As the Michael Jackson hoopla-cum-mourning continues, you’ll hear lots of comparisons of Jackson to Elvis Presley.
Jackson was a popular figure, and as I wrote yesterday he did represent an apogee of crossover, with commercial results we can wonder at to this day. Presley, of course, was uniquely popular too.
Both suffered from their stardom; both coasted for decades on early concussions of creativity; both lost themselves in an abyss of cowed courtiers and drug use; both, let’s face it, were sexual predators, a term I use not as a general-purpose epithet but as a descriptive term about people who systematically pursue under-aged kids for sexual purposes and, in both cases, were uniquely positioned to be successful at it, leaving some not insignificant legacy of damaged lives in their wake; both died, sadly, wasted away in a laceratingly pointless fashion, knowing, in their hearts, that they could not longer do the things that gave them their power in the first place.
Both were man-boys with infantile sexualities and preadolescent images of themselves as gang leaders and missionaries. Both changed from impossibly beautiful youths into ravaged adults, Presley bloated and dazed; Jackson self-mutilated almost beyond recognition.
But there the similarities end.
Presley grew up severely disadvantaged; I don’t want to make comparisons to a black family in Gary in the 1960s, but let’s remember that his father was basically a failed sharecropper. Out of this environment, one that should have made him a racist cracker, he developed a visionary perspective on music that hadn’t been imagined before. Blacks and whites, country and gospel, blues and pop. And he did it at a time when no one wanted it—indeed, almost everyone didn’t want it.
Presley invented a music and created its audience. Fine—so did T.K. Records, right?
But this wasn’t disco, for two reasons. What Presley invented with his voice was something that, in a sociological sense, was the internet of its time—by which I mean that it carried in it the seeds of its own revolution, and grew in power in the face of opposition. It did it by being so right—with the clarity of its conception and the audacity of its idea: Bringing those musics, and cultures, together. I think we can agree the rock era’s effect on society was definitive.
And that audacity was the second reason. Rock is the most American of musical genres because its conception is just that big. If I may quote Greil Marcus, Elvis Presley “almost has the scope to take America in.” America, like rock, is often flawed in its execution but it’s hard to argue with its ambition or its intents. The implications of America—the idea of America, not the reality of it—is monumental, something you can’t get your mind around. Presley—his audacity, his vision—is too big to think about as well. His tragedy is so vast it calls into question the future of the society that created, and destroyed, him.
Now, as for Jackson. As I wrote yesterday, he is the embodiment of crossover—the biggest star of his time, the culmination of some three decades of gracious black pop. Motown commandeered that music and cleaned it up for presentation to whites; Jackson took the lessons he gleaned from Berry Gordy, imagined a world that he bestrode, and didn’t stop until he did.
But: Since that world was merely a commercial one, Michael Jackson’s life doesn’t resonate like Presley’s. Sure his Thriller was the biggest record ever, for a while—but its commercial appeal soon burned out and, as the years went by, it was steadily overtaken and then supplanted by … Springsteen? Prince? Madonna?
No, just a dorky Eagles greatest hits album (”Oooh-oooh, witch-chay woo-man!”), beloved of the modern-day frat boy. Ten years or so after Thriller, Michael Jackson’s artistic footprint had washed away. He was no longer a star per se but rather a spectacle. Elvis Presley died at home, but no artist was farther away from himself at the time of his death; Jackson, by contrast, remained at the center of his own created world until the very end.
His legacy incorporated himself and nothing else, though I suppose you could throw Usher and Justin Timberlake in there. We’re still living in the world Elvis Presley created; for all intents and purposes, Jackson’s ended yesterday.
No comments:
Post a Comment