Word: presleys
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...biggest star was Elvis, who had "died" two year before WWN was born. The weekly ran frequent stories about the singer ("Painting of Elvis Weeps Real Tears"), but its greatest news coup, and its top-selling issue, was the one that announced Presley was alive in a Kalamazoo, Mich., hideout. WWN's explanation of his 1977 disappearance - what was reported as his death - was typically ingenious. Building on the fact that Elvis had a twin brother Jesse who died at birth, WWN claimed that Jesse had in fact survived, brain damaged and hidden away, and that when Jesse died...
What happened to the coarsening of our culture? By now, to be a teen heartthrob, you should have done time in rehab, videotaped yourself having sex or been shot in the face at least once. But instead we've gone backward, from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to Leonardo DiCaprio to Justin Timberlake to Zac Efron. By 2020, 12-year-old girls will be decorating their lockers with photos of the surgeon general...
...What Presley and Parker didn't understand was the revolution Elvis had created. He had overthrown the empire of nice; now the outlaw was in. Later pop stars, like Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, didn't sanitize themselves for the mass culture. They knew they were the mass culture, and they did films only as a lark. They had seen what indenture to the old Hollywood dream had done to Elvis: a bunch of B movies that betrayed his revolutionary promise, neutered the sneering sexuality of his early live performances. His top-of-the-charts ballads might have enlarged his audience...
...When Presley gave up movies in the late 60s, and hit Vegas, he reverted to balladeer form: reprising his rock hits but concentrating on the passionate crooning of songs made famous by people like Crosby ("White Christmas") and Sinatra ("My Way"), finally outing himself as rock's first - maybe last - romantic. Sequins and strutting aside, Elvis had become the singers he grew up listening to. Only fatter...
...earlier version of this story referred incorrectly to Presley's age at the time of his death...