Todd Epp and Professor Schaff have a difference of opinion on "who was the more successful entertainer, the King or the Crooner? Someone with shrewder judgment and a cooler head now needs to step in and settle the matter. Until that person shows up, I'll have to do.
1. In spite of preferring Bing to the King, Professor Schaff is not 94 years old, as Epp alleges. Even if he does dress like Ralphy in A Christmas Story, intentionally, he is too young to have come by his affection for Crosby honestly. I suspect the cause may be radiation from his glow in the dark golf sweaters.
2. As for who made better music, the answer is almost certainly Bing. I say this only because his generation of entertainers took their craft much more seriously than did Elvis and those who followed him. Moreover Bing has a sense of propriety about his whole persona that Elvis, to put it delicately, never possessed about anything. I take no position on their relative body of songs.
3. As for who was the more successful entertainer, here one needs a standard. Epp's is this: "Women desired him. Men wanted to be him". This strikes me as a flawed standard. It means that to be successful, you not only have to be preeminent in your art, you also have to be sexy.
4. The proper standard is who had the greatest impact on the culture of the nation and the world? Here I think the matter clearly favors Elvis, but for no fault of his own. Elvis was clearly a powerful entertainer, but his greatness was supplied by a unique historical context. The US changed profoundly after and largely as a result of the Second World War. When I was a teenager I didn't like any of the music my father liked. By contrast, I like a lot of the music my daughter likes, and my teenage son is now listening to the Rolling Stones and the soundtrack to Easy Rider. The fifties through the seventies represent a fault line in the history of the American soul.
Elvis more than anyone else personified the first wave of cultural change, as did James Dean, for example, in film. Likewise Bob Dylan and the Beatles personified the second wave (the one on acid). Both of the latter wrote and produced bodies of music that were wonderful in their own right, but their unique power came from the moment. Bing just didn't have such a moment to work with.
One final note about Elvis. I see no reason women shouldn't have desired him, at least before the drug and processed sugar stage of his career. But if men wanted to be him, that's just a sign that men have no idea what to want. I visited Graceland with my daughter this last summer. In spite of growing up a mere hour away, I had never been there. The place was appalling. Gaudy to a degree that would make a lawn gnome look like a Donnatello, it was a monument to an utterly empty soul. Elvis had the bad fortune to get everything he wanted early in life. He spent the rest of his life looking vainly for something that might keep his interest. Karate? Golf car pollo on his lawn? No wonder he ended up chasing Twinkies with sedatives. I know nothing about Bing Crosby's personal life, which is more than I want to know, but sure it can't have been half that bad.
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