The Material Girl recently surpassed The King of Rock ’n’ Roll on the list of most Top 10 singles with her ditty "4 Minutes," reports Billboard.com, giving Madonna 37 to Elvis Presley's 36. Justin Timberlake is featured on the Madge number and Timbaland co-wrote it, which means the track could have been a smash for just about anybody — even Elvis , whose resurrected vocal worked nicely for the hit 2002 Junkie XL remix of his song "A Little Less Conversation." But I digress. The point of this blog post is to see if anyone would pick Madonna over Elvis on a list of most important pop stars of all time. Consider:
- Cultural impact: Elvis came first, started rock 'n' roll (if you believe the simpletons writing such nonsense), influenced everyone from Dylan to The Beatles, altered history, etc. But it took the Material Girl to destroy the double standard applied to women, who were allowed mostly to only be girl-in-a-cage sexy before the whip-wielding Madonna came along.
- Sex symbol: Both were the most sexually brazen artists of their era. Both were hot. Seriously. Young Elvis might have been the sexiest man to ever walk the earth other than maybe a young Marlon Brando. Madonna wasn't born with his natural beauty, but she's known how to work it, and keep her body immaculate, since the get-go, making many adolescent boys like me stay up late into the morning in the 1980s hoping to catch her latest video on MTV.
- Vocal talent: Elvis is about 100 times better than Madonna as a singer. There's no debate on this one. If you think Madonna can hold her own with Elvis in the vocal department it might best serve you to jam pencils in both ears.
- Songwriting: Despite what the crooked, Colonel Parker-dictated songwriting credits might read, Elvis, by most reports, never wrote a verse. Madonna, on the other hand, has played a significant role in the songwriting and production of her entire output. For instance, she wrote or co-wrote every track but one on her 1983 self-titled debut album. Yeah, her new disc, Hard Candy, relies on more outsourcing than perhaps any release in her career, but at age 49 she's allowed to let some young bucks lend a hand. (Presley was dead at age 42).
Madonna vs. Elvis: Most important pop star?
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2008.