Elvis and the Dialectic of Love

Elvis is back. Kind of. The movie about him from last year made a lot of money and is probably going to win some Oscars. His only daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, tragically died the other day. Now is as good a time as any to think about Elvis. And to me, that means thinking about him dialectically—how he, and his music (especially his love songs), are these contradictions that reveal deeper truths.

Elvis is the most important cultural figure in 20th century America. Yet despite how massively famous he is he doesn’t seem to be much part of our culture. (Though that seems to be changing recently—there seems to be a new desire to understand him). For a long time he has seemed almost too famous to understand. You didn’t hear or see much about him, he was like the forgotten giant of American culture. But we are living through a time of profound cultural emptiness in America—so a new look at Elvis, the richest pop cultural source that America has, is just what we need. So let’s ask some questions: What is the meaning of Elvis, why is he important right now, in the 2020s, what did he sing about, what did he represent?

Elvis was all about love, more than anything—specifically the dialectical nature of love, its power and freedom, but also its vulnerability. This is one of the things that the Elvis movie nailed—at the very end, the Tom Hanks character says that drugs didn’t kill Elvis, but love did. I think this is correct.

So what can Elvis tell us about the dialectics of love?

Love is probably the most important thing in life, yet the hardest to describe without using dead language, cliches, and banalities. It’s the most living thing there is, the closest thing to us, yet also the furthest and hardest to capture in living language. When we try to express it, understand it, or capture it, it withers away and dies. It’s the most obvious thing, yet most mysterious, the most human part of life, but also the most alien. It makes us most alive, yet whenever we try to understand it, it seems to vanish. When I say that love is “dialectical,” this is what I’m talking about. And Elvis gets at the heart of all this better than anyone ever has.

Love is the ultimate freedom, it empowers us to become who we are, and do things we never thought we could do—but it also traps us and makes us weak. Love is the power that makes us weak. Love is so maddening and seductive because it makes us think we have the power to control our own freedom and become who we are—but we are also always reminded that this power isn’t ours, it depends on someone else.

Love makes us who, and what, we are, but also destroys us—it keeps us together and also pulls us apart. We want it more than anything, despite its leading to the destruction of the self—or perhaps because of that. I think in Elvis’ voice you can hear this tension—all his songs are about love, about wanting it even though it destroys him—especially because it destroys him, and pulls him apart.

And you can not only hear this in his voice, but you can also feel it. You can feel him being pulled apart by love—that’s the sound of his voice. But even so, it is still an affirmation of this—his songs aren’t really sad, they’re uplifting, inspiring, energizing, life-affirming—even though you can hear and feel him being pulled to pieces. His songs are happy even though they’re about being pulled apart by love.

Most of Elvis’ songs are about this, but his song “Love Me” is perhaps most directly about this. He sings: “Treat me like a fool. Treat me mean and cruel. But love me. Wring my faithful heart. Tear it all apart. But love me.” He fully knows what love will do to him—it will tear his heart apart, but he still wants it more than anything. His heart being faithful just makes it that much better to be wrung out. He knows that having his heart torn apart is how the heart is formed, that’s what love is. Love me, tear my heart up, because that is how the heart is formed—and it’s better to have a heart than not have one. And the heart is only formed by being torn—like any muscle growth.

Love was the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard’s main theme. As he sums up its dialectical nature: “Love, to be sure, proceeds from the heart, but let us not in our haste about this forget the eternal truth that love forms the heart.”[1] This is what you can hear in Elvis’ voice—that love must build itself in order to sustain itself. We have to form the heart, before we can love, so that we can love. Forming a heart, building a heart—it’s a very intense, painful process. And you can always hear this kind of building of the self, this painful process, in Elvis’ voice. Elvis represents love without idealism or romance—a grounded, materialist, realistic love, that fully engages with the necessary pain involved.

Love forms the heart, so that you then have a heart with which to love—and love will then destroy your heart, because that’s what love does. So you build your heart in order to love, so that it may then be broken. This is the dialectic of love, and is what Elvis is all about—forming a heart only to have it broken, yet driven by the duty to build that heart anyway. As Elvis sings in another song, he can’t help falling in love. He can’t help but form his heart even though it is painful—so he is the least free, yet he has this amazing power to do anything, go anywhere, he is The King. A king yet totally controlled by love. The pain you hear in his voice is precisely what makes him The King—the King of Pain.

Kierkegaard says of God: “You who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in You!”[2] So when we love, we are living and being within God—we can live inside of love, wherever we are and forever, in this way. And I think Elvis shows this—he is very tortured and in pain, but also very at home in the world—because wherever he is, he is living fully within love. And that makes him The King. As the King, he is very powerful, and his power comes from Love—but Love is not something he controls or uses or has power over—quite the opposite. In “Can’t Help Falling In Love,” he laments how he is powerless against love, even though he knows it’s the wrong idea. But while giving into it weakens him, it also strengthens him.

