how does Elvis Presley convert revolt into style

Hey,

The idea of the "revolt into style" was first given formal expression by Thom Gunn in a not entirely complimentary 1950s poem about Elvis Presley (“Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs/He turns revolt into a style ...”).

The phrase then provided the title of George Melly’s celebrated 1970 study of the music business and subsequently went on to enjoy a long afterlife in both the more socially aware forms of music journalism and in the music itself – see, for example, the classic single of the same name by Bill Nelson: “Revolt into Style” (1979) complains about revivalism, the persistence of bygone youth cults and the lack of anything genuinely new.

It is not Mr Brand’s fault, or not quite, for if he is intelligent enough to know that you cannot touch pitch without being defiled by it, then he is also intelligent enough to realise that exposure in the modern age depends on your having something ripe for defilement. At the same time, one of the tricks of late capitalism is its habit of transforming an element of genuinely popular culture into an element of mass consumer culture without either side knowing the transformation has taken place: an imposture which Russell Brand, like John Lydon and Kingsley Amis before him, finds it well-nigh impossible to resist.