Elvis, Taylor, and fear
Fear drove Elvis Presley. What drives Taylor Swift?
Dear Squawkers,
“… if you’re not afraid, you’re in trouble. If you want it to be good, you’re petrified. It’s a very lonely feeling. The fear… of failure is such a great motivator. The fear of embarrassment. We all know what it’s like to be in front of people and it doesn’t go well. And it’s terrible. People are here, young people […] no one’s gonna care about me. But there’s something about being up against it that enables you to do it.”
Those of the words of Conan O’Brien, describing what it feels like to perform on stage, and I watched him say this around the same time that it was announced last week that he will host the Oscars this year. Conan, however, wasn’t talking about himself, he was talking about Elvis in the new Netflix documentary Return of the King: The Fall and Rise of Elvis Presley.
The doc is about Elvis’s 1968 comeback special, and the first half of the film sets up what a huge deal it was for Elvis at the time, because at that point in his career, just before the special was released, he was pretty much a laughingstock. Colonel Tom Parker had turned him into a clown – the movies were shit, the music was shit, he hadn’t performed live in front of an audience in almost a decade. Which is a pop culture crime. Elvis Presley is one of the most naturally gifted performers we’ve ever seen in the history of entertainment, and that motherfucker chained him to a series of bad contracts that kept him away from the audience.
So, going into that special, nobody really knew if Elvis could overcome his anxiety, his nerves, his self-doubt, to reclaim the stage. And this is the part where Conan could, in a small way, relate to him. In that if you’re not terrified of the thing you’re about to do, you probably don’t want it bad enough. As Sarah wrote when she covered the news about Conan accepting the Academy’s invitation to host this year’s Oscars, “I assume hosting a podcast got boring and Conan is looking for a new challenge”. Given what he said in the documentary about Elvis, this is the thing that terrifies Conan. And so he said yes.
If you’ve been reading LaineyGossip for long enough, you’re probably well aware that I have been a lifelong Elvis Presley fan, sometimes to the point of obsession. I know everything about the 68 comeback special, I’ve watched it countless times, and countless times before the internet, when watching things wasn’t as easy and accessible as it is now. This documentary didn’t really illuminate anything new for me about its subject…but what was new was that I watched it through the lens of another artist who is one of Elvis’s pop culture descendants: Taylor Swift. And that’s by fluke of timing. I was assigned by ETALK to cover Taylor’s first of six shows in Toronto last Thursday, so the spectacle of The Eras Tour was fresh in my mind when I watched Return of the King on Friday night.
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