CULTURE WATCH : Stamp Act

As Albert Goldman documented in his 1981 book “Elvis,” the singer whose face will soon grace a U.S. stamp had a lot of bad habits. Some of them, however, fed the liberating fusion of musical and social styles that would become rock ‘n’ roll and go on to conquer the world.

As late as 1951 Louis Armstrong could still sing: “Give me a kiss to build a dream on, and my imagination will make that moment live.” Elvis, notoriously, was unwilling to leave so much to the imagination. Whatever his personal problems, he helped solve a larger problem of sexual candor in a society whose television cameras refused, in 1956, to pan below the singer’s waist to his scandalously thrusting hips.

If that’s what early rock ‘n’ roll was in social terms, what it was in musical terms was a fusion of country and rhythm and blues.

What is too seldom noticed, however, is that both elements in the new fusion had been excluded from the dominant, increasingly effete musical culture of urban America in the late 1950s. And the musical exclusions matched a social exclusion.

Elvis Presley was not Bob Dylan, much less Pete Seeger, in the realm of social protest. But when, years after Elvis’ death, a composer-singer as musically adventurous and socially aware as Paul Simon chose to name a landmark album “Graceland” for Elvis’ Memphis home, we didn’t have to ask why.

We are what we hear, especially when we are young. Elvis--the young Elvis--deserves his stamp for changing forever what the young of the Western World would hear.