Elvis Presley "Elvis Presley" [1956]

A series of lunkheaded decisions -- letting a sobby-voiced hambone fake his way through modern standards, backing him up with a faceless group of hillbilly hacks and apparently recording his vocal tracks in an elevator shaft -- is what got the whole ball rolling in 1956. Thus, if at any time in the ensuing six decades of rock music you ever wondered what in the hell the embarrassing clowns you're listening to are trying to do, the answer will inevitably lead you back to this: they're emulating the Original Embarrassing Rock 'n Roll Clown, Elvis Presley. On this, his debut album, Elvis sets the entire genre on course weighed down by a series of bad habits that only mutated monstrously as time wore on, including sloppy performance execution, lying-ass come-ons, callous put-downs, overt vocal grandstanding (including his hopelessly sappy falsetto), materialistic shallowness and willing self-objectification. Because he only had to compete with whitebread pussies like Pat Boone and Perry Como at the time, Elvis' style was able to spread across the landscape like a viral epidemic. If only he had been a true talent with at least a few brains in his head, there's no telling how much higher musical quality could have reached by now. Instead, we got this cocky hip-swinger who could only manage to sell himself out to Hollywood and be put out to pasture in Vegas as a phony karate-chopping swine. To say we deserved better is an understatement more massive than Elvis' final white jumpsuit.