It’s been 20 years since the death of “The King” of rock music or, as the supermarket tabloids would have it, since he went into hiding as a slick career move. Whatever, this month has seen the likeness of Elvis Presley planted firmly in everything involved in the world of music to the face of the current U.S. president.

One could even be forgiven for believing that Elvis may be alive, shrewdly repackaged as the equally sensitive, Southern and music-loving Bill Clinton. Or perhaps he has disguised himself in the drag garb of Canadian lesbian country star, and avowed Elvis fan, K.D. Lang.

The television channel VH-1 recently broadcast an entire week of Presley concerts, films and clips, while, last week thousands of fans gathered outside Presley’s Graceland estate in Tennessee to hold a candlelight vigil and pay homage to their idol.

It wasn’t obvious that Presley’s influence would remain so important after his career descended into self-parody in the 1970s, finally ending on Aug. 16, 1977, when he suffered a heart attack in a toilet after another binge on food and drugs. The black rock group Living Colour mocked Elvis’s pathetic end on their song ‘Elvis Is Dead’ by singing snidely, “When the King died/ He was on his throne.”

For a while, rock music sought to strip itself of the aura of Elvis, it’s first major sex symbol who ended up an overweight and overly-melodramatic Las Vegas crooner. The rap group Public Enemy summed up the zeitgeist on their 1989 song ‘Fight the Power’, where they dismissed Presley entirely: “Elvis was a hero to most/ But he never meant s— to me/ He was a straight-out racist, the sucker was simple and plain.”

Part of the problem is that Presley’s career lay in the wedding of two popular post-Second World War musical genres: blues music, then almost entirely performed by blacks, and the white-dominated country music. At a time when racist ‘Jim Crow’ laws kept the two races segregated, Presley sped up country standards and bowdlerised blues tunes like Big Mama Thonrton’s ‘You Ain’t Nothing But a Hound Dog’ to rocket to stardom.

In the modern United States, that legacy isn’t a happy one for African Americans, who have tried to reclaim their musical roots from white popularisers. As a result, a blues-based group like Living Colour is anxious to dispel the idea that Presley’s watered- down version could win him the title of the King of Rock and Roll. One rap group, Run-DMC, even claimed the title of King of Rock jointly for themselves.

Significantly, the only black performer to attempt to claim Presley’s legacy in recent years is the similarly troubled, self- styled King of Pop, Michael Jackson. Jackson briefly married Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie, and has also borrowed such trademark gestures as the King’s nostril-flaring sneer and hip thrusts.

Ironically, Jackson, like Presley, has attracted attention for the wrong reasons, as well, with rumours of paedophilia and painkiller use dogging him in the same way that tales of sexual and gastronomical excess pursued Elvis.

In fact, many Elvis fans dace the problem of being compared not only to the slim, pouting Young Elvis of the 1950s, but to the fat, gaudy Old Elvis of the 1970s.

Bill Clinton – of whom his predecessor George Bush once said, “He’s going to give us an Elvis economy that leaves everybody in the Heartbreak Hotel” – received distinctly Young Elvis praise early in his career, but since has been the target of Old Elvis jokes about his eating habits.

The U.S. Postal Service, when it unveiled an Elvis postage stamp three years ago, even gave customers a choice over whether it wanted the King’s visage to be that of the youthful, vaguely feminine 1950s version or the paunchier, sequinned 1970s brand. In a poll, respondents voted overwhelmingly for Young Elvis.

Nevertheless, even Old Elvis has proved an inspiration, particularly for country singers who wallow in the same overblown sentimentality the King favoured in his later years.

From Elvis imitators – now practically a U.S. tradition – to the hordes of fans who still visit Graceland every year, Presley looms as large on the cultural landscape as he did two decades ago. Rocker Mojo Nixon’s half-mocking, half-serious tribute ‘Elvis Is Everywhere’ rings true today: “Elvis is everywhere/ Elvis is everything/ Elvis is everyone/ Elvis is still the King.”