This Is It : Michael Jackson : The Last Megastar

EEvents Not Songs I've just been to see 'This Is It', and it has reaffirmed something I've always thought. Michael Jackson didn't write songs. He wrote events. Every 'song' or track is actually a micro universe. With it's own visual identity, often with its own dance or film. A way of presenting itself in many dimensions. And they were born this way, this wasn't something that was tacked on afterwards. It is almost certainly the future.

The pioneer of the music video and the moonwalk knew the role of music as being but a part of a bigger spectacle, and he had the advantage of having some of the best pop songs ever written as a starting point. With that formula, it's hard to fail. According to Danny Ortega, Michael's creative partner for the O2 shows, 'This is It' was to have HD 3D, giant illuminated characters descending from the ceiling, new dance moves to go with the new show...he and his team were always pushing the envelope. But as for Jackson himself : Because every fibre of his body was listening or communicating that sense of rhythm or tone, he became a master of nuance and detail. The telltale sign is the way he seems to physically inhabit his songs. So well rehearsed they appear fluent and effortless, so atuned to the rhythm that he was a master of micro-timing, that realm in any medium where you become a master of the silence between events. At this resolution, you can change the mood at will by moving position fractionally in any direction. It's all about the relationship between contrasts: space and tone, solid and void. This applies not only across the musical spectrum from Debussy to Basement Jaxx, but to any creative endeavour and beyond, from animation, interiors and art to language (fluency, intonation for emphasis), science, mathematics and sport (even in things like diving, for example, the first thing you do upon entering the water is to achieve neutral buoyancy so that when you breath in you go up slightly and when you breath down you sink slightly). Basically you are finely balanced - even a mathematical theory is just a set of ideas and formulas that are in balance. Any change in its structure and the meaning can change radically. The moonwalk and the beatbox percussion are expressions of this...his voice was a hybrid : acting both as a traditional voice and also a percussion instrument. The percussive extent of his thoughts also translated to his body movements, you can almost hear the dancing. Sometimes the rhythm is pure words and the words are pure rhythm; think 'shamoa' or 'ama-se-ama-sa-a-ma-husa'. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_IeyKndyF8&feature=related And as well as being a master of micro-timing, his macro-timing wasn't bad either. Remember that at his peak it was the 1980s. Most people had only radio and tv. Maybe 2 or 3 tvs if they were lucky. And that was it. There was no internet radio, well, no internet...which meant no myspace, facebook, twitter, youtube or google. And that meant that everybody watched the same things. Jackson wisely used this to his advantage. His official mouthpieces were TV and cds. And the rest he kept hidden....his life was secret, which is exactly how he wanted it. Did you ever see him chatting on Myspace? Did he ever use Twitter? Of course not. He knew the value of keeping his mouth shut and out of the public eye. When I was 6, our neighbours came over to our house because their TV wasn't working to watch the first airing of the Thriller video. I knew something was up because: a) they never normally came round just to watch TV, and b) they seemed barely able to contain themselves. The air was electrified and the presenter was breathless. I can't say that I 'got it' at that age, but there was certainly a realisation that something momentous had just happened, that the horizon had just been pushed back. When I saw him at Wembley for the Dangerous Tour in 1992 he (well, a double but I didn't see the swap from my position perched on the cool box in the middle of the crowd!) exited the stadium by flying out of it in a NASA (or similar) jet pack. I still haven't seen a stage exit to match that since.

Video killed the radio star. Internet is killing the video star. And it has come to pass that the numbers of people watching TV, or actually any homogenous medium, these days is dwindling, just ask any advertiser. This has been the product of choice. With too much choice comes ever decreasing circles of influence. Ever more self absorbed. On the one hand it allows us all a voice. On the other, because of this, nothing rises above the hubbub for two reasons - a) our attention has been atomised into a thousand channels from iphone apps to internet radio so we can't concentrate on anything for more than 20 seconds, and b) we are all too busy producing our own content we've stopped listening to anyone else's, or at least we have less time to spend listening to other people. So it appears we will never get that consensus again for the same prolonged period of time that allows an act like Jackson (and maybe a few others of his generation : Elvis and the Beatles) to grow to planetary proportions and garner the quasi-religious attention and loyalty that he still has. How many pop stars of the future will merit the kind of funeral that is normally reserved for leaders of the free world, broadcast live globally to an audience of millions of terrestrial TV viewers, and cost in the region of one and half million dollars? TV was his medium because the widely acknowledged innovation of the epic music video was of course a TV phenomenon. While videos existed before, they didn't have the production value, intensity, or marriage of so many masterful traits as the Jackson/John Landis videos portrayed. I wonder if he was 12 again now...would he just end up on Pop Idol, to be fought over by Simon Cowell and Co, and have to release something on the cheap while he was still in the minds of the TV audience, before the next drumming gorilla appears, or the next contestant on Big Brother falls over? The downward spiral seems to be going like this: Acts like his won't happen any more because in an age of twitter updates every few minutes, nothing or no-one gets to incubate or develop an idea or an act for long enough before it becomes public property. Certainly the budgets are also dwindling for new acts, so it is unlikely that new groundbreakingly and expensive videos will be produced. Yes, groundbreaking doesn't mean it has to be lavish, but does this therefore mean the future is only low-budget guerilla-type productions? The problem with this approach is that it just reinforces the perception that the act and its surrounding aura are temporary. The law of diminishing returns is at work here, so I'd anticipate that if anyone is going to break through, it won't be with music and video as we know it. There are some very talented people out there in the realm of visuals...but often the problem is that they are married to very average music. It's as if these acts get halfway through the process and then either give up with the rest of it, or they think that having great visuals is enough. Or they just don't think it through to the point where they can see how they could break boundaries in more than one way. But it's true that it is much harder now to be heard because it's a much more crowded place now than it was back in the 1980s. Yet something will come along. In the meantime, I'm putting a Beat It remix together. Will post it up soon. MJ RIP