Kierkegaard mentions the dialectical nature of singing: “For what perishes blossoms and what blossoms perishes, but that which has being cannot be sung about—it must be believed and it must be lived.”[3] Being cannot be sung about—but if being is transformed into becoming, if being becomes body, then being can just roll out of the body. That is what Elvis sounds like—being itself rolling out of the body in this effortless way.

Love is the most powerful thing in life, so we hold it far away from us, even though it is the only way we can feel at home in the world. Without love, we’re kind of like aliens wandering lost on this planet—but with love, we are at constant risk of being destroyed. So those are our two options—lost aliens or destroyed humans. Elvis sounds like the tension between these two things. He sounds like this voice from some other place, but also a voice that is rising out of the very earth itself.

Elvis does not hold love at a safe distance, he is not alien, he is the most human—his songs are all about accepting the destructive power of love into himself. He lives in love, so he is always at home in it, but also always in pain from it.

His song “Burning Love” is literally about the experience of being burned up by love. He sings about being reduced to “just a hunk of burning love”—he is no longer human, he has lost his human form, he is a piece of flesh on fire, yet still he sings about it, he affirms it. It is a happy song, despite being about self-destruction. He says, “I might just turn to smoke but I feel fine.” That sums it all up.

In his song “All Shook Up,” he’s all shook up by love, he’s dizzy, he’s turned upside down, but he isn’t lamenting or mourning this, he is celebrating it. That song, like “Burning Love,” is all about the body, his knees are weak, he can’t stand up, his mind is mixed up. It’s all descriptions of the body and these guttural sounds.

I think it’s also significant that Elvis died in 1977, right as the neoliberal period was starting. Elvis’ subjectivity is totally incompatible with the neoliberal subject. Elvis was firmly a postwar subject. Once the postwar period ended, and neoliberalism started, Elvis was weirdly obsolete. But as neoliberalism is ending now—or at least we all want it to end!—the subjectivity of Elvis is useful for showing us a different, better way of being.

The neoliberal subject has no time for love, but is defined only by work, by emptying himself out but without filling himself up. Neoliberal subjectivity is empty, no content, no texture, alienated—which is why the theme of returning to a better golden past, to make our nation and ourselves great again, has become so popular, as neoliberalism crumbles, as the neoliberal era ends, as neoliberal subjectivity becomes discredited.

Elvis wasn’t yearning to return to any previous age—he was a man fully in the present age. He had a true, authentic way of being in the modern world; he is the quintessential modern subject, at home in the world for the first time. He was fully modern, and embraced the terror and uncertainty of that—being pulled apart and overwhelmed—but he was comfortable and secure in it. He embraced it and lived in the moment. This is what love does—it enables us to live in the present like nothing else. Love is the feeling of the infinite in a single moment.

Elvis wasn’t trying to return to a better, more authentic time, and he wasn’t trying to travel around or ramble around in search of something—he stays right where he is, he lives in love, and that is all the traveling, all the motion he needs. This separates him from someone like Bob Dylan, whose songs were all about rambling around, traveling from town to town. That is the music of nomads. But Elvis is not this way—he was a kind of inverted nomad—the world comes to him, love comes to him, he doesn’t have to move.

Elvis was so anchored to the present, living fully within love, that he had no need of future or past or of traveling or rambling around. In one of his best songs, “If I Can Dream,” performed in 1968, with MLK’s “I Have A Dream” speech firmly in everyone’s mind, Elvis harnessed the power of the present in a remarkable way. When Elvis sings about his dream in “If I Can Dream,” he makes it sound both beautiful and agonizing, both inevitable and impossible—it might be his most dialectical song.

Love is very dialectical—and Elvis’ songs are often dialectical, in the form of questions. The title of the song, “If I Can Dream,” is in the form of a question, and he offers answers to that question in the song: If I can dream, then the dream should come true right now. The journey, the destination, is already contained within the question. If this, then that. In the song he also says “In my heart there’s a trembling question…” Love is this dialectical trembling, freedom being found and lost at the same time, power and powerlessness—embracing love even though it causes pain—especially because it causes pain. Elvis is constantly living within that dialectic.

He isn’t talking about a dream that can be achieved in the future—he is saying, if I can dream, then why can’t my dream come true right now? And it’s very materialist— if I can walk and talk and think and dream, if I can do all these physical things in the world with my body, then my dream ought to come true,  because it’s part of my body. He is materializing dreams, and placing them in the present moment—a dream is not a far off thing, it is in the world, just like your body is. And if a dream is part of your body, and your body can do things like walk and talk, then your dream should be as possible as walking and talking are. He is grounding dreams in the present, and in the materiality of this world. Dreams aren’t in our heads, and they aren’t in the future—they are part of our body in this world in the present right now.

