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Posts Tagged “Elvis Presley”

100 and single

Touch Their Bodies, Eat Their Dust: Two Queens Dethrone The King

Ed. note: Chris "dennisobell" Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on this week's Billboard charts:

So momentous was the news of Mariah Carey's triumph on the Hot 100 with "Touch My Body" that Billboard leaked it on Wednesday, a day early. Chart freaks talk about acts beating small records all the time. But it's not every day that someone beats a mark on the all-time list that involves something as iconic as career No. 1 hits. And it's even rarer when that record is four decades old and involves the King of Rock & Roll.

And hey, Elvis was only ranked second on the list for total No. 1 hits. (He was, until this week, first place among solo acts.) Even sadder for Presley fans, this same week, another lady bests a record he had all to himself—this time, for most Top 10 hits. As "4 Minutes" makes a 65-point leap to No. 3, Madonna pulls out of a tie with the King, leaving him all shook up with 17 No. 1's and 36 Top 10s, to Carey's 18 chart-toppers and Madge's 37 smashes.

There's no joy in Graceland today. And if you're near Abbey Road right now, don't be surprised if folks there look a bit twitchy, too.

More »

2:00 PM on Fri Apr 4 2008
By Chris Molanphy
1,541 views, 3 comments

elvis was a hero to some

The Legacy Of Elvis Must Be Defended!

Elvis fans, as you might have guessed, are a bit of a nutty breed. When I was the sort of person who collected and sold records, a woman begged me to sell her a copy of the soundtrack to Roustabout. (Actual begging, I assure you.) She needed it, apparently, to complete her collection of all the Elvis soundtracks. I ended up giving it to her, partially to get her to go away. But to actually consider that there are people out there collecting Elvis soundtracks, as if the movies themselves weren't bad enough, is somewhat staggering, which may be why it didn't surprise me to see the latest front of Elvis-related insanity. More »

10:30 AM on Fri Mar 21 2008
By Dan Gibson
364 views, 5 comments

Latest by Michaelangelo Matos: @Chris Molanphy: For the record (and I can't believe I'm bothering to fact-check this crackpot) hahahahaha oh I can, Chris more »

ready the wetnaps

Elvis: Just As Gross As You Remember

Forbes's sorta banal (but perversely appetizing) look at "Extreme Eats" isn't so much extreme in the Travel Channel "eating a pulsating frog's heart and washing it down with a cup of bat's milk" sense of the word as "you will have an extremely painful death if you regularly consume these deep-fried abominations." But greasy, over-the-top junk food constructions are surely the new sign of American ingenuity, as rock'n'roll once was, and Forbes does note the infamous gastronomic impact that popular singers have had on our present extra-extra-extra-cheese culture. More »

11:10 AM on Tue Nov 27 2007
By jharv
689 views, 15 comments

Latest by Richaod: Here's a discussion about that on an Australian music quiz show earlier this year: [www.youtube.com] He actually had two of those at 10 PM every day instead of AM. Classic. more »

elvis week: the final word

The King-dom Is Gone

Michael A. Gonzales's essay on the problematic aspects of being a black fan of Elvis Presley is warm, honest, and well written. He captures the simple excitement of young hero-worship, sketches an early Black Rock Coalition meeting in entertaining detail. But toward the end he writes something that had me scratching my head: More »

4:30 PM on Fri Aug 17 2007
By mmatos
459 views, 1 comment

fathers, be good to your daughters

The Elvis/Lisa Marie Video: Infants, Handguns, And Shitty Blocking


Well, the video for the Elvis/Lisa Marie duet on "In The Ghetto" dropped and the single hit iTunes, and it's more maudlin that we could have even dreamed. The song itself is just a semi-awkward imposition of a new, but not awful, vocal by Lisa Marie on top of dad's original, just as advertised. But the video features gurning close-ups of Lisa's anguish-wracked, tear-streaked face in "artful" (read: a lot of cockeyed framing) black and white—it's like the clip for Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt" if it had been directed by a guy whose resume was made up mostly of insurance company ads and one episode of Alias—and (get this) little babies wriggling around in their cribs with handguns. A grim portent!

