http://www.usatoday.com/life/people/2009-0...on-legacy_N.htm
Michael Jackson's legacy endures through music, videos
By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY
At Michael Jackson's revival of a memorial service, Smokey Robinson slapped the lectern and smiled.
Michael "will never really be gone," he said emphatically. "He is going to live forever and ever and ever and ever."
Robinson's conviction was a balm to the tearful Staples Center crowd that gathered July 7 to remember the King of Pop. No doubt such sentiments will surface again today among family and fans as the singer is finally laid to rest in a private burial at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale, Calif.
But as years go by, will Robinson's declaration prove true? Plenty of celebrities have stolen the spotlight in death, only to see their memories fade with the passage of time.
Princess Diana's funeral shut down London and riveted viewers from Kalamazoo to Karachi. A decade later, her role — as a fashionable mother of two with a passion for global causes — has been filled by Michelle Obama.
Frank Sinatra once seemed so synonymous with devil-may-care cool that setting a movie in Las Vegas (cue Swingers) practically required referencing that Rat Pack reign. But lately, his chain-smoking men's club seems more a vestige of a less-enlightened age.
Even Elvis Presley, arguably the most enduring of our cultural comets, is burning less brightly 32 years after his death. Many of his once-revolutionary hits would strike a quaint note on a contemporary playlist, and his pop-culture presence seems largely confined to cartoon soundtracks and ubiquitous impersonators.
Jackson's quest for immortality will have its obstacles. Though Elvis' bloated capes-and-collars period was a brief kicker to a storied career, Jackson's last 20 years were light on hits but heavy on high drama, from the hyperbaric chamber and pet chimp to child molestation allegations and disfiguring plastic surgeries.
It remains to be seen whether the memories — and the music — of Jackson's golden era are potent enough to offset not only those oddities but also the controversies that continue to swirl around him, from his abuse of hospital-grade painkillers to his death by homicide.
Challenges to Jackson legacy
Jackson biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli yearns for a day "when we'll all get back to the music." But taking into account his friend's now controversial passing, he concedes "it may take some time for that to happen."
And that's as long as no new revelations surface, says Brian Hiatt, associate editor at Rolling Stone. "If there are more scandals uncovered, that could irreparably damage the legacy," he says.
Another potential problem: legal wrangling between the estate's executors and anyone vying for a piece of the gold mine.
"Managing a deceased artist is often harder than managing a live one, because sometimes the right answer is 'no, don't release that song' or 'don't agree to the sale of that image,' " says Jerry Schilling, a longtime confidant of Presley's and one-time creative affairs director of Elvis Presley Enterprises, the benchmark of iron-fisted estate management. "You have to be in agreement."
Without a unified stance, intellectual property "can often end up in the public domain, so you have to have all interests aligned or you can destroy the asset," says lawyer Robert Alpert, who specializes in intellectual property issues in the New York offices of the firm Bryan Cave.
"For all of Jackson's bad press, there's an amazing amount of goodwill toward him, which makes his a great property to build on," Alpert says. "But you have to be clear and consistent about the image you want to project through time for it to last. It can be cheapened very easily. And then it'll be forgotten."
At the moment, Jackson couldn't be more top of mind.
He has sold 5 million albums in 2009, up from sales of 297,000 year to date before his death, and his Number Ones is 2009's best-selling album, overtaking Taylor Swift's Fearless, according to Nielsen SoundScan. There's also a $60 million deal with Sony Pictures for a movie drawn from Jackson's rehearsals for the 50 London concerts that would have started in July.
"A legacy like his has to be rooted in the musical catalog, which is a staggering 40 years of making records," says Hilary Rosen, former CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America. "But a lasting brand always needs both steak and sizzle. Sizzle is part of his legacy, that of the tragic hero figure. There's no need to erase or embellish it."
It also helps that the steak is Grade A. Rosen recalls attending the 1988 Grammy Awards and seeing an "absolutely jaded industry audience leap to their feet when Michael's silhouette appeared behind the scrim. His was not cheap celebrity."
Music 'will keep him alive'
Jackson's shocking death at age 50 — on the eve of what some say was sure to be a concert-driven comeback — has in essence given former fans turned off by the singer's peccadilloes the green light to revel in that musical genius.
"I've always said Michael was amazing, but I do sense that now it's OK for others to appreciate his magic," says Raquel Choyce, president of the Las Vegas-based Michael Jackson's United Nation International Fan Club. Among the club's 900 members are fans as young as 10. "What will keep him alive are the wonderful messages in his music."