In “Never Been To Spain,” he also celebrates the power of staying in one place, of being in the present. He sings: “Well I've never been to heaven. But I've been in Oklahoma. Well, they tell me I was born there. But I really don't remember. In Oklahoma or Arizona. What does it matter.”

There’s no real journey to Elvis‘s songs, because he doesn’t have to go on a journey, he’s Elvis, he’s the man. Wherever he is, that’s the place to be. He is the journey—he is the bridge over troubled water. At the end of an Elvis song you always feel like you’re in the same place you were at the beginning, but in a radically new way—you haven’t moved at all, the world has moved.

His songs come out of him in this very physical, material way, they almost emerge from him and vibrate out from him, emanating rather than being sung, like it’s already there and is just being revealed, rather than being effortfully belted out. The songs themselves don’t really have much to them, they aren’t complex. They’re very minimal but he finds some kind of maximalism within them. He finds a kind of maximal expressionism through his own experience and through his own body—his being itself brings the depth and complexity to the minimal, simple songs.

One of the interesting things about Elvis is the way his voice doesn’t really start or stop, it’s sort of always in the middle. It’s a moving train or rolling waves that’s always there, so he just opens himself up, and we can catch the train—it doesn’t really build to any crescendos or lead anywhere, it’s complete already

Another great song of his is “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Again in the title we see the emphasis on the present, forgetting the past or future, just go with whatever thought you have, and it will be fine. The song begins like it’s already in the middle—it doesn’t get started, it’s already started, it’s just like the volume gets turned up.

He sings: “Where I ‘m bound I can’t tell.” The song is a moving train. Don’t think twice, just jump on the train that’s moving right in front of you. This is how the philosopher Louis Althusser describes revolution, as a moving train already on the go in the present—the “materialism of the encounter.”

Elvis is precisely this materialism of the encounter. Love is this material encounter of the self with itself—the negation of the self. That is revolutionary.

And the materialism of the encounter is not a pleasant, easy thing—it’s terrifying. Althusser says the materialism of the encounter is all about the creation of a void, so that some new revolutionary content can fill it—and the void is pure terror. Terror and revolution are always linked in this way. And the sound of Elvis is precisely the void creating itself—pure terror, but also pure excitement.

This is the essence of modern subjectivity—all you can do is create a void, but this terror should not make us sad, it should excite us, because it’s all we can do to make life progress and advance. Life only progresses through terror—and love is the most terrifying thing, but it is also what makes life go on.

Sound is such a mystery, it’s the hardest thing to transform into words and reason, even though sound is what we’re immersed in all the time. Sound is the closest thing to us, but we don’t know what it looks like, feels like, or points towards. Nothing is more mysterious than sound—invisible waves that carry being itself through the air and into our bodies. The magic of Elvis is how he gets sound to stand still, to take human form, to become something we can see and feel and use.

What’s the revolutionary about Elvis is how music had never sounded so human before, sound had never become so human before, the content of sound finally achieved a kind of synthesis with form, human form, content and form merge completely. Elvis didn’t have a sound, he was a sound.

He sounds like he’s singing to save his soul at times. When Elvis sings, you can almost hear him trying to save his own soul, struggling with it in real time—it hasn't been lost yet, but it is being lost.

Elvis kind of sounds the way he looks, and looks like he sounds. That’s why he was such a great performer—he had that kind of unity. I think his voice got better as he got older. “If I Can Dream” was recorded in 1968 during his Comeback Special—his voice had more life to it, more gravitas and rawness. But as his voice sounded better, he looked worse—the quality of his voice was carved out of his body itself.

This is why he sings with such urgency in his later years—his voice got better as it was destroying him. He had no time to wait. He was not singing for the future, his voice is not the voice of the future, it’s a voice fully in the present, and that gives it its power but also its vulnerability.

For Kierkegaard, love is the most important thing to analyze, because it is the most direct experience we can have of God in this world. He says: “Mine, what does this word signify? Not what belongs to me, but what I belong to, what contains my whole being, which is mine insofar as I belong to it. My God is not the God who belongs to me, but the God to whom I belong…” So when we worship God, we are worshipping our own subordination.

So it is with love as well—your love is not yours, your love is who you belong to. So when you love someone, when they are yours to love, it means that you’re actually belonging to them. Love is essentially vulnerable like this. The self must be found through the other, who is also finding itself through the other. So you can hear and feel this dialectical tension, this pushing and pulling in Elvis’ voice, in the titles of his songs, in his lyrics.

