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25 years ago, Michael Jackson couldn't be beat
By MELINDA MAWDSLEY
The Daily Sentinel
Friday, January 04, 2008
Love him or hate him, Michael Jackson matters.
The “King of Pop” is one of the most polarizing artists in history and one of the most popular musicians of all time based on album sales. He is also arguably one of the most innovative.
His iconic career now is overshadowed by accusations of child molestation, but 25 years ago, Jackson couldn’t be beat.
His “Thriller” was the best-selling album in the country.
“Thriller” was released Dec. 1, 1982, and was the No. 1 best-selling album for 37 weeks and America’s top-selling album for two years (1983-1984), according to Billboard magazine.
It is considered one of the greatest albums ever and produced a string of hits, including No. 1 songs “Billie Jean” and “Beat It.”
“Thriller” is the United State’s No. 2 top-selling album of all time. “Eagles: Their Greatest Hits, 1971-1975” is No. 1.
“Thriller” sold an estimated 104 million copies worldwide and produced eight Grammys in 1983.
In 2005, Jackson went on trial and was exonerated of child molestation charges. Since his acquittal, he has seemingly tried to avoid the spotlight.
In February, a 25th anniversary commemorative edition of “Thriller” will be released, according to Sony BMG Entertainment.
Jackson, who turns 50 in August, candidly talked about the original release of “Thriller” and the material on the new album in a rare interview with Joy T. Bennett for December’s Ebony magazine.
The anniversary album will contain classic songs, video and new cuts featuring Jackson and contemporary artists such as Akon, Kanye West, Fergie and will.i.am, both of the Black Eyed Peas, according to Sony BMG Entertainment.
The first single from the new album — Jackson’s first single in nearly five years — will be “The Girl is Mine,” which he originally recorded with Paul McCartney. In this new version, McCartney’s vocals were removed and the song remixed with vocals from will.i.am. It is set to come out Jan. 22.
“It’s a classic, there is no question about it,” said Rock Cesario, owner of Triple Play Records, 530 Main St. “Michael Jackson wouldn’t be the first guy with talent who is strange. I was just listening to the Jackson 5 the other day, and that kid could sing when he was young. Who knows what happened.”
GRAND JUNCTION THRILLED
In 1983, a gallon of gas was $1.29, and a postage stamp was 20 cents. Tom Selleck was America’s heartthrob as Magnum P.I.
Grand Junction was smaller and more conservative than with it is now, but “Thriller” was still a resounding success.
“It sold like hot cakes... I couldn’t keep it in the store,” said Arn McConnell, who was attending Mesa College and working at Airtime, a store on North Avenue, when “Thriller” as released.
McConnell was also the station manager at Mesa College’s radio station, KMSA. He didn’t play songs from “Thriller” because it was too mainstream and didn’t fit his eclectic taste. He said he preferred to play songs not heard on popular radio.
McConnell didn’t buy “Thriller” because it was so mainstream, but he could tell Jackson’s album would be successful.
“It generated hit after hit after hit, which is unusual,” said McConnell, a graduate of Grand Junction High School and Mesa College, now Mesa State College.“The release was huge even in white bread Grand Junction. Culturally, it seemed backwater here, but it probably was not much different (here) than the rest of the country.”
Nowadays, McConnell is a DJ at KAFM community radio and occasionally puts a Jackson song on the air. However, he prefers Jackson’s songs recorded before “Thriller.”
Jack Delmore, a lyric tenor and Mesa State College associate professor of music and music theater, is adamant that he is not a fan of Jackson. But years ago, he listened to “Thriller” over and over again courtesy of his sister’s cassette and vinyl collection.
Yes, he said. She had both.
“Back then, he was kind of a phenomenon,” Delmore said. “Everybody listened to it, of course.”
Delmore was beginning graduate school at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston when “Thriller” came out.
