This piece by David Segal in the New York Times about the end of fame in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death is the kind of lazy editorializing that drives me crazy. The apparent disinterest in facts is bad enough (why, for instance, say that Thriller was number one for “more than 31 weeks” instead of looking up the actual number, 37, which is easily found through any number of sources?), but even more irritating is the kneejerk, conventional wisdom that fills the whole piece. Apparently, we’re too easily distracted now to appreciate an artist like Jackson. We’re overwhelmed by too much information, too many competing forms of media, too much viral cybercrap diverting our attention (ironically, the example Segal uses to cap his piece is decidedly old school: a scantily-clad woman being pulled through a crowd on a cart–at what time in all of human history would that not be a distraction?).
Segal ignores two things. First, that Jackson himself benefited from the the early ’80s own version of an information explosion: the proliferation of 24 hour cable TV channels that expanded the market for promotional videos and led to the creation of MTV, a media expansion which many at the time complained was flooding the country with meaningless information and novelty-driven entertainment (a complaint that had already been leveled at television in the ’50s and radio in the ’20s).
Second, and most important, Michael Jackson was a multi-talented genius who would have become a major star in any generation or in any period of cultural or, as people seem to prefer to think of it now, media history. Talent will out, and the fact that the viral successes that clog up the current media stream are short lived novelties is meaningless. Viral media isn’t preventing talent from appearing, it’s unconsciously sifting the talent pool in search of an artist who will justify it’s existence, turning it from just another media stream into the media stream, in the same way Jackson justified the existence of MTV.
The tired argument that the media controls the culture, instead of the other way around, has been disproved time and time again for anyone who would take the trouble to look, but it still gets dredged up by people on both sides of the media power divide: the have nots think an expansion of media will create an explosion of repressed and under-appreciated talent, while the haves are afraid that new media will cause them to lose control of a culture over which, in reality, they have no actual power.
The idea that culture, even popular culture (if, that is, it can even be separated from human culture as a whole), can be controlled in any real way for any appreciable length of time, is laughable. Popular culture is, literally, a force of nature, and Jackson became a kind of perfect storm. It’s meaningless to say there will never be another Michael Jackson–of course there won’t. There will never be another Beatles either, or another Elvis or Sinatra or Jolson or Caruso (there will never be another you or I, for that matter).
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be others whose achievements will be just as great, whose fame will be just as phenomenal, whose presence will seem as irreplaceable once they’re gone. Every generation has at least one of those, usually more. In the end, Jackson’s death is only one man’s death, no matter how sad it may be or whatever meaning or symbolism you want to hang on it (and I fully admit to having done some of that myself). But the end of fame? Some people just aren’t paying attention.
