Dead Elvis. A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession

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Elvis Presley remains alive--in the cultural imagination of our place and time. His vitality has intensified in direct proportion to the obsession with his memory. Dead Elvis chronicles this obsession; it is a biography of Elvis's life since his death. Elvis has become a sort of ever-present ghost behind any given cultural event, adding an element of mystery, drama, squalor, grandeur--an anarchy of possibilities--to manifestations as diverse as the Statue of Liberty centennial and the third ignored single by an unknown punk band. Greil Marcus follows the trail of this new, posthumous Elvis as an imaginative force, a kind of necessity--"the necessity existing in every culture that leads it to produce a perfect, all-inclusive metaphor for itself." Dead Elvis makes plain how the meanings of that metaphor have multiplied since Elvis died; how themes of freedom, responsibility, authority, sex, repression, youth, age, tradition, novelty, guilt, and redemption have been expressed through a phenomenon of such magnitude it can only be seen in fragments. "This is a book about what Elvis Presley has been up to in the last fourteen years," Marcus writes; "a small history of something much too big for one body or one face. Elvis Presley made history; this is a book about how, when he died, many people found themselves caught up in the adventure of remaking his history, which is to say their own."