Elvis has Left the Building?
By I’m a bit late to the game on this one. Paul beat me to the punch, and got in the obviously good quip in the process. I blame the time zones. Or the healthy moderate drinking that a good friend and I partook in last night at my house. It was a nice Zin, and also a really nice, proper Chablis, but I digress.
I’m both surprised and not, at once. When I woke and heard the news on BBC 6 Music this morning, I went to my itunes collection to put some Jackson on, out of some sort of sentimental obligation or whatever. Fortunately, over the years, cooler heads have prevailed; out of the 95 gig of music in my itunes collection (other pointless stats: 51.7 straight days of music; I don’t have 51.7 days to listen to music exclusively) there is not a single Michael Jackson song. [UPDATE: There is. I have a very nice Motown box set that I hadn’t imported into itunes for some reason. And I’m kicking myself for missing the obvious temporal link here — the Jackson 5 were signed to Motown in 1968, the same year Elvis realized that he was irrelevant and had his comeback special. 1969 was when the Jackson 5 released their first singles, the same year Elvis recorded what would become parts of the Memphis Record.]
That also sort of surprised me — as, while lapsed in the theological sense, I do maintain a catholic approach to music. I’ll admit to an admiration for the man in terms of his pop sensibilities — he was genius there. But, unlike the King, Jacko never had his return to Memphis moment. Jackson had become utterly irrelevant, and worse, a running joke, but part of me had hoped, in vain, that he would recognize this. Where Elvis had self-awareness, recognized that he had become irrelevant, and even better, did something about it, making perhaps one of the best records ever, Jackson did nothing more than string us along.
I will state, unequivocally, that Michael Jackson is not my generation’s Elvis. As far as I am concerned, that man is playing Glastonbury this weekend. But with both Jacko and Farrah, who will be the third? [readers have correctly pointed out that Ed McMahon was the first of this batch of three . . . and on this one, my excuses are flimsy at best.]