And messages sent in a digital bottle have a good chance of sailing through time. Jackson had the good fortune of being a child of the television age, whose intricacies he later mastered. His Thriller-era videos both broke him onto MTV and destroyed the band-filmed-while-lip-syncing approach to the genre. Those music videos, and their influence on the stars of today, also play a crucial role in perpetuating Jackson's iconic status.
"Let's face it, Billie Jeanis never really going to sound bad," says Rolling Stone's Hiatt. "That song is 26 years old, but it sounds way more current than (Elvis' first recording) would have sounded at the time of his death in 1977. With Michael, you've got everyone from Usher to Justin Timberlake drawing from his stuff. That's what will help keep him alive for 10 or 20 years, or more."
Decades hence, it won't matter that few remember seeing Jackson's dance moves firsthand or recall waiting for his electric videos to make their debut, Hiatt says. Jackson's music is already so intertwined with today's sounds that his influence isn't likely to be forgotten.
In fact, Gail Mitchell, senior editor at Billboard magazine, uses a different metric to set Jackson apart from other music stars: his lack of recent success.
"Michael Jackson sold out 50 concerts in a matter of hours, this despite not having a recent hit song or record and, truth be told, being an artist who really only had four big albums a long time ago," from Off the Wall(1979)to Dangerous(1991), Mitchell says. "How many artists could do that? I may be idealistic, but I think his legacy will trump all others."
Schilling, too, says Jackson has what it takes to endure: "If you are loved by the world, have an impressive body of work, and there's a huge and organized machine running your estate, the sky's the limit.
"Both Elvis and Michael had their personal issues in life, maybe like most big stars do. But they also were both fundamentally about making the world happy. That's a powerful thing."
The Jackson team should take stock of what the singer has in the vaults "and plan a very strategic release of that material," says Peter Sealey, former marketing chief at Coca-Cola and Columbia Pictures, who teaches entertainment marketing at Claremont (Calif.) Graduate University.
"It's sad but true that those who die before their time have the ability to endure through the ages because they didn't live long enough to make bad movies or late-night infomercials, all of which dilute your brand," Sealey says. "Managed correctly, Jackson, with his body of work, should be a star toward the end of this century."
Graceland, Neverland
An invaluable tool in stoking the memories of a dead pop icon is a place to celebrate his or her life. Elvis has Graceland, but in Jackson's case the destination could be anywhere from a proposed traveling exhibit of his personal effects to a Las Vegas reinterpretation of Neverland. Some have mentioned Jackson's boyhood home in Gary, Ind., as a fitting shrine for fans, but at 24-by-28 feet, it couldn't accommodate the inevitable stampede.
A permanent location is crucial, says Harriette Cole, acting editor in chief and creative director of Ebony magazine, which has chronicled all the Jacksons' lives from their late-'60s blossoming. "Practically speaking, ticket sales (to a Jackson version of Graceland) would help pay off a lot of debt. But it would also prove important in preserving Michael's legacy, as a place to remember what he was all about."
Meanwhile, Gary isn't wasting any time. The town is planning a Jackson family museum, says Mayor Rudy Clay. "We're working on it," he says. "Twenty years from now, you won't find anyone who doesn't know Michael, unless they're Rip van Winkle. History often shows us that with the great stars, they become bigger in death than they were in life."
Biographer Taraborrelli says that one advantage of time is that it can erase life's scars.
"Michael's iconic status will grow stronger because it will no longer be clouded with these personal issues," says Taraborrelli, who met the singer when he was a 10-year-old sensation.
"I'd like to think that he'd have had a peaceful future had he lived, but you can never be sure of that. Instead, now all we're left with is the music, which is the way he would have wanted it."
Our 'death anxiety'
But there's another possibility: that this isn't really about Michael's legacy but our fears.
This perception of cultural heroes as immortal "serves to alleviate death anxiety," says Pelin Kesebir, psychology professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Two years ago, Kesebir asked two groups of students how long they thought Jackson would be remembered after his death. One group said 60 years, but the other group, which first had to write a lengthy essay about their own mortality, predicted 104 years.
For fans, Jackson's death will be perceived "as the annihilation of something they inwardly deemed to be imperishable. But in time, they will derive a sense of stamina from his symbolic immortality."
Amish Gandhi says he's intrigued by that theory. "I never thought of it that way," says Gandhi, who created the Michael Jackson R.I.P. page on Facebook moments after Jackson's death was confirmed.
But ultimately for Gandhi — and likely countless other die-hard fans — the endurance of Jackson's legacy comes down to nothing more complicated than great music.
"I grew up in Africa and India, and he was just a part of everyday life for us," says Gandhi, now a new-media product manager in New York. "That music will go on and on and on."
