ABSTRACT
Of course, there are all kinds of Elvis to love-Southern Elvis, Tender Elvis, Trucker Elvis, Cadillac Elvis, Black Elvis, Queer Elvis, Vegas Elvis, Zoroastrian Elvis, Army Elvis, Karate Elvis, Bloated Elvis, Dead Elvis, Saint Elvis. At the risk of crowding the stage, my essay adds four more to the mix: Ready-made Elvis, Machine Elvis, Mother Elvis, and the Third Elvis. By presenting these undeniably willful constructions of “The King”—I hope to conjoin my interests as a fan and a scholar and thus expose the primarily affective dimensions of the entire Elvis phenomenon. More than anything else, I believe, Elvis’s fame rests upon an affective openness that became available with both the new recording technology and expanding consumer culture that redefined the public sphere during the modern era. His aesthetic, if one may apply that term to such an incoherent and undeniably spontaneous process, begins with an anxious dissociation of sensibility, a radical decontextualization of experience, voice, and language that nonetheless entails the release of otherwise illicit affects and emotional states. In this, Elvis’s modernism-his avant-gardism, say-proves decisively popular and non-literate; on records, at concerts, and in photographs, it works at the level of the sensual body and serves to reconfigure its habitual relations with an increasingly mechanical world. Here, then, with Elvis and his fame, we may trace the outlines of a popular or vernacular modernism, of the kind first defined by Miriam Hansen, one that exhibits its own structures of feeling, its own relations to the pains and promises of modernity, and its own modes of address and reparation.
