Michael Jackson: The
Death of a Way of Doing Business
"There
isn’t and will be no new Michael Jackson, any more than there will be a new Beatles.
In the music industry, artists are now the objects of crazes as violent as they
are quick, as if the speed of the news cycle has imposed its own law on periods
of creativity."
For a few moments, death restored
Michael Jackson's status as a global superstar. The deposed King of Pop had
lost it through trouble with the law, eccentricities that were repeated ad
nauseam, and the hideous physical metamorphosisthat turned the
cherub of the music label Motown into a creature of unknown gender.
The grieving carries us back
to a moment a quarter century ago, when Michael Jackson was worshipped around
the world for what he created - music, image and choreography. And considering
the void he left behind quite some time ago, one realizes that he was the last
of the planetary superstars. He died just under a century after Charlie Chaplin
became the first of the species - an artist who became a demigod due to the
combined effect of the widespread dissemination of his work and the total
attention of the means of communication. To belong to this twentieth century
pantheon, one had to be a movie actor or, once microgroove records had been
invented, a singer. The altar consecrated by Greta Garbo
stands beside that of Elvis Presley.
There are reasons for every
cult generated by the star system: the eroticism of Brigitte Bardot, the
prodigious creativity of the Beatles … but common to all of these stars is
that they were shaped by an industry - either of films or recording. The almost
hegemonic domination of the United States in this field explains to a great
extent why the majority of superstars have been, if not American, then at least
English-speaking. For the past fifteen years, both the cinema and record
industries have undergone profound changes - and in the case of records, bankruptcy
- powerfully contributing to the disappearance of superstars.
Michael Jackson was the
product of Detroit entertainment production company Tamla
Motown, one of those star-making factories now as obsolete as Birmingham’s
textile mills. After leaving Motown, the singer tied his colors to the mast of
multinational CBS, which sold tens of millions of copies of his albums Off
The Wall, Thriller and Bad. It was in part this success that
encouraged Japanese Sony to buy CBS in 1987.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
In the decade 1985-1995, the
system that evolved around Jackson reached a prodigious level of efficiency
that was carried along by new methods of promotion - videos aired on cable
channels and advertising partnerships - his records and concert tickets sold by
the million.
The singer’s creative decline
corresponded to the collapse of this method of production. The introduction of
compact discs sped the trend toward a consolidation of the music industry, but
above all, it encouraged the growth of piracy. As the CD is composed of digital
information, it is easily and precisely reproducible.
At the same time, the media -
round-the-clock news channels, magazines like People - discovered the extreme
profitability of blanket coverage of the lives of celebrities. In 1994 and
1995, the murder trial of OJ Simpson, who went from
being an American football superstar to a second-rate actor, received much
better coverage than the genocide in Rwanda.
Michael Jackson produced
ideal material for this emerging industry, with his dynastic marriage to Elvis
Presley’s daughter, then with the morbid saga of his physical transformations, and
finally with his pedophilia trial in 2004-2005. He was no longer a star, but a
celebrity trapped in a televised serial. In an attempt to top Jackson, other
stars deliberately exhibited their own declines, such as John Lydon,
former singer with the Sex Pistols, who took part in the reality show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
This degeneration wasn't
accompanied by the emergence of a new generation of stars. There isn’t and will
be no new Michael Jackson, any more than there will be a new Beatles. In
the music industry, artists are now the objects of crazes as violent as they
are quick, as if the speed of the news cycle has imposed its own law on periods
of creativity.
Posted
by WORLDMEETS.US
Cinema has been better at
resisting changes in media and industry, but has learned to be wary of its
stars, who are costly and whose presence in the credits hasn't guaranteed
commercial success. No longer investing hundreds of millions of dollars, the
studios, in contrast to the record companies, understood the need to transform themselves and are no longer anything like the dream
factories of the golden age. They prefer to shoot films without stars and
divide them into episodes - Harry Potter, X-Men or The Lord of
the Rings, or, simpler still, cartoons.
Every day, cultural
industries are learning how to do without superstars. But because many of them -
Mick Jagger, Madonna, Will Smith - survive and thrive
since the dividing line between star and celebrity remains blurred, the world
has yet to realize that we’re talking about an endangered species, of which
Michael Jackson was the last specimen to appear, just thirty years ago.
