It don't matter if you're black or white--Or does it?

Perhaps it is because I’m not feeling well and am extremely tired, but I found Marcus’ article quite convoluted and, at times, I wasn’t entirely certain that I understood what Marcus was trying to tell me. Marcus traces a number of “contradictions” that he finds evident in Elvis’ work, image, and aura, beginning with the statement that Elvis was “a great artist, a great rocker…a great bore” (121). However, Marcus himself originally makes the statement that in Elvis’ music “you can hear that distance, that refusal to really commit himself, in his best music and in his worst” (125), and later recalls (as we saw in the documentary last week) that Elvis was a perfectionist to the extent that he recorded “Hound Dog” (I think it was Hound Dog) 32 times before he was satisfied with take #28.
Nonetheless, there are a few points that he makes which I feel require a bit more attention. My problem is with the idea of “artist,” not in the sense of a performer, but of a creator. Marcus seems to take the stand throughout the article that Elvis was a great creator, and his success is attributable to his new form of music, a new style. However, he also mentions that Elvis’ very style is rooted in Black culture. His adaptation of blues, R&B and gospel are just that—an adaptation. The style, born out of the Harlem Renaissance, existed long before Elvis recorded his first hit. The folkloric nature of Elvis’ music, and even his manner of speech, is also very much aligned with the narrative of African-American experience in the United States. So, on the one hand, Elvis’ edgy black and blues style was borrowed, not created. I think it’s reasonable to make a similar argument for country music. Both existed long before Elvis; maybe his genius, then, is forcing them to meet, thus giving birth to rockabilly.
On page 129 he claims that “the fundamental contrast, of course, could not have been more obvious: black and white.” While recording That’s All Right Mama, Marcus suggests that Phillips is “perplexed. Who is gonna play this crazy record? White jocks won’t touch it ‘cause it’s nigger music and colored will pass ‘cause its hillbilly” (142). Yet, just three paragraphs later, Marcus asserts “the image was white….There were two kinds of white counterattack on the black invasion of white popular culture that was rock ‘n’ roll: the attempt to soften black music or freeze it out, and the rockabilly lust to beat the black man at his own game” (143). This moment certainly destroys Marcus’ claim that Elvis’ music harbored the inability to exclude. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Elvis had less than ten black fans. In watching the documentary last week, Professor Newman made an important observation: were there any black fans in the audiences? One, maybe? There had to have been a notable looming racial tension hovering over Elvis’ career and what his career signified in American popular culture. Although on page 146 Marcus attempts to draw a distinction between early forms of rock ‘n’ roll, which may have co-opted an African-
American stylistic form, and rockabilly which was “a world of its own, and as authentically new as any music can be,” I don’t think rockabilly exists without rock ‘n’ roll.
Marcus’ claim of Elvis’ unending openness and inability to exclude is also problematic in that Elvis began his career with Sun Records, a recording studio that Sam Phillips originally founded with the intention of providing black artists an opportunity to record their rhythm and blues. After Elvis and other similar white artists hit it big with Sun Records, the days of wanting to infiltrate American culture with the music of the black artist began to fade. A musical style and harvesting of culture that would essentially uplift the race, using art to demand equality, was arguably twisted into a white popular cultural phenomenon that excluded its Black roots. The sorts of hierarchical exclusionary aspects of Elvis’ music and its effect on popular culture highlight an undemocratic nature of popular culture that privileges black culture through a white lens.