Today marks the second anniversary of Michael Jackson's death and the death of music at large. (and Farrah Fawcets, sorry you died on the wrong day). Remember when Kanye said "I'mma let you finish, Beyonce's video was one of the greatest video's of all time!" ? I can't quite duplicate the aura of sweat, desperation, douchebaggery, drunkenness and venereal disease to describe the picture adequately. However, I thought to myself..."Beyonce, leotard, dancing with 2 other girls in a glove she swagger jacked from Kylie Minogue. How is that different from any other video and how does this qualify as the greatest video of all time?" I swear that song was written by a retarded person. It's funny the male bashing going on in that song by a person paid to take off her clothes while married to a camel, one has to question her morals. Most videos that MJ did were mini movies with story lines that were more than a chick shaking a cellulite thigh, slanging weave in a wind tunnel repeating one line over and over. Single ladies was a glorified strip tease, Michael Jackson created art.
Michael's music touched the lives of every generation that was fortunate to have been born for the last 100 years. (If you don't understand that, think about it and you'll get it.) Older people will remember and cherish him as Little Michael from the Jackson Five, with his cute little Afro, bell bottoms, belting out "I'll be there" and "ABC". He was cute...They will remember how sensitive and shy he was but he was a little dynamo on the stage and he put seasoned adult performers to shame. My generation remembers him at the height of his fame, the 80's. There was no one bigger or cooler to us than Michael Jackson. (we were little) Everything he did or wore, we all wanted to copy from the sequined glove, the leather jackets, even the Jeri curl. We tried in vain to moonwalk, learned the thriller dance and even looked past him carrying around a fully dressed Bubbles to award ceremonies and amusement parks.
The one thing each generation had in common, is that we all took Michael for granted. We always assumed he would be there to make music or for us to use his eccentricities as comedic fodder. He left in the void an absolute wreck called the "music industry". You may not understand what I mean when I say music is dead, because you can hear music everywhere you go, or hear musicians perform for large audiences. But what you are hearing coming out of your ear-buds and amplifiers is not music, it is the badly reanimated corpse of a once thriving and evolving monster, now extinct as the dodo, cloned and recycled into a consumer commodity. There are no new genres, no new instruments, no new sounds to sample, and the new pop stars are not producing new or groundbreaking music. It's all been done and said before and the only way these so called musicians can be "innovative" is to wear crazy clothes, be more provocative, take off more clothes, be more controversial, or perform some publicity stunt unrelated to the music. (Rihanna, Gaga, Chris Brown, J.Lo, P. Diddy, every rapper). They have told every story, told every emotion, whatever lesson you want, any philosophy rational or irrational, there's an app for that.
Even though music is dead, musicians will insist on dragging the dead corpse around for who knows what reason. They will continue to market sh*t and call it sugar and expect us to pay $.99 per song for it. Many people will attempt to use the term "star", "icon", "superstar", but none truly know the dedication showmanship and dedication inherent in those words. These so called "celebrities" and "pop stars" effect on the music industry can only be compared to the US atom bomb on Hiroshima. Yes...that destructive to music. It's a primordial soup of non-talent. There are no signs of life, not one.
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