“‘Thriller’ (the song) was more operatic in its scope,” Delmore said. “It was this epic song telling this story with amazing imagery, and there were some great licks. It was fun to listen to. It kept going and going. In that regard, it was fun. You knew you were listening to something that was really unique. His musicality is top-notch or first-rate or cutting-edge.”
Delmore said he will listen to “Thriller” again when the anniversary release comes out in February.
It will be interesting to see how the public receives Jackson in 2007, he said.
“He was very talented,” Delmore said. “Maybe he’ll have a second act, but he’s done so much damage to his public image. I don’t know if they’ll embrace a new album.”
OLD AND NEW FANS
Ryan Stringfellow was a kid when “Thriller” was released. He wasn’t into music or performance, but he idolized his older brothers and their opinions. His middle brother, eight years Stringfellow’s elder, was into Jackson.
“He had the glove,” said Stringfellow, 31, executive director at KAFM. “He taught me the moonwalk. I remember some people I went to school with had the red leather jackets.”
In the early 1980s, with the arrival of MTV and music videos, the visual appeal of musicians became increasingly important. Jackson entered the video scene with the 1983 “Thriller.”
The critically-acclaimed, 13-minute video was named MTV’s top video ever.
It was so popular and ground breaking that it continues to be imitated around the world. One of the more famous recent re-enactments of “Thriller” was done by the inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines. That video and others can be watched on www.youtube.com.
“He always wanted to do the next great things,” Stringfellow said. “He was always doing something different. He was innovative.”
With the choreography in the “Thriller” video, Jackson turned presentation into an essential element of music. It is a recipe pop stars still follow.
“People were talking about him,” said Jan Hart, who owns J.B. Hart Music, which has been at 417 Main St. since 1972. “It was not negative. He was a fabulous dancer. Nobody had ever seen (dancing like that).”
As a joke, Hart Music employees autographed a Jackson poster with the words, “To all my friends at Hart Music.” Hart remembered a man asking for the poster while he was purchasing a piano. The store’s employees told the man it wasn’t really Jackson’s autograph.
“He didn’t care,” Hart said.
Nancy Don, a volunteer accountant at KAFM, bought “Thriller” for her 14-year-old daughter as a stocking stuffer last Christmas.
Don said she is trying to introduce her daughter to a wide variety of music that was popular and innovative before she was born.
“She loved it,” Don said.
1984 - Michael Jackson was nominated for a dozen Grammy Awards. At the time, his Thriller LP was becoming the best-selling album of all time. Jackson went on to win eight Grammys.
1989 - Michael Jackson's "Moonwalker" video was released. Jackson played a superhero in the video, which included a lengthy fantasy segment set to the song "Smooth Criminal."
Michael Jackson Mentionings:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../06/do0608.xml
Nothing you can sing that can't be sold
So, Beatles songs are to be used in commercials for babies' nappies. Clearly nothing is sacred any more.
It could be worse, I know. The copyright holders of the songs, Sony/ATV Music, could be planning to license them to companies who want to flog us beer, burgers or even violent computer games. At least we associate nappies with smiling, healthy, beaming babies.
All the same, the news that bids have been invited for the Lennon and McCartney catalogue so that they can be exploited in TV adverts has to be pretty depressing. It's so un-Sixties. So un-Beatles.
Apparently the first song to be so abused will be All You Need Is Love, a song specially written by John Lennon to celebrate the pioneering worldwide TV link up, Our World, in 1967. The phrase and the song caught the ethos of the time perfectly. Now it's to be used in the marketing of a Procter and Gamble advert for their "all you need is Luvs" nappy campaign.
Sony/ATV, who don't need the Beatles' or their heirs' permission to license the songs, think it's very tasteful. I think John Lennon will be biting the heavenly Axminster in fury.
With his knack for turning out catchy phrases and slogans such as "a hard day's night", "give peace a chance", "all you need is love", "a day in the life", "imagine" and so on, Lennon would, no doubt, have made a brilliant advertising copywriter. That he didn't is because he had the wit to do more with his talent than simply sell soap with a cute rhyme, a couple of guitars and a backbeat. What's more, both he and Paul McCartney knew how valuable their work was - especially if they kept it scarce. Thus the Beatles' Apple organisation has so far guarded the licensing of the group's recordings zealously.
