The Illiterate

None of the post-mortems of Michael Jackson I’ve read so far have made what seems to me an obvious connection, that Jackson’s death symbolically marks the absolute end of what had been standard operating procedure for the record business ever since Thriller. Since he set the paradigm of the blockbuster, multi-single album, a concept that has been dead for three or four years now, that only seems fitting. Like Elvis’s death, Jackson’s passing marks a cultural and business turning point. The exhaustion of pop music the last few years, especially in hip-hop and r&b, has been an indicator that the massive influence Jackson had over pop music, and the creative energy he injected into it, has finally faded. The rot had settled in long before yesterday, of course, and one of the ironies of Jackson’s final days is that a great many people in the music industry were looking forward to the O2 shows as a way of revitalizing the industry, or at least reveling in it’s former glory. Now, instead, they will get a sudden burst of sales in Jackson’s albums–just in time for them to appear on eMusic–and then a whole lot of nothing. There will be tons of commemorative reissues, remixes, outtakes and God knows what else–a death industry that will rival Elvis’s. Neverland will become the new Graceland, being a Michael Jackson imitator will become a lucrative and lifelong career, and advertisements for commemorative plates will flood the airwaves. Then, in another four or five years, someone will either appear from nowhere like Elvis, or remake themselves into something totally unexpected in the same way Jackson did, and an entire generation will put MJ aside and move on to fresher glories.