review of isbn 0674194225)

11/04/08

bookshelves: non-fiction

Read in November, 2008

recommended to Nate by: Sonya

As a sampling of writings pulled from other sources mostly over the decade and a half following Elvis' death in 1977 (book reviews, mock screenplays, collage art), this book is mostly a sort of Greil Marcus: the Collected Elvis Essays. Which is both good -- "Greil Marcus: Anything" may be as much recommendation as any book about music really needs -- and the bad -- unlike Lipstick Traces, there is no consistent narrative...more As a sampling of writings pulled from other sources mostly over the decade and a half following Elvis' death in 1977 (book reviews, mock screenplays, collage art), this book is mostly a sort of Greil Marcus: the Collected Elvis Essays. Which is both good -- "Greil Marcus: Anything" may be as much recommendation as any book about music really needs -- and the bad -- unlike Lipstick Traces, there is no consistent narrative thread here, and the significance of Elvis must be assembled from a dozen broken up lenses pointing from opposing directions, talking over and echoing one another. And occasionally, via the many other voices that speak through the books in review, contradicting one another; though Marcus' views seem well defined and consistent, he also seems content to let an image emerge out of the babble on its own at times, indistinct and left for the reader to judge.

And what is that image Marcus is content to let emerge? Certainly not the Truth Behind Elvis, or even, as in a titling quip, "the Myth Behind the Truth Behind the Legend." Instead, Marcus seems primarily concerned with Elvis as Mythology. Ultimately his book is a survey of a culture reeling from an epochal shift -- no less than the emergence of rock and roll -- and then left to deal with with the early loss of its priest and avatar (and in a manner that seems as fitting a summation and indication of the American dream and its contradictions as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. To deal in ways ranging from deification to reinvention to appropriation to bitter excorism.

I myself have never had a specific interest in Elvis' music -- my first contacts with his work were less the fire of his early rockabilly days and more the bloat of later years -- but I could certainly not deny or minimize his relevance and impact. And so this book seems -- despite its padding with outdated bibliographies of past Elvis Literature -- to be an insightful, intriguing glimpse into the machinery of American pop culture....less

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Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession

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