Unfortunately, neither McCartney, Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, nor Apple own the actual songs - although McCartney and Ono still earn royalties from them. Having been contracted as songwriters to music publishers Northern Songs at the beginning of the Beatles' fame in 1963, Lennon and McCartney lost any control of their work when Northern Songs was sold to ATV in 1969.
Then, after a series of missed opportunities to buy them back, McCartney and Ono let the songs fall into the hands of Michael Jackson in 1985, who, when times got tough, called in the giant Sony corporation. And now, after years of self-restraint, it seems Sony/ATV Music are about to cash in big time.
Now, personally, I don't care who makes the most money out of these songs, certainly the most valuable collection in popular music. What bothers me is that if they are used to sell consumer products they will inevitably be debased, and the personal images that you and I associate with them will be erased and replaced with those of the hard sell.
And, to my mind, this can't be right. Because no matter who wrote them, or who owns them, culturally the songs have now become ours, the people who have been humming them for the past 40 odd years, who have invested little parts of our lives, our loves and our memories in them. When I hear All You Need Is Love I think of the hippy summer of 1967, of the flat I was living in when I first heard it, and how within a few weeks all London was blooming with flower power. I know that the "Summer of Love", as it was called, was very silly, but it was the moment, and Lennon was writing about it.
What he was not writing about were babies' nappies. And once a global campaign for All You Need Is Luvs has been launched we can all bid goodbye to our own mental videos of what the song means to us. After that it will forever be about nappies. Our brains will, quite literally, have been washed of their old associations. The song will have been devalued.
It happens all the time. The classics, conveniently out of copyright, have been pillaged brutally. Can we ever hear Bach's Air on a G String without conjuring up an image of a smoking cigar? Did Dvorák really think he'd be advertising brown bread when he composed his New World Symphony? Did Elgar dream up Pomp and Circumstance so that he could promote HP Sauce?
I don't think so. Yet, through commercials, the legacies of all these composers have been contaminated. So will it be with the Beatles. Once the precedent is set, how long will it be before Yesterday is used to sell some old-fashioned biscuit or sauce?
I know there will be those who disagree, but to me the Beatles' songs represent not only some of the best popular music of the last half century, they define an era, too, and a peculiarly British one at that. To traduce them by turning them into mere jingles is little short of heritage robbery.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mp3/ne...To-Drop-DRM/p1
Sony BMG To Drop DRM
Could the king of proprietary technology soon become the most unlikely of liberals?
According to BusinessWeek, Sony / Bertelsmann co-venture Sony BMG is finalising plans to make some, if not all, of its online music downloads DRM-free.
Sony BGM is the last of the so-called 'Big Four' music labels still holding onto Digital Rights Managements after Warner Bros finally gave in inking a deal with Amazon at the end of last month. EMI was first off the blocks after its historical announcement in April, with Universal buckling in August.
How big a player is Sony BMG? Well, given that it lists AC/DC, Aerosmith, Alicia Keys, Beyonce, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, Dido, Elvis Presley's back catalogue, Franz Ferdinand, George Michael, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Timberlake, Kylie, Michael Jackson, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Rod Stewart, Shakira, Tori Amos, Westlife and Whitney Houston amongst its stable of artists you get the idea...
Ironically, Sony BMG found itself in hot water in 2005 when it put extended copy protection on its music CDs, a system which made software to automatically install on users' computers when played and caused security holes which enabled viruses to break in. So giving in to the DRM-free movement marks a complete 180 for the label.
Official confirmation of the move is expected in the next few weeks, with Amazon's entirely DRM free download service mooted as its first official partner.
Personally, we don't care who it partners with - just get that DRM outta here...
By MELINDA MAWDSLEY
The Daily Sentinel
Friday, January 04, 2008
Love him or hate him, Michael Jackson matters.