Video Premier: Elvis and Lisa Marie Presley's "In The Ghetto" [Spinner] More »

12:01 PM on Fri Aug 17 2007
By jharv
1,171 views, 7 comments

Latest by nonce: I think maybe they made the video so completely horrifying so that the song itself would seem tame by comparison. Though the Southern/white over-enunciation of "Get Toe" is always great. It's like a Boston Brahmin trying to say "trailer park." more »

In honor of Elvis Week, CBS' Early Show has talked to a bunch of ladies the King frenched/pitched woo/made eyes at, including his first girlfriend, who claims El was a chaste young man. "It did not get to the heavy petting point," she says. Suuuuuure. [CBS News]

1 comment

Kicking it with the ghost in the machine, Lisa Marie Presely has recorded a "duet" with her long dead dad of popular Elvis fave "In The Ghetto." "It's pretty organic," Lisa Marie sez of the tune. Huh? This is, like, the most inorganic "collaboration" possible. Unless you're invoking the black arts in the studio or something. [Yahoo]

4 comments

having fun with elvis on blogs

"Elvis Week": Almost As Exciting As Shark Week

It's "Elvis Week," and since this year marks the 30th anniversary of the King's demise, there's a good chance we'll be inundated with mawkish/contentious/revisionist TV specials/news reports/blog posts by Friday. The excellent Boogie Woogie Flu blog, a treasure trove of crackly old vinyl from the early rock'n'roll era and before, has a handful of Elvis-related MP3's and a reprint of Peter Guralnick's posthumous New York Times interrogation of the prevailing notion that Presley was a racist and/or an exploiter of African-American music. More »

1:50 PM on Mon Aug 13 2007
By jharv
317 views, 1 comment

Latest by loudersoft: We here in Memphis could not be happier about Dead Elvis Week. It's 103 degrees here today. Please join us for a city-wide "sidewalk barbeque" (where it's so hot that people can actually use the heat to roast more »

From the "when selecting music for your ad campaign goes horribly, horribly awry" file: Some genius decided to sell the rights to "Viva Las Vegas" to an ad for Viagra. What's next, "Hound Dog" for Cialis? [azcentral.com]

2 comments

news

Liner Notes: Prepare To Get Blunted

- James Blunt's new album is coming out in September; on release day, expect your mom to cue it up and take a longer-than-usual bath. [NME]
- Kudos to the New York Daily News for incorporating the phrase "The Gloved One even fingered a man" into a story about Michael Jackson's dwindling finances. [NY Daily News]
- A bottle of antihistamines that once belonged to Elvis Presley was auctioned off for $2,600; the winning bid was placed by the ghost of Colonel Tom Parker, who's both evil and overly nostalgic. [TMZ]

1:05 PM on Mon Jun 18 2007
By Brian Raftery
1,100 views, Comment

american idol

"American Idol" Charity Show To Raise The Standards Of Bad Taste

Perhaps you were too traumatized by the loss of Sanjaya to remember the moment on last Wednesday's American Idol when Ryan Seacrest teased a duet between two "musical legends" on this Wednesday night's telethon extravaganza (which we'll be liveblogging). We didn't; hey, we even made a stupid joke about the duet turning out to be Celine Dion singing alongside the lead singer of Hinder. Well, as it turns out, we were half-right about the duet's participants; Dion is, in fact, involved. The other half? Let's just say that the choice of performer is almost in worse taste than selecting the Hinder guy. From TMZ: More »

2:03 PM on Mon Apr 23 2007
By mjohnston
6,488 views, 6 comments

Latest by horseycraze: Don't you guys get it? This is obviously a ruse to get Elvis out of hiding. If he's still alive, he'll intervene to make sure this never happens. more »