Elvis Presley - White Christmas
What better way to start than with a little something from the King? Aside from laying the foundations for modern pop music as we know it, Elvis also set the standard for the lucrative Xmas album format and his festive 1957 collection remains the best selling Xmas record of all time. It wasn't the first time a popular artist had capitalised on their popularity by flinging out a Xmas record at the height of their fame but Elvis' status as the first genuine pop star of his time gave him the opportunity to mix things up a little bit style-wise and the album married straight-faced spiritual numbers with some more upbeat cuts delivered in the pelvic-thrusting hornmonster persona he had adopted back then, resulting in the first example of a mainstream pop artist repackaging Xmas tunes in their own inimitable style. Bizarrely the song that caused the most trouble wasn't one of the raunchy rock 'n' roll numbers but his revamp of Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas', itself an established festive standard of 15 years' pedigree by that point - Elvis' slow, seductive version of the song enraged composer Irving Berlin enough to prompt him to phone radio stations across North America insisting that they remove the 'profane parody of his cherished yuletide standard' from their playlists. These days it's hard to see what the fella was so upset about but then again that was 55 years ago so we can probably assume that the modern-day impact would be something along the lines of LMFAO recording a bosh-pop reworking of Cliff Richard's 'Mistletoe and Wine' over a video montage of elf on elf bondage and reindeer fellatio. Such are the times we live in I suppose....
1 comment:
Irving Berlin was from Tunbridge Wells ?
This reader is trying to remove the images fostered by the last sentence of the blog... Whew.
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