The “King of Pop” is one of the most polarizing artists in history and one of the most popular musicians of all time based on album sales. He is also arguably one of the most innovative.
His iconic career now is overshadowed by accusations of child molestation, but 25 years ago, Jackson couldn’t be beat.
His “Thriller” was the best-selling album in the country.
“Thriller” was released Dec. 1, 1982, and was the No. 1 best-selling album for 37 weeks and America’s top-selling album for two years (1983-1984), according to Billboard magazine.
It is considered one of the greatest albums ever and produced a string of hits, including No. 1 songs “Billie Jean” and “Beat It.”
“Thriller” is the United State’s No. 2 top-selling album of all time. “Eagles: Their Greatest Hits, 1971-1975” is No. 1.
“Thriller” sold an estimated 104 million copies worldwide and produced eight Grammys in 1983.
In 2005, Jackson went on trial and was exonerated of child molestation charges. Since his acquittal, he has seemingly tried to avoid the spotlight.
In February, a 25th anniversary commemorative edition of “Thriller” will be released, according to Sony BMG Entertainment.
Jackson, who turns 50 in August, candidly talked about the original release of “Thriller” and the material on the new album in a rare interview with Joy T. Bennett for December’s Ebony magazine.
The anniversary album will contain classic songs, video and new cuts featuring Jackson and contemporary artists such as Akon, Kanye West, Fergie and will.i.am, both of the Black Eyed Peas, according to Sony BMG Entertainment.
The first single from the new album — Jackson’s first single in nearly five years — will be “The Girl is Mine,” which he originally recorded with Paul McCartney. In this new version, McCartney’s vocals were removed and the song remixed with vocals from will.i.am. It is set to come out Jan. 22.
“It’s a classic, there is no question about it,” said Rock Cesario, owner of Triple Play Records, 530 Main St. “Michael Jackson wouldn’t be the first guy with talent who is strange. I was just listening to the Jackson 5 the other day, and that kid could sing when he was young. Who knows what happened.”
GRAND JUNCTION THRILLED
In 1983, a gallon of gas was $1.29, and a postage stamp was 20 cents. Tom Selleck was America’s heartthrob as Magnum P.I.
Grand Junction was smaller and more conservative than with it is now, but “Thriller” was still a resounding success.
“It sold like hot cakes... I couldn’t keep it in the store,” said Arn McConnell, who was attending Mesa College and working at Airtime, a store on North Avenue, when “Thriller” as released.
McConnell was also the station manager at Mesa College’s radio station, KMSA. He didn’t play songs from “Thriller” because it was too mainstream and didn’t fit his eclectic taste. He said he preferred to play songs not heard on popular radio.
McConnell didn’t buy “Thriller” because it was so mainstream, but he could tell Jackson’s album would be successful.
“It generated hit after hit after hit, which is unusual,” said McConnell, a graduate of Grand Junction High School and Mesa College, now Mesa State College.“The release was huge even in white bread Grand Junction. Culturally, it seemed backwater here, but it probably was not much different (here) than the rest of the country.”
Nowadays, McConnell is a DJ at KAFM community radio and occasionally puts a Jackson song on the air. However, he prefers Jackson’s songs recorded before “Thriller.”
Jack Delmore, a lyric tenor and Mesa State College associate professor of music and music theater, is adamant that he is not a fan of Jackson. But years ago, he listened to “Thriller” over and over again courtesy of his sister’s cassette and vinyl collection.
Yes, he said. She had both.
“Back then, he was kind of a phenomenon,” Delmore said. “Everybody listened to it, of course.”
Delmore was beginning graduate school at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston when “Thriller” came out.
“‘Thriller’ (the song) was more operatic in its scope,” Delmore said. “It was this epic song telling this story with amazing imagery, and there were some great licks. It was fun to listen to. It kept going and going. In that regard, it was fun. You knew you were listening to something that was really unique. His musicality is top-notch or first-rate or cutting-edge.”
Delmore said he will listen to “Thriller” again when the anniversary release comes out in February.
