Dylanology 16 (August 2022): “The Way Elvis Freed Our Bodies”
Baz Luhrmann’s not-just-a-biopic “Elvis” made me think of Bruce Springsteen’s comparison between Dylan and Elvis, and wonder how deep the similarities go. Very deep, is my answer.
In his speech at Bob Dylan’s induction in the Rock ’n’ Roll hall of fame in 1988, Bruce Springsteen said:
Dylan was a revolutionary – the way that Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical, it did not mean that it was anti-intellect. He broke through the limitations of what a recording artist could achieve.
I watched Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis recently, and I came to think of this speech. The question I asked myself was: How deep does the comparison between Dylan and Elvis go?
I suspect that for Bruce, it’s the “revolutionary” part that is most important: I think what he had in mind was that both Elvis and Dylan blew to pieces certain boundaries to what could be done in music. Elvis moved in a way that for a while was controversial and culturally not acceptable, but thanks to him it became normal, and a whole new way of using the body became available to everyone. Dylan did something similar with the lyrics of popular music by introducing advanced poetry and lofty subjects and thereby widening the possibilities of the genre.
But I think the comparison could go way deeper than that.
Are they just similar because they are both revolutionary, or are they revolutionary in the same way? I think it is worth asking what exactly it is that Dylan and Elvis do in each their domain, and if there is perhaps something that they do not just in similar ways, but in the same way – The way.
What way is “the way”?
To make a long story short, as a tl;dr, I think that the way Elvis used his body has a direct parallel in the way Dylan uses language; that Elvis created a language for using the body in music the same way that Dylan has created a language for using speech in music; that they both have created something that wasn’t there before, and they do so by extending the natural into the domain of the poetic, or vice versa.
Below is the longer version of the story.
What is it that Elvis does?
What was it, then, that Elvis did, that was so revolutionary? Two things in particular are frequently mentioned.
One is sex. This is abundantly clear from the reactions to Elvis’s first public appearances in the mid-50s. After his legendary performance of “Hound Dog” on the Milton Bearle show in 1956, Ben Gross wrote that “Elvis, who rotates his pelvis … gave an exhibition that was suggestive and vulgar, tinged with the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos”, and Ed Sullivan declared him “unfit for family viewing”.
Again, I assume that this is what Bruce has in mind: that the sexual side of music was liberated.
The parallel with Dylan would be that where Elvis is overtly sexual, Dylan is overtly “brainy”, writing “Of war and peace the truth just twists, // its curfew gull just glides” instead of “Love me tender”.
But I think there is more at play here.
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