.png)
The King knew how to make the case for the horizontal mambo
Elvis Presley was a next level teen idol - female fans almost ripped the singer to pieces. Literally (shades of Dionysus). No surprise there…
Elvis was tall, preternaturally handsome and famous on a level it’s hard to conceive. More than that, he was infamous, condemned as licentious by moral guardians country-wide. Rightly so. “Elvis the Pelvis” gyrated on stage unlike any white man before him, and most since.
The key to Elvis’ ability to put otherwise demure girls/women in heat wasn’t just how he sang - his moves and a voice combining sweet, operatic and nasty - but what he sang. Songs that leaped over the border between romantic and “fuck me.”
His very first hit - That’s Alright Mama - had an unmistakeable sexual undercurrent.
The singer’s parents warn him “the girl you’re foolin’ with she ain’t no good for you.” To which Elvis responds “That’s alright now Mama, any way you do.” What way might that be? Hmmmm.
From there and over the entire course of his career, Elvis released songs whose main if not only purpose was convincing a woman to bump uglies.
I’m not talking about tunes you put on in the background to set the mood, to get laid. Not Frank Sinatra or Swedish Death Metal. I’m talking about songs that make the case for sex directly. Fuck Me Songs (FMS).
I draw your intention to the money shot in Give Me The Right. “Why make me plead… for something you need.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Elvis isn’t asking for sex. He’s saying he has the right to it. “You can’t say no, when I love you so,” he insists.
PC it ain’t, but talk about ballsy.
Backing off from that a bit, but not much, we have One Night With You. How in the world did “I want your sweet helping hand. My love's too strong to hide” make into the Billboard top 10?
Part of that’s down to Elvis changing the lyrics from "One night of sin is what I'm now paying for" to "One night with you is what I'm now praying for." (Note: he finally sang the original lyrics in what’s now called the 1968 Comeback Special.)
Elvis’ hand job request was hardly the only barely disguised sexual entreaty. Check out this lyric from Santa Claus Is Back In Town.
“Hang up your pretty stockings, turn out the light, Santa Claus is coming down your chimney tonight.”
That’s “coming” with an “o.” In a Christmas song.
Fever is insane – a slow, minimalist, sexy AF song that puts Elvis’ desire in a historical context. And hits listeners with this chorus:
You give me fever when you kiss me Fever when you hold me tight Fever in the morning Fever all through the night
Too subtle (these days)? How about Such a Night.
At the end of the song, the Jordinaires’ oohs and aahs lead us to the unavoidable conclusion that Elvis is having sex with his back-up singers.
There are more examples, plenty, but these are some of the best, and you get the idea.
The hidden dynamic in Elvis’ FMS’s isn’t the backing music, often a modified distillation of the rock and roll Black musicians pioneered. It was Elvis himself.
As Albert Goldman pointed out in his epic biography Elvis, The King believed he contained the subsumed soul of stillborn twin Jesse Garon.
No kidding. It was a common belief for surviving twins amongst Elvis’ religious not-to-say superstitious milieu. To the point where his mother Gladys set a place at the table for Elvis’ dead twin.
Whether you buy that or not, Elvis had a split personality: “Good Elvis” and “bad Elvis.” A good boy who’s also a very, very bad boy.
The dichotomy powered his career and informed his FMS’s. You can see it in this performance of Don’t Be Cruel on The Ed Sullivan Show. The King alternates between glowering, smiling seductively and beaming happily.
One last thing…
The contraceptive pill hit the streets in 1960, kicking off the so-called sexual revolution. Elvis’ FMS’s tapped into and unleashed that pent-up sexual energy.
Elvis Presley was hardly the first obviously sexiest singer ever to hit the airwaves, but he was certainly one of the first. And definitely one of the best.