The Unbearable Likeness of Elvis

Picture the following scene:

Elvis, onstage. Singing. Smiling. Shaking his hips.

Only, instead of it being 1968, imagine the year is 2014.

Now picture me, quietly mortified by such a possibility. Not the prospect of this year’s much-anticipated apocalypse being a warm-up act for the King’s Second Comeback – musty black leather and diamonds bedraggling his horny zombie bones – but to that of a performing hologram being loosed on the world, courtesy of the same people who returned Tupac to the stage.

Picture me turning frantically to my copy of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being for guidance in this, my hour of need.

The ‘lightness’ Kundera refers to is something I often attempt to counteract by seeking out ‘heaviness’/substance within art. I can be a bit of a picky bugger in this regard, often shying away from new trends, particularly in music, because they seem, at first, too frivolous, inconsequential.

Which is not, however, to suggest that I’m perpetually aching for Nick Cave-levels of grim poeticism. Contrarily, I sometimes feel that ‘lightness’ should be embraced, rather than wrestled with, through what might be termed ‘high cheese’ – hair metal-era Bon Jovi, disco-era Queen, and, of course, Las Vegas-era Elvis.

Songs from simpler, dafter, better times.

Yet songs stuck in those times, nonetheless. Sure, there is the sweetly bogus authenticity of cover bands, if a fan really wants to feel closer to a moment they miss(ed). But there’s little chance of the Jon Bon Jovi re-growing that glorious mullet (poor lad’s started thinning on top…).

This is how it should be. Fans age, why not performers? Indeed, the more successful of the older ranks of artists tend to be those who directly confront the realities of their ageing, the prospect of their mortality. Not an issue that bands launching their first album should worry about, but something they will have to face up to, should they wish to end up like Springsteen, still performing into their sixties. 

Which is why the possibility I refer to re: Elvis perturbs me so.

In addition to upsetting the natural order, this doesn’t augur well for live music in the (perhaps not-too-distant) future; it serves to enhance the negative aspects of the presumed divide between ‘superstar’ and ‘ordinary person’. This technology promises further ‘immortality’ to the already-famous, and, in doing so, belittles the efforts of the young bands that actually are playing live. Suddenly, their music doesn’t seem quite so frivolous, and begins to possess a depth that the holograms will miss, no matter how detailed the programmers can make them.

This provides a perfect demonstration of Kundera’s definition of kitsch. The hologram will stand ignorant of the fact, and the circumstances, of Elvis’ death. It will be Elvis without both the crap and the crapper. Will be Elvis without the fallible, tragic, self-destructive aspect. That is, it won’t be Elvis at all.

But I fear that a great many people will still pay good money: 1) for the ‘lightness’, and 2) for the show.

From a stone

You take the small exit. The door only open today because it is sunlit outside, because it would be too warm in the shop otherwise. You take the exit and return to the side-street. Shoe-battered flagstones. Loudness of footsteps amplified, it seems, by the shadows that crowd between this building and the building facing.

You walk out into the street, walk along it with the pockets of your jacket – conspiring to make it hotter still – laden, chock-full with books. Weighted, as though with stones on your way to the river.

Only, different.

If these are stones, then they are stones from which you can easily draw blood. Blood and warmth – not like sunshine, but similar – and voices and words. And songs, and company, and recipe lists. And chemicals, it seems, that spark off passions in you. Feed both lust and intellect in equal measure.

The things of living, fixed and held steady for a time, so as you might think more closely on them. Bearhug them tightly, cut off from the slipstream and the traffic and the conveyor belt crowds.

Stones that can flip the world, and nature’s ever onwards-marching order, so that, instead of sinking you, they carry you up.

They clatter against your hips as you enter the plaza, leave shadows and echoes behind for the day. The clatter gains pace as you come nearer the station, more eager than ever to get home and read.