RIP, 1980s
Michael Jackson is dead tonight.
Nobody born after 1984 can appreciate how big a star he was. No pop culture figure can ever match the Beatles and Elvis for sheer overwhelming fame. But if you lived during the early 1980s, Michael Jackson was the star. When I was little, every kid had Thriller, and listened to it over and over again. A new Michael Jackson video on MTV generated tremendous interest. Kids at my school wore leather jackets with tons of zippers and tried to moon walk. He was ultra-famous.
But, of course, he could never duplicate the success of Thriller. Even if he continued to sell well through the rest of the 1980s, everyone compared his later work to Thriller or Off the Wall, and the comparisons were never favorable. Combine that with his increasingly erratic behavior and freakish appearance, and before long Michael Jackson seemed like a sad carnival act. While he had once been the one everyone wanted to emulate, he wound up being tabloid fodder. A lot of it he brought on himself. Some of it may have been unfair. But, by the mid-1990s you could have queried a hundred Americans and not found anyone who’d claim to be a Michael Jackson fan. “Thriller was good”, they’d say, “but that guy’s messed up”.
We live in a different age. Everything is incredibly segmented now. There isn’t just one MTV anymore to claim the attention of the young. The 1980s saw the rise of some remarkable superstars, but the conditions that created those stars don’t exist any more. Set aside the sham marriages, plastic surgery, baby-dangling, accusations of molestation, and all the other bizarre and disturbing behavior and rumors, and think back to the years 1983-1985. There was nobody bigger than Michael Jackson. And no athlete, movie star or singer will probably ever be that famous again.


I don't like going places, doing things or seeing people.