In 2023 Taylor Swift set a record for being at the top of the Billboard album chart, the Billboard 200, more frequently than any other individual: 68 weeks. Swift has been releasing albums since 2006, when her self-titled disc dropped. Her first album at the top was her second, Fearless (2008), which racked up 11 weeks there, or 16% of her total run (so far; she’s probably added to her dominance by the time you read this).
Swift took the top spot from Elvis, who, with 67 weeks, is the second solo artist on the list.
(Both have a ways to go to be at the overall top of the Billboard 200 cumulative list: the Beatles have marked 132 weeks.)
Elvis’ Billboard 200 numbers are for 10 albums released between 1956 and 2002, with that last date being pretty damn good for a guy who died in 1977, or 12 years before Taylor Swift was born.
In Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, if we use the Syd Field three-act structure from his Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979), the Confrontation occurs in a Las Vegas that resembles the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. A dirty bomb apparently went off in Vegas, although it seems as though it was a neutron bomb, given that with the exception of the massive statues that are being reclaimed by the desert, the casino hotels still stand, which gives Rick Deckard, portrayed by Harrison Ford, a place to live, hidden away from the Wallace Corporation. (Apparently he’s been there since the time of the first Blade Runner film, which is set in. . . 2019.)
As Ryan Gosling’s K, in 2049, wanders through the casino that houses Deckard, he goes into a theater, where a glitchy Vegas-era holographic Elvis performs “Suspicious Minds” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” about which Deckard, after engaging in a fist fight with K, says, “I like this song.” Elvis first released the song, which is based on a melody from a French composition of 1784 (“Plaisir d’amour”), in 1961. Deckard is in his 30s in the first film, which means he would have been born in 1989 at the latest or 1980 at the earliest: either way he was born after the 1969 residency at the International that is associated with Elvis and that rhinestone-decorated white jumpsuit.
Evidently, Elvis continued to have resonance maybe in the future (it is not disclosed when Sin City became Empty City, so it based on the setting of the first film in 2019, it could have been anytime between then and 2040, based on the idea that the ruin-like nature would have taken at least nine years to be as manifest as it is). Maybe that future is. . .2024.
