billyworld99
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Scholars and Critics Offer Candidates. Hint: One Claimed Not To Be Billie Jean's Lover.
Historian David Halberstam once identified the three most important events of the 1950s as the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the building of Levittown, and the rise of Elvis Presley. That a musician should rank among the top three important phenomena of a 10-year span is unusual, and no musician since has achieved such significance. Still, music matters a lot. It influences our perceptions, our social lives, and, sometimes, even our politics. And musicians do keep influencing us. Therefore, in advance of the Zócalo/Occidental College event “Can Popular Music Still Change Culture?”, we asked several writers and critics to address the following question: What musician, aside from Elvis Presley, changed American society the most?
Mark Anthony Neal
Michael Jackson
When Michael Jackson reached the commercial apex of his career in the mid-1980s, he did so not only on the strength of his formidable talent and creative vision, but also as the most visible embodiment of the broad traditions of African-American musicality.
For many, Jackson’s ascendance to the pinnacle of popular music could only be read through the prism of figures who defined the stakes in popular music, namely Elvis Presley and the Beatles. But both Presley and the Beatles owed much of what they did to the oft-diminished earlier generation of black blues and rhythm-and-blues artists (something that Presley never denied).
Jackson’s inspirational archive was wide-ranging, but he drew especially heavily on the Chitlin Circuit—the network of clubs, speakeasies, theaters (the Apollo being the most well known), restaurants, and even barns that incubated much of the Black music tradition during the early 20th century. Fully understanding that heritage gave Jackson his signature performance quality: making such thorough and inventive use of all those primary influences that people couldn’t even tell he was doing it. This move by Jackson was as much about his artistic ego—his interest in literally being the “Greatest Show on Earth” (he loved P.T. Barnum)—as it was about his respect for cultural and artistic roots. Michael Jackson’s singular brilliance was his capacity to archive a comprehensive history of Black musical performance and then both reproduce it, yet also create something that was truly original.
Jackson’s championing of Black musical traditions became particularly important when Jackson became a global phenomenon, in effect making those Black musical traditions part of an emerging global language—an effect seen in the huge global popularity of hip-hop culture and rap music. In this regard few could claim to have had the kind of impact that Jackson did.
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University and the author of several books including the just released Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press).
http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2...ideas/up-for-discussion/#.UaUJeivL7ZM.twitter
Historian David Halberstam once identified the three most important events of the 1950s as the Brown v. Board of Education decision, the building of Levittown, and the rise of Elvis Presley. That a musician should rank among the top three important phenomena of a 10-year span is unusual, and no musician since has achieved such significance. Still, music matters a lot. It influences our perceptions, our social lives, and, sometimes, even our politics. And musicians do keep influencing us. Therefore, in advance of the Zócalo/Occidental College event “Can Popular Music Still Change Culture?”, we asked several writers and critics to address the following question: What musician, aside from Elvis Presley, changed American society the most?
Mark Anthony Neal
Michael Jackson
When Michael Jackson reached the commercial apex of his career in the mid-1980s, he did so not only on the strength of his formidable talent and creative vision, but also as the most visible embodiment of the broad traditions of African-American musicality.
For many, Jackson’s ascendance to the pinnacle of popular music could only be read through the prism of figures who defined the stakes in popular music, namely Elvis Presley and the Beatles. But both Presley and the Beatles owed much of what they did to the oft-diminished earlier generation of black blues and rhythm-and-blues artists (something that Presley never denied).
Jackson’s inspirational archive was wide-ranging, but he drew especially heavily on the Chitlin Circuit—the network of clubs, speakeasies, theaters (the Apollo being the most well known), restaurants, and even barns that incubated much of the Black music tradition during the early 20th century. Fully understanding that heritage gave Jackson his signature performance quality: making such thorough and inventive use of all those primary influences that people couldn’t even tell he was doing it. This move by Jackson was as much about his artistic ego—his interest in literally being the “Greatest Show on Earth” (he loved P.T. Barnum)—as it was about his respect for cultural and artistic roots. Michael Jackson’s singular brilliance was his capacity to archive a comprehensive history of Black musical performance and then both reproduce it, yet also create something that was truly original.
Jackson’s championing of Black musical traditions became particularly important when Jackson became a global phenomenon, in effect making those Black musical traditions part of an emerging global language—an effect seen in the huge global popularity of hip-hop culture and rap music. In this regard few could claim to have had the kind of impact that Jackson did.
Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of Black Popular Culture in the Department of African & African American Studies at Duke University and the author of several books including the just released Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities (NYU Press).
http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2...ideas/up-for-discussion/#.UaUJeivL7ZM.twitter
