Elvis: A Celebration - Taschenbuch

English, Hardbound/Gebunden mit Schutzumschlag, 22.5x28 cm, 608 Seiten/pages, 2.8 kg ! über 600 Fotos aus den Graceland Archiven mit kurzen Kommentaren - Ein Monster

Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the 20th century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution" - Leonard Bernstein OK, so that was going too far. The man who conducted the New York Philharmonic and composed the music for West Side Story should have known better. Elvis simply didn't 'introduce the beat to everything: but he was the first to acknowledge the roots of his music in blues, gospel, country, and all the other rhythmically based popular music that America had created through the first half of the 20th century. Likewise, the jive-talk language and sharp clothes that were adopted by Elvis and other early rock'n'rollers - and soon taken up by the newly identified generation of "teenagers" - weren't invented overnight, but had their basis in the be-bop slang and zoot-suit fashions of big city jazz musicians in the 1940s.

Having said that, Bernstein was right about Elvis being an incalculable cultural force. It's hard now to appreciate the total impact Elvis had on what we loosely call popular culture, that melting pot of music, art, literature, attitudes, and manners that found its most vital catalyst and instigator for change in the America of the last century. And, like Louis Armstrong, Jackson Pollock, Scott Fitzgerald, cowboy films and boogie woogie, Elvis and his music were uniquely American; it just wouldn't have happened, couldn't have happened, anywhere else. In that media-driven century that has so recently come to a close, the century of the photograph, motion pictures, and television as well as records and radio,...