Seems like he understands it perfectly - the fuck.
"In the beginning there was a great
darkness upon the Earth. There was
Christmas and your birthday but beyond
that all was a black endless authoritarian
void. There was nothing to look forward
to, nothing to look back upon, no future,no history. It was all a kid could do to
make it to summer vacation.
Then, in a moment of light, blinding
as a universe birthing a billion new suns,
there was hope, sex, rhythm, excitement,
possibility, a new way of seeing, of
feeling, of thinking, of looking at your
body, of combing your hair, of wearing
your clothes, of moving and of living.
There was a joyous demand made, a
challenge, a way out of this dead-to-life
world, this small-town grave with all the
people I dearly loved and feared buried in
it alongside of me.
THE BARRICADES HAVE BEEN
STORMED!! A FREEDOM SONG HAS
BEEN SUNG!! THE BELLS OFLIBERTY HAVE RUNG!! A HERO
HAS COME. THE OLD ORDER HAS
BEEN OVERTHROWN!
The teachers,
the parents, the fools so sure they knew
THE WAY—THE ONLY WAY—to
build a life, to have an impact on things
and to make a man or woman out of
yourself, have been challenged.
A HUMAN ATOM HAS JUST SPLIT
THE WORLD IN TWO!
The small part of the world I inhabit
has stumbled upon an irreversible
moment. Somewhere in between the
mundane variety acts on a routine
Sunday night in the year of our Lord
1956 . . . THE REVOLUTION HAS
BEEN TELEVISED!!
Right underneath the nose of the guardians of all that “IS,” who, if they were aware of the powers they were about to unleash, would call
out the national gestapo to SHUT THIS
SHIT DOWN!! . . . or . . . SIGN IT UP
QUICK!! As a matter of fact, the arbiter
of public taste in circa-1950s USA, “MC”
ED SULLIVAN, was not initially going
to let this Southern, sexually depraved
hick sully the American consciousness
and his stage. Once the genie had been let
out of the bottle on national
television . . . IT WOULD BE OVER!
THE NATION WOULD FOLD! And
we the great unwashed, the powerless,
the marginalized, THE KIDS! . . . would
want . . . MORE. More life, more love,more sex, more faith, more hope, more
action, more truth, more power, more
“get down in the gutter, spit on me, Jesus,
teach my blind eyes to SEE” REAL-LIFE
RELIGION!! Most of all, we would want
more ROCK ’N’ ROLL!!
The polite charade, the half-assed
circus acts, the anemic singers, the
bloodless (and often highly enjoyable)
shit that passed for entertainment would
be revealed for what it was.
In the end, ratings and money did the
talking and Ed (actually, on Elvis’s first
appearance, Charles Laughton, covering
for Ed, who’d been waylaid by a car
accident) did the walking, right out to
the center of his stage to cough out,“Ladies and gentlemen . . . Elvis Presley.”
Seventy million Americans that night
were exposed to this hip-shaking human
earthquake. A fearful nation was
protected from itself by the CBS
cameramen, who were told to shoot “the
kid” only from the waist up. No money
shots! No shifting, grinding, joyfully
thrusting crotch shots. It didn’t matter.
It was all there in his eyes, his face, the
face of a Saturday night jukebox
Dionysus, the shimmying eyebrows and
rocking band. A riot ensued. Women,
young girls and many men, screaming for
what the cameras refused to show, for
what their very timidity confirmed and
promised . . . ANOTHER WORLD . . .the one below your waist and above your
heart . . . a world that had been
previously and rigorously denied was
being PROVEN TO EXIST! It was a
world with all of us in it . . . together . . .
all of us. HE HAD TO BE STOPPED!
And of course, in the end, he was
stopped. But not before the money got
made and the secret slipped out from
between his lips and his hips that this,
this life, this “everything” you know is a
mere paper construction. You, my TV
dinner–sucking, glazed-eyed friends, are
living in . . . THE MATRIX . . . and all
you have to do to see the real world, God
and Satan’s glorious kingdom on Earth,
all you have to do to taste real life is torisk being your true self . . . to dare . . . to
watch . . . to listen . . . to all the latenight staticky-voiced deejays playing
“race” records blowing in under the radar,
shouting their tinny AM radio manifesto,
their stations filled with poets, geniuses,
rockers, bluesmen, preachers, philosopher
kings, speaking to YOU from deep in the
heart of your own soul. Their voices sing,
“Listen . . . listen to what this world is
telling you, for it is calling for your love,
your rage, your beauty, your sex, your
energy, your rebellion . . . because it
needs YOU in order to remake itself. In
order to be reborn into something else,
something maybe better, more godly,
more wonderful, it needs US.”
-Bruce Springsteen
Attached: young-elvis-presley-1956.jpg (1250x845, 426.11K)
