Yesterday, August 16, it was 29 year from Elvis Presley death. The Elvis fame don’t fall off. As dead, “The Pelvis” earns more than $30 millions each year from royalties on music, films and image. Here in Europe the majors are asking for a copyright extension to 95 years, like the “Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act” which preserved the Mickey Mouse copyright to Disney.
But the Elvis fame outsell even Mickey Mouse. There is a book called “Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession” which collects all the sights of Elvis after his death (no one see Mickey Mouse instead :-)).
In 1993 the composer Michael Daugherty wrote a piece whose title is again “Dead Elvis”. In the program notes, Daugherty says:

In Dead Elvis (1993), the bassoon soloist is an Elvis impersonator accompanied by a chamber ensemble. It is more than a coincidence that Dead Elvis is scored for the same instrumentation as Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat (1918), in which a soldier sells his violin, and his soul, to the devil for a magic book. I offer a new spin on this Faustian scenario: a rock star sells out to Hollywood, Colonel Parker, and Las Vegas for wealth and fame.

The style is a sort of post-modern collage that Boulez don’t like (see previous post) but in my opinion the music is pretty and fun.