With the media concentrating on coverage of the Michael Jackson Memorial in Los Angeles, from 1:00 pm on up through pretty much the rest of the day, it's only natural that a great many people might search out other sources of information and entertainment. If in doing so you arrive here, what should you see but-
Michael Jackson posts MUAHAHAHAHAHA
See, I'm following the same formula as the media-give the people what they want. Regardless of New York Representative Peter King's recent comments, this media coverage is not a matter of "political correctness", it's a matter of advertising dollars.
It's also a matter of promoting record sales. If CBS, for example, failed to provide wall-to-wall coverage of the day's festivities, the board of parent company Sony would very quickly fire the company's general manager and CEO and hire somebody that appreciated the bottom line, the bread and butter of big business.
Sony, and it's affiliates, CBS, CBS records, and Epic Records in particular, stands to make an arguably obscene profit off of the recent rebirth of interest in Jackson's music. But it is not just them. The others have to compete for those advertising dollars and the viewers that bring them. Any company that owns a large number of radio stations also stands to rake in advertising dollars through Jackson's new and old music, so prepare for a steady diet of it.
And in a sense, Jackson deserves it. So do his fans. No matter what you think of Jackson as a person, with all his strangeness, peccadilloes, warts, and flaws, no one can honestly deny his impact on popular culture, even if you are not particularly a fan of his music.
His impact on the music video business is especially undeniable. He made it, and he made it single-handedly. Without Michael Jackson, there would be no music video business and culture as we know it today, if at all.
True, he had a negative impact on the music business as well. He has given rise to swarms of imitators who would be lost on a stage if not surrounded by a cartel of dancers, who add little to nothing to a show in a musical sense. This has impacted ticket prices as well. These people are all probably well paid, and even if they are not highly paid, you have to clothe, house, transport and feed these people from show to show. Then there is the heightened dependence on special effects, increased numbers of band members, and orchestration, stage designers and choreographers.
As hard as it might be to swallow, I seem to remember a show once where, in the background, during a song, an acrobat was performing. It's really gotten ridiculous.
If you are going to complain about the influence of Michael Jackson, complain about that, please. He is the main reason you can't see a second rate or a once-great but now has-been band for under eighty dollars. And that's the cheap seats.
But for good or bad, his influence on music and popular culture in general is undeniable, and as such his passing is deserving of note, and yes, media coverage. Don't worry, though. It will go away eventually, and once it does, we can all go back to getting the same breaking and important news sensationalism, rumors, scandals, political spin-doctoring, rumors, worthless information, misinformation-and in some cases non-information-for which we have come to so heavily rely upon from our hard-working men and women of the American and world news media.
