'Elvis the Pelvis' and the big beat | Elvis Presley

'Elvis the Pelvis' and the big beat

The American people have a great many serious things to think of now, but one of the less serious, but not totally unimportant, things they debate is the Elvis Presley phenomenon. Is he a credit to his state, as the Governor of Mississippi has asserted, or is he only too representative of that most backward and savage of American commonwealths?

Such are some of the questions that the American public, in a muddled and often angry frame of mind, puts to itself. It rejoiced when it learned that teenagers in Manchester wrecked a cinema under the inspiriting influence of Rock Around the Clock, and that our adolescents are ready to give to "Elvis the Pelvis" the same adoring reception that the two-way stretch girdle age-group gave to Liberace.

We are all in the same boat, so it is gladly believed. Not only American kids are crazy.

The Presley boom recalls Frank Sinatra of 10 years ago. The Charleston and The Black Bottom were as much a source of scandal as Blue Suede Shoes, and the American child is ready to tell Mom or Grandma where she gets off.

I recalled that day in New York when Sinatra fans stormed Times Square, tearing each others' clothes off when deprived of the chance of stripping and perhaps dismembering their hero.

After all, the Bacchae had been there before. The screaming adolescents who wreck cinemas and terrify ministers and parents are disciples of the goddess "to whose bright image nightly by the moon Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs."

"What," asked a lawyer friend of mine of his Irish-Catholic office girl, "does your mother think of your rushing off to see Elvis Presley?" "She doesn't mind; she doesn't know anything". "But what about the wiggle?"

"Oh, that's just his way of expressing himself." Today, as we know, to cripple self-expression is a sin.

In spite of the prayer meetings and the refusal to hire halls, self-expression rages. It is probably only an accident that had made him a master of Rock 'n' Roll and not a gospel-singer or a minor warbler of "country music".

Already someone unknown is on Elvis's trail. For leadership in this world is "a garland briefer than a girl's". Only death can confer real immortality, as the cult of James Dean shows. "Somewhere some young musician is working on something which will make Rock 'n' Roll sound like the genteel tinkling of a spinet," says a Rock 'n' Roll organ. This is the Big Beat that is on the way. We have been warned.

DW Brogan

(The author was professor of political science at Cambridge)

• Elvis Presley

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