The King of Pop or the King?

In terms of contribution to music history, it's Elvis, and it's not close. MJ will go down in history as some kind of self-appointed king of bubble gum music and entertainment's all-time weirdo. Elvis has his demons but as far we know they didn't include little boys. Jackson deserves nothing more than scorn and/or pity for wasted talent, and probably should have died in prison for his sins. Sorry, but there it is.

 

To use a sporting analogy:

Michael was a great player, but Elvis invented the game.

 

And Lennon over him by two lengths.

Youtube Lennon and football. The timing of the announcement pushes it ahead down the stretch.

 

Honestly, where I live, Dale Sr. beats all of them.

 

I think it's hard to compare Jackson/Elvis to Lennon because Lennon was murdered, which adds a extra level of shock to his death.

It seems that Jackson and Elvis at least partly contributed to their own deaths by their lifestyle choices (Elvis certainly did). No one can say about Lennon, "well, if he'd taken better care of himself, he'd probably still be alive."

 

Interesting list. Five of Jackson's album's reached 20 million.

 

Yeah, I would imagine country music sales are pretty negligible outside the U.S.

 

Thriller was eight years prior to what I was talking about.

 

Or stole it from black people.

 

Wonderful analogy, and spot on.

Stop trying to bring that shit to this table. Nobody's interested.

 

For what it's worth, the great songwriting team of Leiber & Stoller felt that way when Elvis started recording their songs, already done by black blues singers. Then they met him, and realized how sincere Elvis was and that he loved and appreciated blues and American music as much or more than they did.

As for ranking deaths, I echo Elvis by a country mile. I still remember, at age 7, sitting in the auto repair waiting area at Story Olds-Datsun in Lansing, Mich., when Elvis' death was announced. I doubt my kids are going to remember what they were doing when they heard Michael Jackson died, and not just because the media landscape is so fragmented. Elvis mattered much more culturally than Michael Jackson did, and as others have noted, was still an active (barely, being propped up by pills and the great TCB band) performer up until his death.

As Joe Queenan once put it, half-admiringly, Elvis was a guy who, in his spare time from being the biggest rock-and-roll star in the world, starred in 31 of the worst movies ever made.

 

As you point out, though, Leiber and Stoller met Elvis and had their fears allayed more than 50 years ago. Why do morons have to keep alleging that Elvis ripped black people off? It was bullshit in the mid 1950s, it's bullshit now.

Besides, his unique musical synthesis incorporated so many different elements - R&B, gospel, C&W, Tin Pan Alley, etc. - that by the time he was done mixing it all together, it wasn't "black" music, it wasn't "white" music - it was Elvis music, and he owned it as sure as if he'd created it from scratch.