Elvis Presley: Seven Wonderful Albums

On August 16, 1977, Elvis Presley died on a toilet in his Graceland mansion, grotesquely overweight, drugged up to his eyeballs and long since deemed culturally irrelevant. More than three decades later, he has been transformed into a kind of demi-god, the ultimate icon of the American Dream in all its glory and its worst excesses.

The trademark Elvis, who was born 80 years ago on January 8 1935, is fixed forever in the first flare of youth and beauty, commemorated on everything from coffee mugs to bed linen, a supernaturally gifted avatar whose instinctive talent made him catalyst and figurehead for the 20th-century’s rock and roll revolution, a poor boy who became the populist king of America, his rags to riches ascent a symbol of the shift of cultural and social power from the elite to the masses.

Twist the prism and Elvis becomes a metaphor for American innocence corrupted and destroyed, a talent that laid waste to itself, harbinger of the bloated future of a fast food nation.

Yet to view Elvis as a symbol is to overlook the music itself. At their best, his recordings contain a pure joyousness and a sense of soaring release, qualities of innocent expressiveness increasingly rare in our self-conscious 30 #1 Hits Best Price: $1.49 Buy New $4.08 (as of 09:05 UTC - Details) era. The primal energy and almost lascivious pleasure of Elvis in full flight released forces beyond anyone’s (least of all his own) comprehension.

The shock of the world’s initial reaction to the Memphis flash still reverberates more than half a century later, when rock is the mainstream music of our times, and its former rebel leader is considered suitable for family entertainment. But even after the world adjusted to Elvis, and Elvis to the world, he continued making records that expressed his unique personality, giving the lie to the lazy critical consensus that Elvis’s muse never recovered from a short back and sides from the US army barber.

Elvis is the only pop star to have had number one singles in every decade since the Fifties, and the simple reason is that the best of his music has so much life and spirit, time and changing fashions cannot dim its appeal.

In 22 years of recording, Presley certainly made a lot of mediocre recordings that do not deserve to be remembered, let alone endlessly reissued. But these magnificent seven original albums are touched by genius.

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