The King of Pop No More
There isn’t a lot to say about Michael Jackson. His life was a multi-billion dollar pop-culture freakshow — sad and entertaining and amazing and frightening all at the same time. He revolutionized pop music. Then he revolutionized celebrity weirdness. I like to think his contribution to the former was greater than his contribution to the latter, but I’m not quite enough of an aficionado to say for sure. It’s too bad he didn’t get to patch his reputation as planned. But if nothing else, he died young enough to cement his legend, both the good parts and the bad — and prove, once again, that true pop stars never grow old.
“[H]e revolutionized celebrity weirdness.”
That Jackson was a hookmaster of the first order there is no doubt, but in these four words you have encapsulated his legacy. He was unrivaled at the art of “Wha?”
— Tony Comstock · Jun 26, 12:14 PM · #
Off the Wall and Thriller, to say nothing of the many lovely Jackson 5 singles, are top-notch R + B in the A.P. era(That’s the “after Poppa’s Gotta Brand New Bag” era). Top-notch, yes, but “revolutionary”? Nope. (Words like that are so tired. So baby-boomer.) And the less said about his 4-months-ahead-of-the-curve innovations in the oh-so fertile art of music-video, really the better. I don’t say this to criticize him, but to criticize the ridiculous importance the music-vid obtained in the 80s. He at least tried to use the music-vid genre to promote quality dance, even if too few followed his lead. But all in all, his is a tale of his innner demons and of pop-music celebrity’s decadent tendencies overtaking his talent. “Bad” was. Would his latest foray really have been good? And musically speaking, the R+B genre has been stale for a long time, and as far as I can tell, Michael post-Thriller did little to fight its more complacent tendencies, which circa 2009 have long reigned supreme. I guess we’ll know soon enough what the older M.J. had in store for us musically had he not died, but we certainly haven’t had a reason for a long time to expect anything great from whatever unreleased recordings do exist.
Finally, read Martha Bayles’ still-fresh and still-authoritative Hole in our Soul for her argument that M.J. made a kind of semi-surrender to the MTV/new-wave gods of Image and Edginess.
— Carl Scott · Jun 26, 06:52 PM · #
He was a truly great dancer.
— nascardaughter · Jun 26, 10:20 PM · #