I think, secretly, every man wishes he was Elvis.

I’ve been a late-stage obsessive ever since I read Careless Love — Peter Guralnick’s brilliant biography.

He remains the most enigmatic figure in music despite dying nearly fifty-five years ago (supposedly).

His career arc — from messianic teenage heartbreaker to drug-addled paranoid fantasist, drowning in the golden quicksand of Las Vegas and his insane contract with the luciferian Colonel Parker — is the archetypal pop culture myth.

It set the stage for every tortured star that followed in his footsteps: Michael Jackson, Freddie Mercury, Amy Winehouse — the list is endless.

He was the first to run the rock and roll gauntlet that few would survive.

The ultimate Faustian bargain: wealth, success, sex, drugs, fame — all for the measly price of one human soul.

And what was so heartbreaking about Elvis was that he was so full of soul.

His voice, his eyes, the way he moved. The way he could take a simple song and turn it into a religious experience.

His sensitivity, his pain, his innocence. His love of gospel and, of course, his mama.

He wasn’t just a performer. He was a conduit. Something moved through him.

He was, in many ways, the polar opposite of the man who came to own him.

Colonel Tom Parker — a Dutch shyster with a fictitious war record and the uncanny ability to make money out of thin air.

A Snowman, as he liked to call himself.

Master of the “snowjob” — the con, the trick, the ruse.

Like it or not, Elvis and the Colonel represent a permanent tension at the heart of entertainment.

The tension between the artist who touches the infinite and the system that tries to package it.

I’ve come to see their relationship as analogous to the human brain itself.

We all know the brain is split into two hemispheres — a right and a left — and that they don’t simply duplicate each other.

They attend to the world in radically different ways.

Ian McGilchrist, in The Master and His Emissary, argues that the right hemisphere is our primary way of encountering reality.

It’s the part of us that meets the world whole, before it’s carved into categories.

It handles context, tone, ambiguity, movement, emotion.

It’s how the world first arrives — dense, alive, untranslatable.

It is the hemisphere of encounter.

The Elvis hemisphere.

The left hemisphere works differently.

It specialises in breaking that living complexity into manageable parts.

It turns our experience into symbols, systems and language.

It simplifies, names, categorises and repeats. It’s how we make things practical, shareable and reliable.

It’s where speech is largely organised, and where we build the explanations we use to describe the world — to other people and, interestingly, to ourselves.

It’s the Colonel Tom Parker of the brain.

Together, these two modes form the most powerful instrument we’ve yet encountered in our universe: the human mind.

Just as the Colonel could take Elvis’ raw soul and emotion and package it into stickers, dolls and movies, the left hemisphere takes the rich, wordless understanding of the right and stabilises it — turning it into sentences, symbols we can understand, processes we can explain and repeat.

In theory, this should all be done in service of what McGilchrist terms 'the master": the right hemisphere; the Elvis hemisphere.

But, just like in showbusiness, relationships like this are always in danger of inversion.

Neurology gives us a glimpse of what happens when the balance breaks.

Patients with left-hemisphere strokes often lose fluent speech. They struggle to assemble new sentences. Language construction collapses.

That’s because Colonel Parker has been taken offline. He isn’t able to help translate all the world’s complexity into neat little soundbites anymore.

And yet many of these same patients can still sing.

Because the Elvis hemisphere is still up and running.

Not because music sits neatly in one half of the brain and language in the other — the brain is never that tidy — but because singing recruits older, more distributed systems that lean heavily on right-hemisphere networks: rhythm, melody, gesture, breath, emotional contour.

A song is organised as a whole organic pattern rather than assembled piece by piece like a sentence.

When speech breaks, music can still carry meaning.

Elvis can still sing, with or without the Colonel.

But when the right hemisphere is damaged — when our Elvis hemisphere goes offline — the consequences are more unsettling.

Patients may lose half their world.

They can no longer absorb the gestalt, the big picture.

They lose touch with reality.

Often, because the working left hemisphere sees through the right eye, they will ignore the left side of their body.

They won’t dress it, wash it or shave it. And when asked about it, the functioning left hemisphere calmly invents explanations. The arm is tired. It isn’t theirs. It doesn’t matter.

Colonel Parker is a spin doctor; a press secretary.

And he would rather fabricate a story than admit uncertainty.

Narrow precision increases as contact with reality decreases.

The relationship between Elvis and the Colonel drifted into that same pathology.

Elvis died a morbidly obese prisoner of the contract that chained him to the stage of the International Hotel in Las Vegas.

Contractually obliged to appear twice a day, every day, in return for a $100,000 weekly paycheck, the Colonel turned him into a money-printing machine.

A system humming at perfect efficiency, with a soul suffocating inside it.

He never even got to sing outside the United States — a dream he’d always cherished.

Parker's rapacious obsession with the bottom line — the thing that had once amplified Elvis’ art and made him the most successful performer alive — was now in total control.

Instead of the manager serving the artist, the artist was serving the manager.

The left hemisphere had taken over.

McGilchrist argues that modern culture risks the same inversion.

That we live in a world dominated more and more by left hemisphere thinking.

We increasingly prioritise systems over encounters, metrics over experience, models over reality. We optimise for the map and forget the territory.

And with good reason.

Science, business and technology depend on this way of thinking. It is systematic, powerful and replicable.

But when the Colonel is left to run the show unchecked, the world grows thinner.

Elvis loses his magic.

Life becomes rigid, ideological, bureaucratic. Education becomes production. Healthcare becomes throughput. Nature becomes resource.

We become driven by targets, systems and metrics, rather than by the real ambiguities of lived experience.

Art becomes content.

People become brands.

Elvis becomes what Elvis became.

We end up surrounded by machinery that works perfectly and means nothing.

I still think every man secretly wants to be Elvis.

And we probably all need a Colonel Parker.

But tragedy begins the moment we forget who is meant to be serving who.

The manager exists for the artist.

The left hemisphere exists for the right.

And it’s worth remembering who’s supposed to be in charge.

Keep dreaming,

Rob