The Ephiphany of Elvis
Somewhere in the snowy vastness of Finland, Bill Drummond has an ephiphany (from Bad Wisdom):
"The sleeping Dionysius in all us young tender white males understood the clarion call. This clarion call grew and grew, went out around the world. Echoes. Echoes of echoes answering back from continent to continent, from year to year, from generation to generation. Gangs of young men went out into the world armed only with the buzzing, howling and chiming and single-coil and Humbucker pick-ups and the clatter of drums, screaming their war cries and moaning their laments...
"Now, I know Elvis did not sit down and invent Rock 'n' Roll (Elvis didn't invent anything, nor did Sam Philips with his slap-back echo -- these are incidentals). Elvis was Elvis because within him so much was right: the time, the place, the looks, the heartache, the rage, the depth, the shallowness, the hips, the fire, the ice, the voice, the name, the wantonness and the tragedy: and all of these separate elements were in each other, each contained the seed of all the other components.
"Fads and fashion fanned flames then flickered away. Intellectual snobberies muddied the water. Technial prowess tried to hold us -- the hordes -- at bay. But through all that, Dionysius swaggered on, leering and lurching. He was on the loose for the first time in almost one thousand years. He had been banished since the last Viking raids, since the old gods, the Norse gods, the Olympian gods and the Celtic gods, banished but not killed, just locked deep in our souls.
"So don't look for him in Elvis' quiff, or his tough-but-tender looks, or John Lennon's ache or Dylan's rhymes, or Bolan's boogie or Bowie's masks or Johnny Rotten's disdain, or in any other of the thousands who have heard the clarion call and made arseholes of themselves across the world's stages. Generation after generation has grabbed this mantle as a birthright -- and yes, it is a birthright -- but some forget that before Elvis there was nothing, well, nearly nothing, for a thousand years. Rock 'n' Roll in all its ugly, debased and exploited forms, tore out of and built up from the black man's basic twelve-bar blues, is the soundtrack to every Viking voyage. Once again the white boy can rape and pillage, lie and lick, lust and kick, swagger and swear across the known and unknown universe, the chains of Christian doctrine smashed on a pagan altar...
"The reason we Three Kings are hurtling towards the North Pole with this icon of the King is in recognition of the fact that we have thrown away our young men's years on his very altar. We now want to smash on through to the other side before the tragedy [of Dionysius] drags us down with him. Baby Jesus, here we come!
"Elvis is dead. But it was through Elvis that we were able to experience one of our inner gods we had denied for a thousand years; it was onto Elvis and all those who followed him that we were able to project our undeveloped secret gods. We need those kings and gods and superheroes." [pp. 80-82]