Elvis Presley: Blue Hawaii

ELVIS PRESLEY: BLUE HAWAII (1961)

1) Blue Hawaii; 2) Almost Always True; 3) Aloha Oe; 4) No More; 5) Canʼt Help Falling In Love; 6) Rock-A-Hula Baby; 7) Moonlight Swim; 8) Ku-U-I-Po; 9) Ito Eats; 10) Slicinʼ Sand; 11) Hawaiian Sunset; 12) Beach Boy Blues; 13) Island Of Love; 14) Hawaiian Wedding Song.

General verdict: Arguably the point of no return — if you have released something as corny as this album and this movie, you might as well just go on releasing more of the same.

The easiest way to pulverize an album like Blue Hawaii in the modern age is to state, with a fair amount of justice, that it represents a particularly cringeworthy case of «cultural appropriation», namely, white manʼs clichéd exotization of Hawaii as a paradise on Earth; in fact, the movie, which depicted a syrupy melodrama that just happened to use Hawaii for decorations, was just that kind of thing and had fairly few redeeming qualities. The music is a slightly different matter: only a few songs directly deal with Hawaiian realities (most notably ʽAloha Oeʼ, Hawaiiʼs cultural symbol, and ʽHawaiian Wedding Songʼ), while others just use ukuleles, celestes, and occasional lyrical twists to set up a «Hawaiian vibe» for the record.

But even if you know absolutely nothing about Hawaiian history or traditions, Blue Hawaii is a terrible experience. G.I. Blues may have been meandering and inconsistent, Something For Everybody may have been completely second-hand-derivative, and His Hand In Mine may have been too sentimental for a true gospel classic, but none of these three albums were as consistent in presenting Elvis Presley as a lightweight, irrelevant joke act as Blue Hawaii. From the first to the very last song, with but one obvious exception, the album reads like somebodyʼs cruel parody on the King in all his emplois — raunchy rocker, sentimental troubadour, seductive popster. With few interesting original melodies to speak of, the emphasis is on «Hawaiian-style arrangements» of the trusty old tunes — by which, of course, we mean lots and lots and lots of cooing pedal steel, friendly campfire acoustic guitar, and orchid-sweet vocals.

I can hardly find anything at all to say about these songs: there are no specific atrocities to latch onto (well, maybe Elvisʼ awful «native accent» on ʽIto Eatsʼ), they just donʼt work. ʽRock-A-Hula Babyʼ and ʽSlicinʼ Sandʼ are the most energetic of the lot, but both are essentially detoothed rockʼnʼroll pieces with nary an aggressive note in sight. ʽBeach Boy Bluesʼ is blues in form, cabaret in spirit — a song with not an ounce of genuine sentiment, just mindless and heartless entertainment for a Vegasy crowd. The ballads are mostly typical Hollywood tripe, and ʽAloha Oeʼ sounds more like a Christmas carol than a patriotic anthem (I think Iʼd rather take the Lilo & Stich version over this one, thank you very much), but I am not even sure that Elvis was much aware of the figure of Queen Liliʼuokalani when he recorded it anyway.

In the middle of all this comes ʽCanʼt Help Falling In Loveʼ, the albumʼs only acknowledged classic and a song that is hard to forget even if you are not altogether wooed by its chivalrous sentimentalism. It was, after all, a corporate rewrite of ʽPlaisir DʼAmourʼ, meaning several melodic heads above everything else on here, and Elvis seems to have poured more of his heart into it than into all the other songs on here combined. The very fact that this (relative) gem finds itself in such corrosively plebeian company is hilariously weird, though, a living testimony to just how confused and confusing quality and content control was in those young and innocent days of the pop music business. Unfortunately, it is the only thing that separates Blue Hawaii from the soon-to-come endless stream of interchangeably disposable soundtracks — and it is not enough to deny Blue Hawaii, both the album and the movie, the status of that particular historical landmark beyond which Elvis could no longer be taken seriously.