More Elvis?

 “I look out into your eyes, I look out into your faces, you know what I see? I see a little bit of Elvis in each and every one of yah.”

-Mojo Nixon

Chuck D:

Elvis was a hero to most

but he never meant shit to me you see

straight up racist that sucker was

simple and plain

Flavor Flav:

motherfucker him and John Wayne.

-Public Enemy

“Everybody in outer space looks like Elvis, because Elvis is a perfect being. We are all moving in perfect peace and harmony twords Elvis-ness, soon all will become Elvis, everything, everywhere will be Elvis. Why do you think they call it ‘evolution’ anyway? It’s really ‘Elvis-lution’!”

-M. Nixon

I have been aware of the idea that Elvis was essentially a racist construct for about as long as I have been aware of Elvis-- an idea which should be fairly intuitive to anyone with even a passing familiarity with American music and history. By the end of the nineteenth century it was fairly obvious that ‘the blues’ or ‘jazz’ or ‘black people music’ was the most important thing that America had going for it culturally and the idea that the people who figured out how to successfully sell it to white people would do so all the way to the bank, flows from the this realization. This was Elvis. What set him apart from Muddy Watters, Bo Diddly, Chuck Berry and Little Richard was not talent but white skin. Those other guys were better musicians; Elvis made all the money and changed history. 

The question is at what point do you accuse Mojo Nixon of worshiping Elvis in bad faith, and I am extremely reluctant to do so at all. Mojo’s desire to run around wearing sequins, shaking his hips and calling people ‘baybuh’ should, on some level, be ‘pure.’ It was not as if Mojo, or white America, was exposed to an equal amount of Elvis and Bo Diddley and then asked to choose; Mojo emerged in a world where Elvis was a symbol for something that Mojo wanted-- that Elvis had obtained this status through deplorable means was out of a lot of people’s control-- potentially including the King himself. 

Then the question is, at what point does a good Elvis-in-a-UFO joke, a good illusion to the rocking good times of Mojo-Nixon-Elvis, become a reinforcement of the racist idea that a speed-adled, hillbilly Chuck Berry cover act is actually the be-all end-all of popular entertainment? This is a complicated question because Elvis is, or at least fucking should be, if not fun, then at least funny. 

Also, does ANY of this excuse the fact that it took, like, a day of me wondering around with ‘suspicious minds’* in my head for me to realize that ALL the chapter titles in ‘infinite wealth’ were Elvis songs? I don’t feel good about that. But, I do think the result is a very unsatisfying amount of Elvis, since there are, as of yet, no other real references to Elvis. If you are gonna have that much Elvis, might as well throw in a little MORE ELVIS. 

Specifically: Elvis impersonator should be a fucking job. You could kick people with your blue suede shoes and sick hound dogs on them! It would be fuckn’ AWSOME and Kiryu and Ichiban would absolutely rock the hell out of aviators and sequins.** Are there racial issues about Asian Elvis impersonators? I don’t give a shit. 

And, yeah, it sucks that our culture recognizes the Elvis impersonator, and not the Little Richard impersonator. There’s only one thing to do: someone’s gotta get out there and impersonate Little Richard.

ALSO: Every chapter in your game is named after an Elvis song, AND karaoke is a playable mini-game YET none of the available karaoke tracks are Elvis? Something does not add up, RGG. You are not gonna tell me that the guy who voices Kiryu does not have a phonetic ‘jail house rock’ in him. 

Wait-a-sec: what the actual shit?!? A jailhouse rock joint w Ichiban and Kiryu would ROCK! LITERALLY ROCK!!

But, when what pisses you off about a video game is an omission, if it calls out to things that should have been included, you’re already talking about, probably, a pretty good video game. ***

And, again, titles-refrenceing-titles-in-translation. They show the chapter title in Japanese characters, and then give the English title/Elvis song. Are those the characters that you see on the track listing when you buy the King’s greatest hits in Japan? Or is it a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT BIT in the original? Or something in between where ‘suspicious minds’ is and always would be, translated as something a bit differently in Japanese; and there is either more or less going on than we imagined. 

Anyway, in the future, hopefully, someone will look out into our eyes, out into our faces, and see a little bit of Prince in each and every one of us. It will be a good day; one that I sincerely hope Mojo Nixon will appreciate. 

*a) Before I got it in my head and looked up the lyrics, my best guess was that the opening line of ‘suspicious minds’ was ‘they call it a drag’ and not ‘I’m caught in a trap,’ although I was skeptical because ‘call it a drag’ did not make a ton of sense-- although, really, I hadn’t thought about it much at all. Anyway, having looked it up, and listened to it a few times, the King’s absolute refusal to put in the muscular effort required to pronounce consonants, the ‘t’’s and ‘p’in ‘caught’ and ‘trap,’ is truly impressive. This is worth mentioning because tropes about laziness and speech patterns have occasionally come up in reference to black Southerners, but, as illustrated here, it can’t be possible to put less effort into speaking English than a white Southerner.

b) that said? “Suspicious minds” is a fuckn banger, man. The King does not SUCK; he’s just no Chuck Berry. 

** One of my absolute favorite things about Infinite Wealth is how good Kiryu looks in the gun-slinging Desperado job. Kiryu with a quick draw, flourish as he holsters his gun, man that shit is slick. I’m gonna miss you, Dragon…

***Big one is the lack of a reference to The Great Silence in Red Dead Redemption 2. If you are whinning about a work not shouting out Great Silence, you are talking about something that is, probably, getting most things RIGHT. BUT: They had snow AND C-96 Mousers, already! How hard would it have been to shoot a thinly disguised Klaus Kinski in the hunting-down-old-gunfighters quest-line? It would have been EASY. Bad job, Rockstar. Bad.Fucking.Job.