Joe Queenan: The Only Man Brave Enough To Say That Michael Jackson Is Important

mbart | July 12, 2007 5:03 am
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Today’s entry in the “against” column of the “Should old people be allowed to write about pop music?” debate is author, humorist, and professional penitent for America’s cultural sins Joe Queenan, who has written a column on Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” He thinks it’s an important song. Not for the reasons a normal person might think–like, you know, musical ones–but because they made a really cool video for it:

No, Billie Jean was groundbreaking because it introduced the idea that a single must be accompanied by a high-production video – preferably by someone who is a bit of a hoofer – thereby transforming a run-of-the-mill song release into an “event”…it launched the Michael Jackson era, a period in which the entire population of the planet made a group decision to follow the career of one star and one star only. This was an era in which a fabulously gifted performer like Prince was forced into a distant second-fiddle role, because even though Prince could dance, he couldn’t dance like Michael Jackson. Jackson’s all-encompassing appeal was something that had never happened before in the history of pop music…

This was the first time that a song had been upstaged by the performance of a song, creating a peculiar situation where no one really had any interest in hearing the song unless they could simultaneously watch the song being performed.

Later he confuses a studio with a set and claims that “More thought went into the production of this single than would go into the entire recording careers of Axl Rose, Coldplay, Shania Twain or Gwen Stefani,” which I guess is a longer way of saying that he hasn’t listened to music since 1986. Have fun!

How Billie Jean changed the world [Guardian]