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The Day Pop Died?

By shehab ⋅ July 5, 2009 ⋅

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Filed Under Chris Anderson, Culture, George Lucas, Long Tail, Media, Michael Jackson, MJ, MTV, Music, Pop, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Steven Spielberg, Superstars

There’s no doubting Michael Jackson’s passing was a global cultural moment. Like so many others I spent the following days watching every MJ video produced, revisited the albums and reminisced about seeing him live and the many memories he soundtracked.
Throughout was also a niggling question: who else would bring the world together in passing? Would any of our current crop of music superstars have anywhere close to this impact on passing?

Minding Michael Part One : A Good Time

Qool DJ Marv Aural Memoirs & the Buttamilk Archives

Mark Gimein writes in New York Magazine:

The Empire Strikes Back

Over the years, a lot of folks—some worried about how to sell movies and records, some worried about the state of the culture, some peering into the future of media—have seesawed back and forth about how much blockbusters like these will rule the culture business. The most influential best-seller of the 1990s on the subject was economist Robert H. Frank’s Winner Takes All Society, which argued that more and more of the spoils in every field would be concentrated among a few winners. On the other hand, more recently, Wired editor Chris Anderson, in The Long Tail, argued the opposite: that media was progressing toward an ever-growing “long tail” of niche interests.

Minding Michael Part Two : Dreamer

Qool DJ Marv Aural Memoirs & the Buttamilk Archives

So is this the end of Pop? Of course not, but the era of universal global blockbusters may have passed.

Oliver Wang explains this from a DJ’s perspective:

The thing is…it’s so easy to get the party started with MJ, it’s like an unfair advantage over the audience. It’s so easy that I’ve usually avoided playing anything too obvious by MJ simply because…it’s too easy.

And I was thinking: who else comes close to having that kind of power? The only artist even in the conversation is Prince but even then, we’re talking about Purple Rain-era Prince mostly whereas with MJ, you can drop everything from “I Want You Back” (1970) to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” (1979) to “Billie Jean” (1982) to “Smooth Criminal” (1987) and it’s on like Donkey Kong.

His MJ mix is required listening.

Eminem, Radiohead, JT and Beyonce are all incredible artists but I can’t imagine any of them having the universal impact that MJ had. Gimein talks about the emergence of a fat middle:

The single hit has given way to the multi-blockbuster summer.

Not quite the end of Pop then, but the end of Pop as we have known it, as epitomized by MJ.