As a musical artist, there is a kind of historical divide between Elvis Presley, who introduced a multitude of young people to the concept of white rock’n’roll, and The Beatles, who—inspired by Presley’s example—went on to elevate the form. Presley, whose principal iconic moment is gyratingly performing “Hound Dog” on television in 1956 with a double-bassist plucking away and grinning behind him, has the patina of a far more distant age about him, when the world was in unrelatable black-and-white; The Beatles’ relentless musical experiments, innovative production techniques and technicolor outfits, from 1966 onwards, feel sonically audacious even today.
But, by John Lennon’s own account, “Nothing affected me until I heard Elvis. Without Elvis, there would be no Beatles.” For George Harrison, hearing “Heartbreak Hotel” was a “rock’n’roll epiphany”—he became guitar-obsessed after encountering it.
In the end, Presley’s resonance with 21st-century teens and twenty-somethings as a whole may be limited to a select few, but does that matter? His impact on the equivalent demographic in the 1950s, The Beatles included, was nothing short of revelatory, and music has never been the same. In 2015, Spotify launched a tool called the “The Elvis Influence,” which algorithmically charts the musical degrees of separation between Presley and any other artist you’d care to enter into the search bar. This allows one to trace the influences of Justin Bieber back to Michael Jackson, who was in turn inspired by Paul McCartney, who took cues from Presley. Ed Sheeran, on the other hand, was influenced by Nina Nesbitt, who was inspired by Nirvana, who looked to Neil Young, who was influenced by Presley.