In his song “Don’t Be Cruel,” Elvis sings about his true heart, and how exposed and vulnerable it makes him. All he can do is ask the woman not to be cruel to his heart. He isn’t going to protect his heart, or hide his heart—his heart is true, he can’t do anything else—he can’t help it. The truth shouldn’t be hidden, even though the world treats truth with cruelty—because nothing is more vulnerable than the truth. Yet living in the truth of love, presenting this truth to the world, is how one comes to fully live in the present.

Love is about freedom, freedom from the self, and America is the land that worships freedom above all else—but there's also less love here than there is anywhere. Because we Americans don’t want freedom from the self—we want freedom for the self. But the self can’t become free alone—our freedom is contingent, our freedom isn’t free. Freedom is a trap, love is a trap—this is the pain you can hear in Elvis’s voice—he has loved so much, and this is what burns him up, shakes him up, destroys him.

And perhaps because we all have to work so hard to survive and have so little time, and there’s so much inequality here, and that breeds a lack of trust, and there can be no love where there’s no trust. America is also the land of individualism, and love reveals how we need more than just ourselves to become ourselves. So there’s a certain natural skepticism and resentment towards love in America—it’s at best an afterthought here, or something that gets in the way.

But love is freedom, and it’s happiness, so it should be the most central part of American life—the land of the free, where we pursue happiness, and so on. This is one of the weird contradictions of America—it’s the land of the free where we pursue happiness, but it seems like there’s no room for love here. As Kierkegaard says: “…love exists only in freedom, only in freedom is there enjoyment and everlasting delight.” Freedom is the precondition for love, and freedom of this type is what brings the ultimate happiness. Love is the feeling of freedom from the burden of yourself, of being trapped within yourself.

But this kind of freedom can only be given to you by someone else—so freedom isn’t free, and it doesn’t obey you. My freedom depends on the dynamics of your freedom. You can’t give yourself freedom. Love makes you who you are, but you have very limited power over it. Love is freedom, but it’s not a freedom we have power over. Love is a freedom that pulls you apart—which again, you can hear and feel in Elvis’ voice.

In his songs, Elvis is literally describing his own experience of physical destruction, being ripped apart, but with the kind of excitement and anticipation of what this can lead to, transcendence of materiality through this full self-destructive transformative embrace of materiality. He’s all shook up, he’s burning up in love, he can’t help falling in love—he fully is aware of how self-destructive it is, but still fully engages in it.

In “Bridge Over Troubled Water” he is describing transforming himself into a bridge, laying himself down physically, so it’s about physical sacrifice, and you can really hear this sacrifice in his voice, he can barely get through the song. He loses his human form and becomes a bridge. There are these great trumpets that kind of carry him throughout the song, this light angelic lift to balance out his haggard, pained, collapsing heaviness. He needs to be kind of carried along by the orchestra in this song. The most beautiful sound is when Elvis is old and tired but still tries to hit rousing high notes at the end of songs, and has this whole orchestra behind him, but all he can manage is raggedy wailing, but he pushes through it and achieves a kind of triumphant beauty nevertheless. This is what love sounds like. 

In one of his later songs, “Suspicious Minds,” we hear about the effects of living a life of such massive amounts of love. We hear him paying the price for all the love in his life. The song is about Elvis trying to have a normal relationship with a woman, but he can’t because she is always suspicious of him, because he has “old friends,” female admirers, coming over to say “hi.”

This song is kind of his self-critique of the effects of living the life he lived, of such reckless burning love. His love burns so hard that anyone who approached him would be suspicious of how much his love had burned. He sings in this song about the pain that his woman’s suspicion causes him—but she is right to be suspicious of him, because he’s Elvis, every woman in America wanted him.

Elvis sings about how every time she looks at him with suspicion it causes him pain, like he’s being punished for being this shining burning light of love in the world. He is sad in that song because he wants to build his dreams with his lover—but her mind is too suspicious, and she is suspicious because Elvis has loved too much. “We can’t build our dreams with suspicious minds” he says. So the freedom of love that he experienced throughout his life ends up trapping him, and taking away his freedom.

Building a dream is significant image—and that’s really what love is about, building a dream. So how do you build a dream? With your soul and your body. And this is the dialectic of destruction that Elvis represents. You have to turn your body into your soul, and your soul into your body, in order to build a dream out of it. Form and content merge together in this way, to create a dream out of the present conditions, that can transcend the conditions.

Elvis synthesizes form and content in all these ways, and he also synthesizes hot and cold. Elvis wasn’t cool. Frank Sinatra and those guys were all about being cool. Elvis was hot, he burned himself up, he couldn’t keep his cool—and that’s precisely what made him cooler than anyone.

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[1] Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love (HarperCollins, 2009), 29.

[2] Ibid., 19.

[3] Ibid., 26.