Comments for The Plan- Elvis

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This piece belongs to the series "The Plan"

Produced by Barrett Golding/KGLT

Other pieces by Hearing Voices

Summary: Elvis Presley Jan 8 1935 - Aug 16 1977
 

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Review of The Plan- Elvis

Aren't we over Elvis yet?

Maybe I'm a cynic, but it seems to me that stringing a bunch of segments about Elvis together isn't really much a tribute. I was just left feeling kind of tawdry by this piece.

Here's why:

For the most part we hear a lot segments that alternate between the sincer and the exploitative. I just kind of felt that the piece did not treat the Elvis impersonators with dignity. Ok, maybe that's me. But I just felt like the piece exploited these folks obsession with Elvis.

The connective segments between the pieces are either missing or don't give us the perspective we need to honor these folks, we just end up looking at them and left to wonder why.

The tone of the piece is a bit understated. The music included is kind of chill and this adds to the introspective nature of the piece. The DJ like back announcing of the segments is kind of awkward.

The production is a bit uneven, though I do kind of like mixing the Elvis hip hop in, but it kind of makes me wonder about the other pieces. But the anger and cuss words at the end are bit over the top and quite frankly, a turn off. That ads to the over atmosphere of disrespect for the subject.

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Review of The Plan- Elvis

Dwelling intensely, a phrase associated with old school anthropological fieldwork comes to mine. This piece dwells intensely in Elvis's what? Wake? Legacy? It's as much about the space he's created for us than the man himself. But without being sonically intimate (no interviews of Elvis sobbing), it is strangely intimate somehow, which I have to attribute to the producers' choices. We hear Elvis's echoes in our popular culture, our intellectual culture. The best parts were the Resident's story of The Baby King, used to frame the whole mixture. The interview with Gillian Welch from WUNC was great, well edited, well selected, fitted well into the whole thing
(and I have wondered what that song was about). It was also great to hear Salt brother Adam Allington's "Elvis Cop", one of my favorite rose among roses of the Salt corpus; Another straight documentary might not fit as well, but Adam's editing allowed The Elvis Cop to merge into Elvis himself, and in so doing, merge into the overall mix.

And so, overall, we're invited to consider Elvis and we're permitted a simple narrative in which to do it and a conclusion to draw. Elvis was sad, he was the king of need, and we all need him. It might fall apart if you look at it too closely, so don't. Just listen. Dwell. Coming soon to a radio near me I hope?