Reflections of Michael Jackson :
Articles, Blogs & Stories
One of our major objectives here at the Legacy Project is to raise the level of dicussion as it pertains to Michael as an artist.
In this thread we will focus on writings that look at Michael's body of work in a way that is respectful and thought-provoking.
Please feel free to share your thoughts and insights, whether you agree or disagree!
As always, thanks go out to MJ TinkerBell for her tireless research in this area.
Michael Jackson was the most influential artist of the 20th century. That might sound shocking to sophisticated ears. Jackson, after all, was only a pop star. What about the century's great writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner? What about visual artists, like Picasso and Dali, or the masters of cinema from Chaplin to Kubrick? Even among influential musicians, did Michael really matter more than the Beatles? What about
Louis Armstrong, who invented jazz, or
Frank Sinatra, who reinvented it for white people? Or Elvis Presley, who did the same with blues and gospel, founding rock in the process? Michael Jackson is bigger than Elvis? By a country mile.
First, there is no question that musicians in the 20th century had far more cultural impact than any other sort of artist. There is no such thing, for instance, as a 20th-century painter that is more famous than an entertainer like Sinatra. There are no filmmakers or movie stars that had more cultural sway than The Beatles, and no 20th-century writers who touched more lives than Elvis. Consider that thousands of human beings, from Bangkok to Brazil, make their living by pretending to be
Elvis Presley. When was the last time you saw a good impression of Picasso? Even Elvis, though, is overshadowed by Jackson's career.
First, with the possible exception of Prince and Sammy Davis Jr.,
Michael Jackson simply had more raw talent as a performer than any of his peers. But the King of Pop reigns as the century's signature artist not just because of his exceptional talent, but because he was able to package that talent in a whole new way. In both form and content, Jackson simply did what no one had done before.
Louis Armstrong, for instance, learned music as a live performer and adapted his art for records and radio. Sinatra and Elvis were also basically live acts who made records, ultimately expanding that on-stage persona into other media through sheer force of charisma. The Beatles were a hybrid; a once-great live band made popular by radio and TV, forced by their own fame to become rock's first great studio artists.
Jackson, though, was something else entirely. Something new. Obviously he made great records, usually with the help of Quincy Jones. Jackson's musical influence on subsequent artists is simply unavoidable, from his immediate followers like Madonna and
Bobby Brown, to later stars like Usher and Justin Timberlake.
Certainly, Jackson could also electrify a live audience. His true canvas, though, was always the video screen. Above all, he was the first great televisual entertainer. From his Jackson 5 childhood, to his adult crossover on the Motown 25th anniversary special, to the last sad tabloid fodder, Jackson lived and died for on TV. He was born in 1958, part of the first generation of Americans who never knew a world without TV. And Jackson didn't just grow up with TV. He grew up on it. Child stardom, the great blessing and curse of his life, let him to internalize the medium's conventions and see its potential in a way that no earlier performer possibly could.
The result, as typified by the videos for "Thriller," "Billie Jean," and "Beat It," was more than just great art. It was a new art form. Jackson turned the low-budget, promotional clips record companies would make to promote a hit single into high art, a whole new genre that combined every form of 20th century mass media: the music video. It was cinematic, but not a movie. There were elements of live performance, but it was nothing like a concert. A seamless mix of song and dance that wasn't cheesy like Broadway, it was on TV but wildly different from anything people had ever seen on a screen.
The oft-repeated conventional wisdom—that Jackson's videos made MTV and so "changed the music industry" is only half true. It's more like the music industry ballooned to encompass Jackson's talent and shrunk down again without him. Videos didn't matter before Michael, and they ceased to matter at almost the precise cultural moment he stopped producing great work. His last relevant clip, "Black or White," was essentially the genre's swan song. Led by Nirvana and
Pearl Jam, the next wave of pop stars hated making videos, seeing the entire format, and the channel they aired on, as tools of corporate rock.
The greatest impact of the music video wasn't on music, but video. That is, on film and television. The generation that grew up watching '80s videos started making movies and TV shows in the '90s, using MTV's once-daring stylistic elements like quick cuts, vérité-style hand-helds, nonlinear narrative and heavy visual effects and turning them into mainstream TV and film movie conventions.
If Jackson had only been a great musician who also invented music video, he still wouldn't have mattered as much. Madonna, his only worthy heir, was almost as gifted at communicating an aesthetic on-screen. The aesthetic Jackson communicated, however, was much more powerful, liberating and globally resonant than hers. It was more powerful than what Elvis and Sinatra communicated, too. Hence, that whole "Most Influential Artist" thing.
American popular music has always been about challenging stereotypes and breaking down barriers. Throughout the century, be it in Jazz, Rock or Hip-Hop, black and white artists mixed styles, implicitly, and often explicitly, advocating racial equality. Popular music has always challenged sex roles, too. Top 40 artists especially, from Little Richard and proto-feminist Leslie Gore, to
David Bowie, Madonna and Lady Gaga have pushed social progress by bending and breaking gender rules.
