THE DAILY TELEGRAPH Elvis and Subo duet is like defacing an old master with graffiti Susan Boyle is using the voice of dead singer Elvis Presley for a Christmas duet on O Come All Ye Faithful – and Neil McCormick objects. By Neil McCormick,09 Sep 2013 He was the King of Rock ’n’ Roll who changed popular music forever. She once came second in a televised talent contest. Now Elvis Presley and Susan Boyle are to be united across time and space, defying all mortal bonds as their voices join together in song, a living dead duet of O Come All You Faithful. It is a musical match made in … well, I don’t know where. Not heaven, anyway. A digital editing suite on a computer hard drive, I suppose. Or the boardroom of a record company marketing department. News of a forthcoming release by Elvis and Subo should bring a dreary chill to the soul of any music lover. They will call it a duet but that is like defacing an old master with graffiti and calling it a collaboration. You can hear the Presley version, recorded in 1971, performed as he intended in an arrangement he was presumably happy with. And now you will be able to hear it with another voice wrapped around, and perhaps some new strings and bits and pieces added by a producer who probably wasn’t even born when Elvis died. “Isn’t technology brilliant?” in the words of Boyle herself. The Boyle camp are stressing the legitimacy of the exercise by underlining that permission was personally granted not just by the anonymous Presley estate but by his ex-wife, Priscilla, who still carries the Presley name despite divorcing him in 1972. But the one person who has no say in the matter is, of course, the very person whose name and image is being used to sell the recording. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Elvis himself would have actually objected to this money spinning exercise. It is not as if his career was marked by tremendous quality control. But I object, as a fan and a music lover. In fact, I object to this whole posthumous exploitation industry. Death is big business in entertainment. Forbes prints lists of the highest earning dead celebrities, many of whom earn vastly greater sums than even the highest earning living stars. Elvis is always up there, turning over $55 million last year, although that is dwarfed by the $145 million earned by Michael Jackson, a man who was close to bankruptcy when he died in 2009. Some artists are worth more dead than alive, perhaps because the dead can never say no.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 04:59:27 +0000
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