Which begs the question why America's most senior composer was regurgitated.
It does not at all beg the question; it answers it - although "regurgitation" is not a word that I would have used in the present context. If, on the other hand, you believe that a thread on the late Mr Jackson must refer to no one else and eschew all suggestion of value judgements in the form of comparisons with anyone else, then that's fine for you, one may suppose, though by no means necessarily so for anyone else.
Anyway, here's an extract from what someone recently wrote to me on the subject and which I think might interest some people here (it might even interest you, Thal, since its only mention of anyone other than its subject is a passing one of the author of the article concerned):
I happened to see an article by Paul Theroux about Michael Jackson containing a transcript of a telephone conversation he'd had with him, which showed that MJ was actually quite intelligent - he could certainly put coherent words together; but he lived in an absurdly artificial world which he had partly created himself but which had also been built round him, and his songs seem to show just how rigidly he was locked into this crazily childish showbiz world which was just a kind of advertisement for itself, and nothing other than that - certainly not art in the way that you and I understand it. Art is about finding yourself, not about hiding yourself in a fake version of childhood.Here is something that I wrote on the subject (which you won't like, Thal - or at least from the close of which you may need to avert your gaze in order to avoid seeing a name that so obviously upsets you for some reason or none); it was in response to the remaks that I recently quoted on the subject that I had received from a composer colleague following the invitation to him to sign prsformusic's condolence book:
Iconic? "I con, therefore I am", perhaps! The trouble is that today's "music industry" is full to beyond bursting point with things that are, as you put it, "glossy and ephemeral" - and some of them not even all that glossy either. I am not for one moment seeking to suggest that Mr Jackson
lacked talent but, in the end, he was (at least before he went off the rails) a showman first and foremost - and not a particularly great one at that. The notion that he "wrote" "songs" that would continue to form part of the fabric of Western society many generations after him has the kind of
absurdity that one would really rather not witness emanating from prsformusic; are we seriously supposed to believe that we should regard his "songwriting" legacy as comparable to that of Fauré, Strauss, Gershwin, Duparc, Rakhmaninov or the aforementioned Porter? I imagine that, in a society where Madonna is fêted as a major musical artist and Andrew Lord Lloyd is described ubiquitously as a "composer", we are indeed expected to regard "the King" (hasn't that term been used before?!) in such glowing terms. Anyone would think that this recently deceased "icon" had written
the C# minor quartet!
What to do? Well, apart, of course, from declining to sign this condolence book (his death, after all, hardly represents any loss at all, let alone a massive one, to the likes of you and I, who have never met him), we should take Carter's liver pills - or rather his wise advice; just do what you
want to do and write how you want to write - if you want to make a lot of money from writing music, then do - that's one way of doing it - and if you want to write notes (meaning real music that comes from within), do that and hope that others enjoy it as much as you enjoy writing it (I paraphrase here, of course, but that's more or less the gist of it).One aspect of this thread title seems so far to have been side-stepped - the implication that Mr Jackson's death at the age of half a century is somehow "freaky". Mozart, Chopin, Schubert, Lekeu, Skryabin, Reger and many others including that other famous Thalian bête noir Schumann all died before reaching that age, yet I have never noticed any commentator decribing such premature demises as "freaky". Any thoughts on that, anyone?...
Best,
Alistair
Topic: Wow... freaky... Michael Jackson died at age 50