Jackson was clearly a tragic figure, and his well-documented childhood trauma didn't help. But his fatal flaw, and simultaneously the source of his immense power, was a truly revolutionary Romantic vision. Not Romantic in the sappy way greeting card companies and florists use the word, but in its older, Byronic sense of someone who commits their entire life to pursing a creative ideal in defiance of social order and even natural law. Jackson's Romantic ideal, learned as a child at Motown founder Berry Gordy's feet, was an Age of Aquarius-inspired vision using of pop music to build racial, sexual, generational and religious harmony. His twist, though, was a doozy.
He not only made art promoting pop's egalitarian ethos, but literally tried embody it. When that vision became an obsession, a standard showbiz plastic surgery addiction became something infinitely more ambitious—and infinitely darker. Jackson consciously tried to turn himself into an indeterminate mix of human types, into a sort of ageless arch-person, blending black and white, male and female, adult and child. He was, however, not an arch-person. He was just a regular person, albeit a supremely talented one, and time makes dust of every person, no matter how well they sing. Decades of throwing himself against this irrefutable wall of fact ravaged him, body then soul, and eventually destroyed him.
At his creative peak, though, it almost seemed possible. Michael could be absolutely anything he wanted;
Diana Ross one day, Peter Pan and the next. Every breathtaking high note, every impossible dance-step and crazy costume projected the same message. There are no more barriers of race, sex, class or age, he told his audience. You, too, can be and do whatever you want. We are limited only by our power to dream. A performer who can make you believe that, to feel it, even for a moment, comes along once in a lifetime. Maybe. If you're lucky.
As years pass and history sanitizes his memory, Jackson's legend will only grow. One day, in addition to being the most influential artist of the 20th century, he may well topple Elvis become the most-impersonated as well. Jackson, after all, only died a year ago. Elvis has been gone since 1977. Another two or three decades and Michael might have the most impersonators from Bangkok and Brazil. Let's just hope that they don't take it too far.
source:
http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/a...fluence/58616/
It sounds strange to say this, but
Michael Jackson is coming off one of the biggest years of his career. Jackson has sold more than 9 million albums and nearly 13 million digital tracks in the U.S. in the year since his death. He was hotter than he'd been at any time since his glory days in the ‘80s. He even achieved a career goal that had eluded him in his lifetime--a hit movie.
I think what happened in the past year is that people focused on Jackson's music for the first time in many years, and remembered how much they liked it. Sadly, it took Jackson's death for people to look past all the controversies--large and small, troubling and trivial--that turned a lot of people off.
In the year since he died, Jackson has sold 9,023,000 albums in the U.S. This has enabled him to vault from #47 on Nielsen/SoundScan's running list of the top 200 album sellers in its history (which dates to 1991) to #18 this week. That's a tremendous one-year gain.
Jackson's posthumous sales are among the most impressive in the history of the music business. Nielsen/SoundScan didn't exist when
Elvis Presley died in 1977 or when John Lennon was killed in 1980, so precise comparisons aren't possible, but the Billboard charts shed some light on the matter.
With his smash compilation Number Ones, Jackson became only the 13th artist to have the best-selling album in the U.S. posthumously. And with the subsequent soundtrack to Michael Jackson's This Is It, he became one of only five artists to have the best-selling album in the U.S. with two albums after his death. Bandleader Glenn Miller and rappers 2Pac and The Notorious B.I.G. each had three posthumous #1 albums. Nirvana, featuring the late Kurt Cobain, had two.
Eight other artists had one posthumous #1 album: Presley and Lennon are joined on this list by
Janis Joplin, Jim Croce, Selena, Aaliyah, Johnny Cash and Ray Charles.
Jackson long wanted to be a movie star, a sort of modern-day
Fred Astaire. In death, he got at least part of his wish: a #1 box-office hit. Michael Jackson's This Is It topped the box-office in its opening weekend at the end of October with a domestic gross of more than $23 million.
The soundtrack album entered The Billboard 200 at #1 that same week, with first-week sales of 373,000. (It was eligible for that chart because it was a new compilation.)
That made Jackson only the sixth music star since the early ‘80s to star in a movie that came in #1 at the box-office and also spawned a #1 soundtrack (on which the star was featured). He followed Prince (1984's Purple Rain); Whitney Houston (1995's Waiting To Exhale); Will Smith (1997's Men In Black);
Eminem (2002's 8 Mile); and
Miley Cyrus (2009's Hannah Montana: The Movie).
Michael Jackson's This Is It grossed more than $72 million in the U.S., which made it the top-grossing music concert film in history. (The old record was held by Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus' 2008 movie Best Of Both Worlds Concert Tour, which grossed more than $65 million.) The movie grossed an additional $180 million in foreign markets for a combined worldwide gross of $252 million. It was also a hit on DVD, with U.S. DVD sales estimated at $43 million.
Beyond the box-office success, the movie helped Jackson's image because it showed him in action and in charge. And we haven't seen that side of him since his heyday. Since Bad came out in 1987, he was usually on the defensive, facing slipping sales, image problems, criminal charges, and all the rest. His life spun out of control. Here, he was seen as being in control again.
