The 1979 Ford LTD was a better car than the Model T by every possible metric. The model T will be remembered in 250 years, the Ford LTD absolutely will not. Elvis may be a Model T, but Cobain will probably be more of a Ranchero. Noteworthy enough in it’s time, but not overly revolutionary, and unlikely to be remembered by anyone except niche interest geeks.
Elvis is essentially Vanilla Ice of rock. Cute white guy who made black music palatable to racist whites. Can anyone name one musical thing he innovated?
Anyway, I decided to look up actual data and I’ll admit Elvis has more influence than I’d guess although The Beatles still win in terms of streams and google searches.
Cobain’s body of work is too small to be of historical significance. Elvis will always have been around longer and at a time when stars were more culturally important. Maybe, if he was still creating music things would be different, but Cobain is just going to get lumped in with the group of musicians around the turn of the century who got everything they wanted and then killed themselves.
Meh. Elvis has more gold records than Cobain has released songs. Graceland still gets 600,000 visitors a year. You may not equate popularity to superior music, except you are with your Spotify numbers. I’d put a big asterisk on those because Cobain’s fan base is going to skew younger than Elvis and be more technically savvy. Nirvana has sold over 75 million records, which sounds impressive until you hear that Elvis has sold over a billion records. There are probably some apple to orange issues with those numbers, as well as population issues; there were more people buying albums during Kurt’s life than during Elvis. Even so, Elvis has 32 albums that sold more than a million copies, Nirvana has 7.
These points don’t address the debate that started this. I never argued he wasn’t hugely popular in the 50s and 60s. I argued he isn’t relevant or influential anymore.
It just seems like a weird hill to die on. An artist that is 40 years older than your favorite artist isn’t as influential as your favorite artist, who is 30 years gone and no longer influential. That’s like arguing over what pop is better Shasta or RC Cola.