Breaking news: Elvis is alive, and he’s playing radio station festivals in Reykjavik.

I took that video on Saturday, during a weekend trip to Iceland. (Didn’t know you could take a weekend trip to Iceland? Neither did I, until someone mentioned it to us recently and, like lemmings, we said “Wow!” and then plunked down a small fortune on plane tickets. Turns out it’s only a four-hour flight from Boston.) The country’s really unique — alien landscape, nice people, interesting history, a coma-inducing amount of partying (by the country, not us, although more on that in a future post), etc. But there was one problem: Elvis.

Well, not just Elvis. Elvis and Madonna and Star Trek and the theme song to “Baywatch” that I had never heard but a packed bar crowd in Reykjavik was singing along to with zeal. I feel bad about this every time I travel abroad and inevidably discover that, instead of enjoying their own culture, other countries are stuck with our crap. I always want to apologize for it; it’s like discovering that when you throw out your trash, it ends up on your neighbor’s lawn.

America’s cultural export is a bullhorn to the ear — quality doesn’t matter, because it’s so loud that it drowns everything else out. I mean, hey, nothing against Elvis. If you’re making music or movies and can find an international audience, that’s an exciting sign of success. And when I talked about this with a local girl in a Reykjavik bar — while the Beastie Boys were playing on the stereo, and she was wearing a Bon Jovi shirt — she didn’t seem too bothered. “People just like whatever’s cool,” she said. So maybe I’m being selfish: I wanted to see something new, and instead found something familiar. But I can’t help but think we’ve done these people wrong.