The news sure spread fast. It interrupted broadcasts and seemed to consume Twitter — as much as it can be consumed by any single event.
Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices reported, according to his metric, that 15% of all posts on the service mentioned Michael Jackson. By comparison, he never saw Iran or Swine Flu exceed 5%. Mashable later reported over 30% (“likely an underestimate”) at one time referred to Michael Jackson or “MJ.”
I have a hard time believing there’s anyone in the world who hasn’t already reacted to this. Even supposed ambivalence about Michael Jackson’s death is expressive. My own initial urge was to announce I didn’t care and wasn’t going to add to the din — until I realized I was adding to the din, and I must have cared somehow to say anything at all.
Then Phronk quickly and rightly argued against nonchalance – calling this a globally significant, history-changing event.
To understand the significance of the event we need to distinguish between “history” as actual events and “history” as the account, or story we compose around them… Don’t underestimate the power of the latter.
Granted, Michael Jackson’s death doesn’t change much of the structure or substance of our world. It doesn’t have any potency — the way a war does, or an election, or a scientific discovery, or economic booms and busts — like the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, which has affected the dynamic of a real, ongoing crisis with countless lives in limbo.
To that list of “potents” we can also add art, literature, and music. Music can be as potent and powerful as anything. Michael Jackson, more than anyone, proved that himself, acting as a beacon for oppressed and impoverished peoples around the globe. Even in Iran, I imagine, this is a significant event.
But as an artist, Michael Jackson washed up long ago. While many still loved the man and his music, he ceased to move the world forward.
What he did continue to do was act as the paradigm, or paragon of Pop. His example was projected onto the careers of every performer who followed (even alternative and indie performers could never escape the paradigm, to oppose something is still to be influenced by it).
He’s still at the centre of our popular culture — and our Pop Culture, Michael Jackson’s Pop Culture, is the only Pop Culture there ever was.
There was popular music and popular culture before him — there was even “pop” — but not with all of the interwoven connotations and assumptions and expectations we now have that make it a distinct and vital concept.
Think of mega-bestselling albums, choreographed music spectacles, videos, tabloid controversies, the cult of eternal youth – things Michael Jackson elevated into the mainstream but which we now take for granted – things that have even become so formulaic that we have a game show, American Idol, producing new pop stars on a four-month schedule.
It hardly impresses anyone anymore. Not the way it used to when an absurdly talented man in read leather morphed into a zombie and moonwalked onto the highest pedestal in the Pantheon of Pop.
While his passing in itself won’t make an immediate impact on music, it does provocatively symbolize an end.
We won’t see it that way — not yet anyways: not as long as there are people who, like me, have childhood memories of putting on little talent shows to the irresistible tune of Billie Jean, Beat It, or Thriller, or Bad, wearing a single white glove, abortively attempting to pull off his superhuman dance moves.
Michael Jackson — and more generally, the popular culture he represented — is ingrained in our identities.
But subsequent generations will come along that never shared the same vital symbols that have defined our time. It follows that they won’t be of the same culture, in a sense. They’ll have their own heroes and paradigms, their own concepts with different connotations, their own galvanizing events.
Compared to the political, social, and economic changes we’ve witnessed in the past year, the death of a pop star is insubstantial — but it is not meaningless, it is not insignificant.
Such an event affects us on a human, emotional level that technical, structual matters do not.
It’s also more symbolic. It doesn’t matter that the symbolism of an event is mostly made up and assigned by our imaginations after the fact. That’s precisely what makes them so important.
In a complex world that often makes little sense, rapidly unfolding towards an uncertain future, we need to imagine idealized and immortal figures. They can be our only means of orientation, navigation, and control through the dusky realm of the big picture, or simply, “What comes next?”
Like a real star, he’s something we never touch but is always there to remind us where we are and why we’re here.
