I recently came across a very interesting podcast by Malcolm Gladwell titled, “Analysis, Parapraxis, Elvis: The One Song the King Couldn’t Sing”. You can listen to it here . It’s fifty fascinating minutes where Gladwell gleans information from a paper written in 2005 by Psychology professors, Alan C. Elms & Bruce Heller.
Parapraxis, or what is more commonly referred to as a Freudian slip, is something that we have all been guilty of at one time or another. We mean to say or write something but end up, unconsciously, saying or writing something entirely different. Gladwell dives into the meaning of parapraxis as it relates to Elvis and his difficulty in singing the hugely popular song “Are You Lonesome Tonight”. Shortly after he was discharged from the Army in 1960, Elvis recorded the song in a dark New York City recording studio at four o’clock in the morning. The song is a haunting ballad about pain, abandonment and longing for a lost love. Although it is a song that Elvis sang hundreds of times over the course of his career, there is a portion of the song that he just could not get through without messing up the lyrics. Elvis would sing the intro and outro parts of the song almost flawlessly, but in between is a difficult spoken word section. This section is borderline corny and heavy on sentiment. It is where Elvis is at his most vulnerable as a singer and as a person.
There are ten live recordings of the song in which you can hear Elvis make 109 mistakes; almost all of them are during this spoken word part. As an Elvis fan I have heard the song hundreds of times and although it’s not my favorite, I do like the song. It’s the later versions, where he messes up the song the most, that I don’t care for so much. Oh, sure you could chalk up the mistakes in the later versions as Elvis just having fun with the song, but I have always wondered why would the most popular singer in the world consistently put in his playlist a song that he always struggled with? He never particularly cared for the song and only recorded it as a favor for the wife of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker. So, for Elvis to consistently play the song and screw it up is bewildering. People of that kind of celebrity typically want to put their best foot forward; minimize their mistakes. But not Elvis. The reason that he frequently sang the song, as Elms and Heller point out, is that Elvis was unconsciously wanting people to know about his pain. Although he was the most popular entertainer in the world, he was also the loneliest person on the planet and once said, “I get lonesome, right in the middle of a crowd.” What is astounding is that at the time nobody saw it. At the time everyone saw his jumbling of the words as playful forgetfulness instead of a cry for help. Or perhaps, like the bleeding woman in my previous blog post, people saw it but didn’t quite know what to do about it.
My point in all of this is not to talk about my favorite singer, but instead to use Elvis as an example of the fact that not everyone who appears to have it together does. That perhaps those little nuances, that our family members, friends, or co-workers display on a frequent basis, aren’t just lovable or annoying quirks. But perhaps they tell us something deeper about who they are as a person. A sort of unconsciously open window to their soul. And as so often happens we miss it.
Christian singer and songwriter, Matthew West sings a song called “The Beautiful Things We Miss”:
I don't wanna miss it
I don't wanna look back someday and find
Everything that really mattered
Was right in front of me this whole time
Open up my eyes, Lord
Keep me in the moment just like this
Before the beautiful things we love
Become the beautiful things we miss
The question that I have been pondering lately, is do I slow down enough, do I care enough to enter through that window and engage in conversation that just might unearth who the real person is.
As it relates to Elvis, Gladwell reminds us that:
“Parapraxis is not failure. When the performer slips, the audience is not cheated; it's the opposite. Parapraxis is a gift. Mistakes reveal our vulnerabilities. They are the way the world understands us, the way performers make their performances real.
And isn’t this true for all of us?