Michael Joseph Jackson the Exception
Making Memories of Michael Joseph Jackson (1958-2009)
The unauthorized interview of michael jackson 1983!!!(1of3)
Throughout his four-decade career, Michael Jackson has been awarded numerous honors including the World Music Award’s Best-Selling Pop Male Artist of the Millennium, American Music Award’s Artist of the Century Award and the Bambi Award’s Pop Artist of the Millennium Award.
He is a double-inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (once as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1997, and as a solo artist in 2001) and an inductee of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Raymone Bain, Jackson’s PR, claims that Jackson has sold over 750 million units worldwide.
From 1988 to 2005, Jackson lived on his Neverland Ranch property, on which he built an amusement park and private zoo for economically disadvantaged and terminally ill children. His frequently held sleepover parties received disparaging media coverage after it was revealed that children frequently shared his bed or bedroom. These first came to light when he was accused of child sexual abuse in 1993. His sleepover parties were brought into the spotlight again in 2003 during the TV documentary Living with Michael Jackson. This resulted in Jackson being tried, and later acquitted, of more child molestation allegations and several other charges in 2005.
Every culture has its own idols, and it would be erroneous to expect, for example, the average American popular culture consumer to be familiar with Russia’s Alla Pugacheva (Dima Bilan doesn’t count), or the average Russian to have heard of Johnny Cash. But Michael Jackson’s fame truly knew no borders.
It was January 20th, 2009, and a group of journalists from around the world, about half of them Americans, gathered in front of a giant television screen in one of Harvard University buildings to watch the much anticipated ceremony – President Barack Obama’s inauguration. We watched the guests of honor filing in their seats on the podium in front of the Capitol, and commented on who was who.
Then CNN showed an Aftican-American lady, wearing an ostentatious grey hat with a bow, enter the scene, and a rumble went through our small crowd.
“Who’s this?” I asked. It was a mistake.
My friends gave me an astonished look.
“How can you not know Aretha Franklin, the queen of soul?”
I didn’t. In the next couple of days the fact that I hadn’t known the great singer and a “household name” triggered an interesting discussion among the group of Nieman Fellows – mid-career journalists who come to Harvard for a year of study. How does popularity spread in the modern, globalized world? What is the power of American popular culture around the world, and why does one expect anyone coming from any corner of the world to know American celebrities? Why did I know, say, Ella Fitzgerald and didn’t know Aretha Franklin? How do you measure popularity? We started exchanging E-mails about pop icons from our own countries, wondering if the others have heard of them.
The discussion led me to conduct utterly unscientific, but nonetheless interesting research, and to a half-joking conclusion that suddenly came to mind on Friday, when the news of Michael Jackson’s death made headlines in Russia and everywhere else. In the modern world, one can measure popularity in Jacksons. What is one Jackson?
I started running Google searches in various languages (except Russian) and Yandex searches in Russian (Yandex is the Russian speaking world’s most popular search engine) for a group of popular singers who came to mind: Americans Ella Fitzerald, Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin; France’s Edith Piaf, the Russian pop diva Alla Pugacheva and a great mid-20th century folk singer Lidia Ruslanova, and, for comparison, Cape Verdian performer Cesaria Evora, whose popular acclaim has spread far beyond the Portuguese-speaking community. A friend suggested adding A. R. Rahman, who was all the rage in India and many other countries, with sizable Indian communities (that was before the Oscar, which brought him more international fame).
Leading my sample group was Michael Jackson, with the late January figure of 37,900,000 pages Google found in English (today the number grew to 56,100,000) and, for comparison, 3,000,000 Yandex pages in Russian (today – 5,000,000).
Pugacheva, on the other hand, produced 101,000 Google pages in English, and a staggering 4,000,000 Yandex search results in Russian. Using this unscientific (but nonetheless telling method), one can conclude that Pugacheva is more popular in the Russian-speaking world than Michael Jackson, and virtually unknown in the French or Portuguese-speaking worlds, where the search produced just 3,000 results each.
Thus, Jackson could easily be taken as a reference value, and this was the case in each of the language groups I sampled. If you take the number of pages in one language group – say French pages mentioning Piaf—divide it by the number of French pages mentioning Michael Jackson, and multiply by 100 to avoid too many decimals, you’d come up with a 5.7 Jackson rating in French. In Russian, Piaf’s Jackson rating is 12.1, which theoretically entails that Piaf is more popular in Russia than in her native France.
Here is the table I made – with late January figures.
English (Google) Russian (Yandex) French (Google) Portuguese (Google) Michael Jackson 37,900,000 3,000,000 14,900,000 13,500,000 Aretha Franklin 3,440,000 65,000 605,000 217,000 Franklin/Jackson 9.0 2.0 4.0 1.6 Ella Fitzgerald 3,380,000 16,000 361,000 205,000 Fitzgerald/Jackson 8.9 0.5 2.4 1.0 Frank Sinatra 9,610,000 520,000 336,000 588,000 Sinatra/Jackson 25.0 17.3 2.3 4.4 Alla Pugacheva 101,000 4,000,000 3,270 2,930 Pugacheva/Jackson 0.3 133 0 0 Lidia Ruslanova 3,570 79,000 111 9 Ruslanova/Jackson 0.1 2.6 0 0 Edith Piaf 1,770,000 363,000 845,000 446,000 Piaf/Jackson 4.7 12.1 5.7 3.3 Césaria Évora 354,000 210,000 395,000 133,000 Evora/Jackson 0.9 7 2.7 1.0 A.R. Rahman 3,110,000 197,000 320,000 204,000 Rahman/Jackson
8.2 6.6 2.1 1.5 Does this mean that Ruslanova, with 0.1 Jacksons in English, 0 Jacksons in French and in Portuguese, and just 2.6 Jacksons in her native Russian, is a less well-known figure than, say, Franklin or Jackson himself? Of course not. It simply means that she lived in the pre-Internet age, and her genre, which although extremely popular at the time, was still short of modern show business in terms of promotional activities.
Most likely, my table makes no sense whatsoever. But it does serve as a reminder of Michael Jackson’s tremendous ability to penetrate the global popular culture, the hearts and minds of audiences around the world. And a reminder of how unevenly (and often unfairly) fame is distributed in the globalized world, where information supposedly knows no borders. But Jackson was an exception.
Perhaps a real scientist would come up with a better way to measure popularity in Jacksons.
The funeral – estimated to have cost more than $1million dollars – had been due to start at 7pm but was delayed by more than an hour as guests waited for the family.
Jackson’s close friend Dame Elizabeth Taylor, 77, was one of the first to arrive at the Los Angeles Forest Lawn Cemetery in a wheelchair, which was placed at the end of a row of seats.
Lisa Marie Presley, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Macaulay Culkin, Corey Feldman, Mila Kunis and Barry Bonds were also amongst the mourners.
Other guests included Travis Payne and Kenny Ortega, who were with Michael at rehearsals for his London shows the night before he died.
Jackson’s young friend Omer Bhatti, 25, who has denied being the singer’s love-child, also joined the mourners.
Debbie Rowe, Jackson’s second wife and the mother of two of his three children, also received an invitation.
MEDIA : Michael Jackson Funeral Held in L.A.
Michael Jackson’s outdoor funeral service began at Forest Lawn Glendale Thursday after a more than hour delay, keeping Elizabeth Taylor and other celebs waiting in the stubborn L.A. heat. (Sept. 4)
God bless You