I can’t imagine that I’ve seen a sea change in cultural attitudes, but I have. I was paying close attention when Nirvana displaced Michael Jackson at the top of the album charts, and it seems even more significant in hindsight.
Amongst the popular musicians, there are only a handful of people who can truly be said to be megastars. There’s Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beatles and Michael Jackson. Everybody else is on a lower order of magnitude.
Nirvana wasn’t about Kurt Cobain becoming a king. It was about Nirvana committing regicide by dethroning Michael Jackson, and ensuring that “Dangerous” would be the last of his megahit albums. And it ensured that the music scene of the 90s would herald a change that was pretty significant. The 80s and the 90s were the decades when the big pop stars would become smaller and smaller. Michael Jackson was the last mega-star. In a nice way, this list would be representative. You had one Italian American from the NYC area, one southerner, one band from northern England, and a black guy from the midwest.
There were big bands in the 90s, and for a while it seemed that the old rock band system was intact. U2, REM and Radiohead were the bands that received critical adulation and were popular with the fans. But that system was starting to fall apart.
In fact, Michael Jackson was revolutionary in a few ways. He was the first MTV superstar, the first guy to combine being a great musician and being a great dancer. (He was one of the greatest dancers but there were quite a few musicians who were greater than him, but never mind.) In fact, during the first few years of MTV, they didn’t put black people there. David Bowie had to step in and talk them into making MTV available to all artists, and very quickly the biggest MTV star would be the black guy.
For a few brief years, Michael Jackson would be the perfect, made for TV superstar. Elvis had invented the concept of the rock and roll star. David Bowie had married the rock star concept with high fashion. James Brown had brought dancing routines into the equation. But Michael Jackson was the one who married everything into one: the flashy dance steps, the rock star idolatry, fusing together rock and soul and funk, and finally marrying all that with flashy video clips. He totally re-invented what it meant to be a superstar in the 80s. Before him, rock stars ruled the airwaves and the concert arenas. But he was the first made for TV rock star. In his wake were other MTV stars like Madonna, Prince and Britney Spears.
Punk was another revolutionary idea. It was a democratic uprising, and it was the music of the revolting masses. It blurred the boundaries between the audience and the star, by taking the star off the pedestal and intimating that anybody could go up on stage and become a star as well. This was incredibly consequential. If Michael Jackson was the zenith of the possibilities for a person to be a pop / rock idol, then punk was the destruction of that possibility. The 80s and the 90s had a whole clutch of one hit wonders and singers who were so disposable that their only job was to turn up, drop the one pop song that everybody remembers, and disappear into the sunset.
The 80s and the 90s were the era where rock stardom was decimated. The 80s saw the rise of Bon Jovi, Poison, Guns n Roses, Warrant, Motley Crue and plenty of pretty boys with long hair who preened, licked their lips and strutted their way to mass popularity. After the second punk revolution of the 90s, many of them lost their superstar status to grungy looking grunge rockers, whose main selling point was that they had more artistic integrity because their lack of attention to looks did not detract from the main product, which was music with heart and authenticity. So you had plainer looking people like REM, Pearl Jam and Radiohead. Even U2, who had a flamboyant leader like Bono made sure that you understood that he was doing everything ironically, that he not a rock star, just sending up one.
Later on, the teenyboppers like Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Christina Aguilera became wildly popular. In a way they were the teen idols, and in a way they were treading down the path that Michael Jackson took, with the super slick MTV, concerts with plenty of props, and the vast pressures of superstardom. Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears in their way burnt out. In some ways, they were the last gasp of superstardom. Just as U2 and REM were the last rock stars, those were the last pop stars. Thereafter there would be many other acts who may or may not have the same pop instincts as those starlets, but the fragmentation of the music scene continued apace. Indie musicians started to dominate the rock and pop scene, because the major labels weren’t able to come up with acts who were befitting of the major act label.
In fact, the 90s were an anomalous time when the major labels were betting heavily that the next big thing was going to be indie music. That was one of the rare times when many otherwise left-field acts were able to walk into studios with the backing of full budgets and create music. In many ways, that was a great time for music, because in the late 90s, a lot of music was produced that way. Gradually, it turned out that it wasn’t lucrative, that the megadeals that were offered to the acts of the day: REM, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson – were simply bad investments. Around 2000, there was a large consolidation of the big labels, there was a lot of buying and selling out.
The upshot of all this was that the system that brought us huge amounts of quality rock music, music that could only exist because plenty of fans paid for CDs at a fairly extortionate rate, was gone. It was gone partly because the market was splintered from a few megabands who could each sustain a large fanbase, to many smaller fan bases and markets. Partly because the internet contributed to a great decline in the number of CDs sold that continued until today. And partly because music companies, who could sustain a system that economically linked the fans to the acts to the studios, as well as support the coterie of studio musicians who contributed their craft to large numbers of recordings – those systems broke down under all this stress.
These days, in an inversion of the 90s, when indie musicians were able to take advantage of major label studio systems, even those aspiring to be major label artist had to contend with indie musician level of budgets.
It seemed like a shock in the 80s when the vinyls were being phased out, to be replaced by cassette tapes and then compact discs. People were even thinking about formats like the ill fated minidiscs and the digital audio tapes (which, like the 8 track tape, did not catch on.) The internet was the big game changer, which first led to Napster file sharing, then iTunes, then Spotify and many other streaming systems.
At the same time, there was a change to the formats. It used to be that the music itself was dominant. The on-stage antics were important, and they contributed a lot to the showmanship, and the stage presence of the performer was important in the early career of the artist. But the recorded music of the performer was the dominant aspect. This was especially true in the rock era, which probably started in 1955 and ended some time back (historians will probably pinpoint some date, but it’s probably over.)
This has not always been the case. In the classical era, either live performances or the sheet music was the dominant aspect of the music.
These days, the music just serves as a backdrop to something else. It has become subservient to the celebrity status of the person singing it. In 90s rock, grunge strived to take the music away from the image and put the focus on “artistic integrity”. But in hindsight we can now see either that this “anti-image” was itself some form of posturing, or that it was the last gasp of the struggle for the music to be heard.
The release cycle of the music has been shortened. That’s because in many ways, the music has been relegated to being the soundtrack of a video. There have been a significant number of videos which have become more famous than the music.
After a period of time when music was studiously apolitical, the political aspects of the music have become more dominant and in many ways threatened to overshadow the work. “This is America” by Childish Gambino is more famous as a video (and to be sure, it’s one of the greatest videos of all time) than as a piece of music. This has turned out to be the decade of protest, much like the 60s. (But sad to say, the 60s had better music.)
So a phenomenon like Michael Jackson could only happen to a guy his age. Before the 80s, he couldn’t exist, even though it was an era where plenty of excellent black musicians were on top of their game. And 10 years later, with the emergence of Nirvana, he couldn’t exist.
The music industry is something that changes quickly. The state of music as it existed in the late 60s was largely unchanged until the late 90s. Sure, punk was disruptive, and the emergence of black acts, and the emergence of electronic music was notable. But in terms of the album being the dominant form, in terms of there being recorded music being sold in physical form, in terms of the music being the dominant aspect of the art, it didn’t change much. Punk was supposed to be something shocking, but the state of the technology produces changes that are far more profound than anything those shock jocks could muster up.
Music Composition 