“Image, Music, Text”

Peter Whitmer has written that around the world the names Jesus, Coke and Elvis are the “only three words that need no translation to convey their meaning” (Whitmer 1996: x). Even in a multicultural South Africa, in the year 2008, the image of an Elvis impersonator was used to market a series of rollerball pens for no other reason than they come in a variety of colours redolent of the ersatz emeralds and sapphires on the singer's jumpsuit (Sunday Times Magazine, 25 May 2008, n.p.)! Elvis Presley, arguably the greatest solo pop idol of the twentieth century and certainly the most recognisable and ubiquitous semiotic marker in American cultural history, embodies the quintessence of “the postmodern condition” (Lyotard). Thirty years after his death – 16 August 2007 marking that epochal moment – Presley's image remains a powerful signifier of the exuberance of post-World-War-Two youth and culture, not only in the West, but worldwide. Drawing on the work of poststructuralist thinkers such as Barthes and cultural theorists such as Simon Frith, Steven Connor and Dick Hebdige, this article explores the mystique of the Elvis image as a postmodern, semiotic text. In crossing the liminal zone between black R & B and white country and western music, Presley, a white southerner, negotiates a fluid, performative identity that characterises the hybrid nature of the rock genre itself

Aesthetics · Aotearoa · Art · Art history · Linguistics · Literature · Performative utterance · Popular culture · Postmodernism · Semiotics · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Gender Studies · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy

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