{"id":23622,"date":"2011-11-02T13:00:48","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T18:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=23622"},"modified":"2011-11-02T09:46:13","modified_gmt":"2011-11-02T14:46:13","slug":"the-real-eighties-jackson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=23622","title":{"rendered":"The Real Eighties: Michael Jackson And The Bending Genre"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to kick off this month of writing about the music of the eighties by getting the biggest-selling artist of the decade &#8211; maybe of all time &#8211; out of the way right away.<\/p>\n<p>And I&#8217;m doing it to kick off the &#8220;theme&#8221; of this, the first week of my observance of eighties music; Genre-bending.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;-<\/p>\n<p>One of the great tragedies &#8211; maybe &#8220;Tragedy&#8221; isn&#8217;t the right word, but work with me, here &#8211; of the nineties and 2000s is the caricature that Michael Jackson became.<\/p>\n<p>You probably know where this is going; the bit <em>every <\/em>music writer mentions about Michael Jackson in the eighties; he had Eddie Van Halen play the guitar solo on &#8220;Beat It&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/oRdxUFDoQe0\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;ve heard it &#8211; the statement and, natch, the song &#8211; many many many times before.<\/p>\n<p>So why does it matter?<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s look at the biggest-selling artists in pop music, by decade:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Fifties: \u00a0Frank Sinatra (followed by Elvis, Pat Boone and Perry Como)<\/li>\n<li>Sixties: \u00a0The Beatles (no surprise) followed by Elvis and the Rolling Stones)<\/li>\n<li>Seventies: \u00a0Elton John (followed by David Bowie and the Stones).<\/li>\n<li>Eighties: \u00a0We&#8217;ll come back to that below.<\/li>\n<li>Nineties: Madonna<\/li>\n<li>Oughties: Eminem.<\/li>\n<li>Teens: We don&#8217;t know that yet, now, do we?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So what do we see, here?<\/p>\n<p>Look at Frank Sinatra and Elton John. \u00a0They had very defined styles. \u00a0They both did them &#8211; whatever you think of the styles&#8217; respective merits &#8211; very well. \u00a0And both presided as the most successful artists over decades &#8211; or, as I keep saying, parts of decades &#8211; where music really didn&#8217;t change a whole lot; where people stayed in their genres and did their thing, not that there&#8217;s necessarily anything wrong with that.<\/p>\n<p>Eminem? \u00a0Yeah, he&#8217;s a white rapper &#8211; and the closest he&#8217;s ever gotten to musical cross-cultural pollination was his hip-hop version of &#8220;Sweet Home Alabama&#8221;, from <em>Eight Mile<\/em>. \u00a0Which was funny, and pointed, and really really good, but hardly a cultural milestone. \u00a0He&#8217;s collaborated with&#8230;Dr. Dre. \u00a0Interesting, but hardly a stylistic reach.<\/p>\n<p>The Beatles got on the charts by covering the Isley Brothers. \u00a0Elvis got famous by covering R&amp;B music from back when R&amp;B was &#8220;black peoples&#8217; music&#8221;. \u00a0And Michael Jackson, after more than a decade as an R&amp;B star with <em>some <\/em>crossover success, suddenly went beyond bending the genres to downright twisting them.<\/p>\n<p>Which opened the way &#8211; commercially, if not creatively &#8211; for the mass of cross-pollinating creativity that was to follow.<\/p>\n<p>Which we&#8217;ll be talking about more through the rest of this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m going to kick off this month of writing about the music of the eighties by getting the biggest-selling artist of the decade &#8211; maybe of all time &#8211; out of the way right away. And I&#8217;m doing it to kick off the &#8220;theme&#8221; of this, the first week of my observance of eighties music; [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,156],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-the-real-eighties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23622"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24104,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23622\/revisions\/24104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}