Uwolnić „soul”, wracając do Memphis

Abstract

The transgressive potential of Elvis Presley’s music and stage persona remains an inadequately explored topic. He was an affective medium which catalysed a moral, racial and social revolution. He was the first beneficiary of emancipatory transformations of sexuality. The narrations and mythologies of rock culture did not problematise Elvis’s art and image transitions – the reasons for his escapes from media stereotypes. The most salient of the medially disjointed images is Elvis’s tenuous identification with the gender role of a male role model imposed upon him. Indeed, rock heroes are to embody the “macho” role. Meanwhile, the most interesting part of Elvis’s musical identity is precisely the ambiguous status of his masculinity in the 1950s and the “non-normativity” of his persona and music in 1960s–70s.