Word: presley
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...second great upheaval was the 1960s. Again, a rupture opened with the past; received standards and values were under siege, this time in the ferment of civil rights, the sexual revolution and Vietnam. In the arts the rumbling had started in the '50s, when Elvis Presley got everybody all shook up, when Jack Kerouac took to the road and Allen Ginsberg began to howl. In 1969, in a muddy field in New York's Catskill Mountains, more than 400,000 of their spiritual heirs gathered at the Woodstock Festival to stake their claim as a new generation...
...spotted the effervescent moptops in mid-mob scene at London's Heathrow Airport the previous October ("Who the hell are the Beatles?" he'd asked excitedly), brought them over to play his show early on, in February 1964, and 70 million people tuned in. A congratulatory telegram from Elvis Presley, the great, lost god of rockabilly, was read at the beginning of the show, in what might have been seen as torch-passing fashion, and Americans--or American youth, at any rate--promptly fell in love. ("I give them a year," said Sullivan's musical director...
...commonly thought that by the time the Beatles arrived in the U.S., rock-'n'-roll music, an uproarious sound forged by such pioneers as Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis Presley, had all but died out, leaving the charts littered with such unconvincing rock-lite commodities as Frankie Avalon, Bobby Rydell and Chubby Checker. This is not entirely true. Although Presley had been drafted into the army in 1958 (and was never quite the same after he got out), and Buddy Holly had been killed in a plane crash in 1959, and Berry, Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis were...
...every school of jazz since has had to address how he interpreted the basics of the idiom--swing, blues, ballads and Afro-Hispanic rhythms. While every jazz instrumentalist owes him an enormous debt, singers as different as Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley and Marvin Gaye have Armstrong in common as well. His freedom, his wit, his discipline, his bawdiness, his majesty and his irrepressible willingness to do battle with deep sorrow and the wages of death give his music a perpetual position in the wave of the future that is the station...
...thirds of his professional life was spent in the rock era, much of it reacting to rhythms and attitudes he found alien. "The most brutal, ugly, degenerate, vicious form of expression it has been my displeasure to hear," Sinatra wrote of rock 'n' roll at the time of Elvis Presley's pre-eminence, no doubt hoping to turn back the Mongols. It didn't quite work, and in efforts to maintain his commercial viability, Sinatra would eventually record Presley's hit Love Me Tender as well as works by Paul Simon (Mrs. Robinson), George Harrison (Something) and Joni Mitchell (Both...