You are probably right about Ladies Gaga, and I apologies for my careless mistake, but I suspect Miley Cyrus is more etymologically akin to octopus than fungus,* with the more authentic pluralization thus being Miley Cyrodes.
*As evidence, I cite that tentacle thing that seems to have started growing from her face area recently, now she is out of her larval phase.
I didn’t even really know about that Elvis until I got older and started getting in to early blues and rockabilly, that’s when I first paid any attention to early Elvis and he absolutely could rock. It’s weird I ended up following his influences to Elvis instead of the other way around.
Some of us who remembered his early work found his last days tragic, not amusingly tacky.
I wonder if some of what propped him up at the end might not have been the church crowd as he had quite a repertoire of gospel songs.
Hmm, you’ve got a point, but doesn’t Cyrus come from Persian? Maybe it should be Miley Cyrusân. I remember that article you linked. Extrapolating from that, the plural of Elvis is simply Elvises, or Elves if you’re a urologist. (Or an urologist?)
It’s interesting how musicians went to the shows Elvis gave in New York in 1972 and how a struggling musician/taxi cab driver named Paul Stanley was inspired listening patrons rave about the show. Maybe this is too “fan boy” wiki article.
Wilt Chamberlain in his 1974 memoir says he is an Elvis fan because he has shown he has staying power.
I won’t call myself a huge Elvis fan but imho “tacky joke” is a little too strong. But we also had fewer information about him at the time.
I don’t have the 1980 “Rolling Stone Rock Record Guide” anymore but my memory is the ratings for the 1970s material was generally three (out of five) stars…far better than what Black Sabbath or the Osmond family got.
I was 23 when he died and I’m another vote for tacky joke, when we thought about him at all. I was less than a month old when he recorded “That’s All Right.” He was from somebody else’s youth and was irrelevant to mine, like the Beach Boys.
The sad thing was that of all the great songs he wrote and recorded, “My Ding-A-Ling” was his only gold record.
Probably a decent analogy. When I watched the '68 special, while some portions were kinda cheesy, it seems that if he had been given the right guidance, he would have had the chance to return to some type of relevance and continued his career. If you could have gotten him away from Tom Parker and his entourage and maybe some one off collaborations with some of the younger blues inspired artists of the time. He may have ended up as a Johnny Cash type elder statesman instead of a joke.
It’s too bad he died when he did. If he’d have somehow cleaned up and got his ass in shape, I’m sure he would have evolved into something highly respectable by the late eighties. Not necessarily relevant, but respectable, and the jumpsuit era would be looked at as the kind of embarrassing aberration that most artists go through at some point.
I’m reminded, a little bit, of one of Presley’s contemporaries, Roy Orbison. Orbison, too, fell out of popular favor after the British Invasion. He kept recording through the 1960s and 1970s (and even made a bad movie), but nothing charted, and he suffered his own health problems, including heart bypass surgery. Oh, and he, too, was wearing bad jumpsuits in the 1970s. OTOH, he was never as much of a cultural icon as Presley, nor was his decline quite so publicly visible.
But, unlike Presley, Orbison survived his health crises, and by the late 1980s, he was working with some of the top talent in rock music (on his solo album Mystery Girl, as well as with the Traveling Wilburys), and was back in the top 40. It’s interesting to think about whether he would have been able to continue that resurgence (had he not died suddenly in '88)…it’s also interesting to consider whether Elvis could have pulled off something similar.