It will be interesting to see how the public receives Jackson in 2007, he said.
“He was very talented,” Delmore said. “Maybe he’ll have a second act, but he’s done so much damage to his public image. I don’t know if they’ll embrace a new album.”
OLD AND NEW FANS
Ryan Stringfellow was a kid when “Thriller” was released. He wasn’t into music or performance, but he idolized his older brothers and their opinions. His middle brother, eight years Stringfellow’s elder, was into Jackson.
“He had the glove,” said Stringfellow, 31, executive director at KAFM. “He taught me the moonwalk. I remember some people I went to school with had the red leather jackets.”
In the early 1980s, with the arrival of MTV and music videos, the visual appeal of musicians became increasingly important. Jackson entered the video scene with the 1983 “Thriller.”
The critically-acclaimed, 13-minute video was named MTV’s top video ever.
It was so popular and ground breaking that it continues to be imitated around the world. One of the more famous recent re-enactments of “Thriller” was done by the inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center in the Philippines. That video and others can be watched on www.youtube.com.
“He always wanted to do the next great things,” Stringfellow said. “He was always doing something different. He was innovative.”
With the choreography in the “Thriller” video, Jackson turned presentation into an essential element of music. It is a recipe pop stars still follow.
“People were talking about him,” said Jan Hart, who owns J.B. Hart Music, which has been at 417 Main St. since 1972. “It was not negative. He was a fabulous dancer. Nobody had ever seen (dancing like that).”
As a joke, Hart Music employees autographed a Jackson poster with the words, “To all my friends at Hart Music.” Hart remembered a man asking for the poster while he was purchasing a piano. The store’s employees told the man it wasn’t really Jackson’s autograph.
“He didn’t care,” Hart said.
Nancy Don, a volunteer accountant at KAFM, bought “Thriller” for her 14-year-old daughter as a stocking stuffer last Christmas.
Don said she is trying to introduce her daughter to a wide variety of music that was popular and innovative before she was born.
“She loved it,” Don said.
~~Today & this Week in
Michael Jackson History~~
1994 - Michael Jackson presented Debbie Allen with the award for "Outstanding Choreography" at the 26th Annual NCAAP Image Awards. Michael Jackson History~~
1984 - Michael Jackson was nominated for a dozen Grammy Awards. At the time, his Thriller LP was becoming the best-selling album of all time. Jackson went on to win eight Grammys.
1989 - Michael Jackson's "Moonwalker" video was released. Jackson played a superhero in the video, which included a lengthy fantasy segment set to the song "Smooth Criminal."
Michael Jackson Mentionings:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/m.../06/do0608.xml
Nothing you can sing that can't be sold
So, Beatles songs are to be used in commercials for babies' nappies. Clearly nothing is sacred any more.
It could be worse, I know. The copyright holders of the songs, Sony/ATV Music, could be planning to license them to companies who want to flog us beer, burgers or even violent computer games. At least we associate nappies with smiling, healthy, beaming babies.
All the same, the news that bids have been invited for the Lennon and McCartney catalogue so that they can be exploited in TV adverts has to be pretty depressing. It's so un-Sixties. So un-Beatles.
Apparently the first song to be so abused will be All You Need Is Love, a song specially written by John Lennon to celebrate the pioneering worldwide TV link up, Our World, in 1967. The phrase and the song caught the ethos of the time perfectly. Now it's to be used in the marketing of a Procter and Gamble advert for their "all you need is Luvs" nappy campaign.
Sony/ATV, who don't need the Beatles' or their heirs' permission to license the songs, think it's very tasteful. I think John Lennon will be biting the heavenly Axminster in fury.
With his knack for turning out catchy phrases and slogans such as "a hard day's night", "give peace a chance", "all you need is love", "a day in the life", "imagine" and so on, Lennon would, no doubt, have made a brilliant advertising copywriter. That he didn't is because he had the wit to do more with his talent than simply sell soap with a cute rhyme, a couple of guitars and a backbeat. What's more, both he and Paul McCartney knew how valuable their work was - especially if they kept it scarce. Thus the Beatles' Apple organisation has so far guarded the licensing of the group's recordings zealously.
