Oct

28

Elton John’s Many Shades of Cool

Filed Under Blogroll, Celebrity Watch, Fun with Eyewear 

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Elton John is easily one of the most influential songwriters/musicians in the past fifty years. Rolling Stone magazine ranks him 49th in their top 100, with Billboard listing him as number 3, after only Madonna and the Beatles. John has been knighted, has entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, has over 50 songs on the top 40 list, and many more career highlights, not the least of which has been the sale of over 200 million records. But it was not his musical skills alone that made him so memorable and adored, it was a mixture of his sense of unique fashion and flare, his talent and his radically optimistic and anarchistic political views and community involvement.


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John’s style is epitomized by overly-flashy colours and cubist, bold designs that are simple in their complexity. He is especially well known for his fashion style in the realm of eyewear, and has worn such a vast array of custom shades that his collection likely fills a whole room.


Having begun his illustrious career at the early age of 15, playing piano in a locally crowded pub/restaurant, Elton would retain a knack from those early days for writing lyrics that were easy to sing along with, but complex in their creation. He was easily forgotten as a youngster, and learned quickly that talent alone would not float a career in music.


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Like the Beatles, Elton John understood the importance of creating an imagine of the self; and idea of the self that could be emulated but never attained by others. Elton John undertook to create an image for himself after the failed release of his first album, which was deemed ‘uninspired.’ He was turned down by several bands when he auditioned for lead singing roles because he was not edgy or interesting enough. In retaliation, Elton John went to the extreme to market himself as a unique voice (though in fact his vocal skills and song writing traits were a derivative of blues/country and traditional British pub music).


His eyewear is characteristic of his need to define and separate himself from his competition, and in that regard they succeed it setting him apart. The white, Jackie O shades with yellow tinted lenses have become almost more synonymous with Elton John than with Jackie herself, for all the stir he caused when first wearing women’s shades.


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There is, perhaps, some validity to the theory that Elton John’s latent homosexuality caused him to continuously create masks for himself in order to appear fun-loving and open when in fact he was struggling internally. His flashy clothes and bright shades covered dark eyes as he played love songs for women he was not attracted to.


In all, there is no other musician quite like Elton John, a statement he would be only too happy to hear given the intense effort he put into creating a unique image of himself for the public, not the least of which was crafted with his particular, and sometimes peculiar, taste in eyewear.

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