When I compare MJ's fan base with that of other classic artists, from Elvis and Sinatra to Prince and the Beatles, I always notice two things.
One is that all of the people who were fans of his whe he was coming out with the great Jacksons albums like Destiny and Triumph or even Off the Wall and Thriller seem to have evaporated. I'm talking about people who would be in their 40's or 50's now. Basically people MJ's own age. If you go on a Beatles' discussion board, you have a bunch of younger fans who recently discovered their music, but you also have all of those old-timers who were around when they went on Ed Sullivan's show. With MJ, you seem to only have the new generation of fans. All of the old fans seem to have forgotten him, or see his music only as a fun, silly nostalgia thing, not a canon of work worth exploring.
The second thing, which is linked to the first, is that a lot of his fan base is made up of people who love his music, but also love and defend the man, or at least his public persona that they've chosen to believe in.If you go on any other music-related forum, fans routinely criticize or make fun of aspects of the artist's life and career. They'll study the music and every detail of the artist's career, but they don't see their interest as a sort of vocation or crusade to defend a victimized person.
I think that these two aspects might explain this initiative's failure, but also the fact that nothing serious has been done in 3 years. We're talking about a fan base that skews younger, and that has less money and expertise to invest in a serious challenge. And their hyper-emotional devotion to the artist hampers their credibility, and makes them less likely to have an almost scholarly, "historian" view of his career, which is a big motivation for getting to the bottom of the Cascio controversy -- for me at least.