Unfortunately, neither McCartney, Lennon's widow Yoko Ono, nor Apple own the actual songs - although McCartney and Ono still earn royalties from them. Having been contracted as songwriters to music publishers Northern Songs at the beginning of the Beatles' fame in 1963, Lennon and McCartney lost any control of their work when Northern Songs was sold to ATV in 1969.
Then, after a series of missed opportunities to buy them back, McCartney and Ono let the songs fall into the hands of Michael Jackson in 1985, who, when times got tough, called in the giant Sony corporation. And now, after years of self-restraint, it seems Sony/ATV Music are about to cash in big time.
Now, personally, I don't care who makes the most money out of these songs, certainly the most valuable collection in popular music. What bothers me is that if they are used to sell consumer products they will inevitably be debased, and the personal images that you and I associate with them will be erased and replaced with those of the hard sell.
And, to my mind, this can't be right. Because no matter who wrote them, or who owns them, culturally the songs have now become ours, the people who have been humming them for the past 40 odd years, who have invested little parts of our lives, our loves and our memories in them. When I hear All You Need Is Love I think of the hippy summer of 1967, of the flat I was living in when I first heard it, and how within a few weeks all London was blooming with flower power. I know that the "Summer of Love", as it was called, was very silly, but it was the moment, and Lennon was writing about it.
What he was not writing about were babies' nappies. And once a global campaign for All You Need Is Luvs has been launched we can all bid goodbye to our own mental videos of what the song means to us. After that it will forever be about nappies. Our brains will, quite literally, have been washed of their old associations. The song will have been devalued.
It happens all the time. The classics, conveniently out of copyright, have been pillaged brutally. Can we ever hear Bach's Air on a G String without conjuring up an image of a smoking cigar? Did Dvorák really think he'd be advertising brown bread when he composed his New World Symphony? Did Elgar dream up Pomp and Circumstance so that he could promote HP Sauce?
I don't think so. Yet, through commercials, the legacies of all these composers have been contaminated. So will it be with the Beatles. Once the precedent is set, how long will it be before Yesterday is used to sell some old-fashioned biscuit or sauce?
I know there will be those who disagree, but to me the Beatles' songs represent not only some of the best popular music of the last half century, they define an era, too, and a peculiarly British one at that. To traduce them by turning them into mere jingles is little short of heritage robbery.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/mp3/ne...To-Drop-DRM/p1
Sony BMG To Drop DRM
Could the king of proprietary technology soon become the most unlikely of liberals?
According to BusinessWeek, Sony / Bertelsmann co-venture Sony BMG is finalising plans to make some, if not all, of its online music downloads DRM-free.
Sony BGM is the last of the so-called 'Big Four' music labels still holding onto Digital Rights Managements after Warner Bros finally gave in inking a deal with Amazon at the end of last month. EMI was first off the blocks after its historical announcement in April, with Universal buckling in August.
How big a player is Sony BMG? Well, given that it lists AC/DC, Aerosmith, Alicia Keys, Beyonce, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, Bruce Springsteen, Celine Dion, Christina Aguilera, Dido, Elvis Presley's back catalogue, Franz Ferdinand, George Michael, Jennifer Lopez, Justin Timberlake, Kylie, Michael Jackson, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Rod Stewart, Shakira, Tori Amos, Westlife and Whitney Houston amongst its stable of artists you get the idea...
Ironically, Sony BMG found itself in hot water in 2005 when it put extended copy protection on its music CDs, a system which made software to automatically install on users' computers when played and caused security holes which enabled viruses to break in. So giving in to the DRM-free movement marks a complete 180 for the label.
Official confirmation of the move is expected in the next few weeks, with Amazon's entirely DRM free download service mooted as its first official partner.
Personally, we don't care who it partners with - just get that DRM outta here...
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