It may be hard to imagine now—what with the thousands of books dedicated to him, the volumes of academic articles, the American Idol theme nights and the dancing circles at fiftieth birthday parties—but there was a time when Elvis Presley was something of an unknown. There was a time when Presley had not yet been absorbed into the safety of the popular music canon. In June 1956, towards the beginning of his career, Presley appeared on NBC’s Milton Berle Show in an infamous hip-swinging performance of ‘Hound Dog’, an event inscribed in popular music history for two reasons. First, the performance was electric, eliciting shrieks of delight from the young audience. Second, and most importantly, it got terrible reviews. Following the airing of the performance, the New York Times would write that Presley had ‘no discernible singing ability’, while the New York Daily News would decry how popular music had ‘reached its lowest depths in the “grunt and groin” antics of one Elvis Presley’. The New York Daily News of 1956 could not possibly have anticipated Iggy Pop.

Not much has changed since then. When the teenage Canadian pop star Justin Bieber recently visited Melbourne to perform to hordes of screaming fans at Rod Laver Arena, the Age review mentioned not the qualities that made Bieber so appealing to his fan base, merely that his voice was squeaky ‘when not autotuned’. Justin Bieber is, in effect, in the same position as Elvis Presley in 1956: enjoying extraordinary success but suffering a disproportionate amount of hatred from those who don’t count themselves among his fans. Forget that his album is certified platinum and that his concert movie Never Say Never has topped box offices. What counts is that, at least as far as adults are concerned, every mention of Justin Bieber finds itself accompanied by an almost universal compulsion to talk about the teenager in a tone of mocking condescension. Take for example the acidic tenor of this report from TheVine on the release of an internet browser application called Shaved Bieber: