Nobody Cares About Elvis Anymore

Don’t fret: They’ll eventually not care about Taylor Swift or Drake either.

My kids have no idea who Elvis Presley is.

Isn’t that crazy? Elvis Presley died about two years after I was born and yet I can’t think of a moment when I haven’t known who he is. Elvis Presley has been at the center of American life essentially from the time he initially broke through in the mid-1950s up until … well, up until fairly recently. Kurt Russell was playing Elvis in high-profile TV movies two years after Elvis died, most of the ’80s featured various supermarket checkout rags insisting that Elvis was still alive, Nicolas Cage was playing Elvis in various forms throughout the ’90s (including the ever-underappreciated Tiny Elvis). Any movie in which any character spent any time in Las Vegas at all was soundtracked almost exclusively by Elvis. Elvis was everywhere.

(Elvis needs boats! Elvis needs boats!)

Sometime in the last few years, this mostly stopped. Partly this is because rock music itself — a genre of which…