In the weeks following his death on June 25, Jackson toppled records that had stood for decades. In the week after he died, he had the three best-selling albums in the U.S.: Number Ones, The Essential Michael Jackson, and Thriller. Since 1963, when Billboard combined its separate stereo and mono charts into one comprehensive listing, no other act had accomplished that feat. (The Beatles came closest, nailing down three of the top four spots in May 1964.)
For two weeks in July, Jackson had six of the 10 best-selling albums in the U.S. This broke a record that had stood since April 1966, when
Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass had four of the top 10.
As I noted last summer, this has a strong sense of déjà vu for me. I wrote a column for Billboard in 1983 and 1984, when Jackson was setting new records virtually every week. I never imagined that it would all happen again, and certainly not under these sad circumstances.
In the week after he died, Jackson became the first artist to sell more than 1 million digital tracks in one week. (He sold 2.6 million, obliterating the old record.) Combining solo hits with songs he recorded with his brothers, he had a staggering 49 of the top 200 titles on the Hot Digital Songs chart that week. He held down six of the top 10 spots.
In each of the first seven weeks after he died, Jackson had three of the five best-selling albums in the U.S.: His biggest seller throughout this period was Number Ones. The hit-studded collection sold more copies in the first 16 weeks after Jackson's death than it had in the five and half years between its release in November 2003 and his death. At its peak in July, Number Ones sold 349,000 copies in one week. That constituted the biggest one-week sales tally for a non-holiday catalog album in Nielsen/SoundScan history.
Number Ones logged six weeks as the best-selling album in the U.S. That was the longest that an artist who had died had the nation's top-seller since 1980-1981, when Double Fantasy, by
John Lennon and his widow,
Yoko Ono, topped The Billboard 200 for eight weeks. It was the longest that a greatest hits set was the best-selling album in the U.S. since 2000-2001, when the Beatles' 1 held the top spot for eight weeks. It was the longest that Jackson had the top-seller since 1987, when Bad held the top spot for six weeks.
Jackson's phenomenal posthumous success forced Billboard to change its long-time policy of excluding catalog albums from The Billboard 200. Beginning with the chart for the issue dated Dec. 5, 2009, catalog albums were able to compete alongside current product on the magazine's flagship chart. The move came too late for Jackson's albums to take their rightful places in the top 10, but it was welcome development nonetheless.
When Nielsen/SoundScan released its final sales tallies for 2009, Jackson had four of the year's top 20 albums: Number Ones at #3, Michael Jackson's This Is It at #12, Thriller at #14 and The Essential Michael Jackson at #20. This constituted a record for the SoundScan era. The old record was held by
Garth Brooks, who had three of the top 20 albums of 1992. (In Brooks's case, however, all three made the year-end top 10.)
By coming in at #3 for the year, Number Ones ranked higher on Nielsen/SoundScan's year-end chart than any album ever had following the artist's death. 2Pac's All Eyez On Me was the #6 album of 1996. The Notorious B.I.G.'s Life After Death was the #6 album of 1997.
Number Ones sold 2,355,000 copies in the U.S. in 2009. It sold all but 117,000 of those copies after Jackson's death.
Jackson had seven of Nielsen/SoundScan's top 100 albums of 2009. In addition to his four albums that made the year-end top 20, Off The Wall was #66, Bad was #68 and Dangerous was #98.
Jackson had nine of the top 200 digital songs of 2009. His biggest hit was "Thriller," which sold 1,096,000 copies during the calendar year. His other top-selling songs for the year were, in descending order: "Billie Jean" (938,000), "Man In The Mirror" (890,000), "Beat It" (830,000), "The Way You Make Me Feel" (671,000), "Don't Stop ‘Til You Get Enough" (611,000), "Smooth Criminal" (605,000), "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)" (557,000), and "Black Or White" (511,000).
Since the digital era began, the song "Thriller" has sold 2,362,000 digital copies. Only one song from the ‘80s has outsold it. That's Journey's ubiquitous 1981 smash "Don't Stop Believin'," which has sold 3,819,000 copies. But Jackson tops the arena rock band in one respect: He has a second song on Nielsen/SoundScan's running list of the 200 best-selling digital songs in its history. "Billie Jean" has sold 1,898,000 copies in the digital era.
In the past year, Thriller has surpassed Dangerous as Jackson's best-selling album of the Nielsen/SoundScan era. Thriller has sold 5,816,000 copies since 1991. Dangerous has sold 5,786,000. This is remarkable because Thriller was released more than eight years before the start of the Nielsen/SoundScan era. By contrast, all Dangerous sales are contained in the SoundScan era.
Jackson topped charts all over the world after his death. Number Ones and The Essential Michael Jackson both reached #1 in the U.K. The latter album topped the U.K. chart for seven weeks, which was the longest run for an American artist since Justin Timberlake's Justified stayed on top for seven weeks in 2003.
Jackson also had a pair of #1 albums in Japan: King Of Pop (Japan Edition) and Michael Jackson's This Is It.
Sincerely Your,
MJJC Legacy Project Team
