The ending of pop culture eras

Well, I guess I won’t have to struggle for a blog topic tonight.

First off, I just want to say that the luckiest and unluckiest guy on the planet right now is the governor of South Carolina. He is lucky in that from this moment on no one is going to give a rat’s ass about him jetting off to Argentina to be with his mistress. It is now gone from the cultural zeitgeist. But man, if he could have just held off one more day for his press conference it would have been the best defusal of a scandal ever.

But I’ll start with the death of Farrah Fawcett. She holds an interesting place in pop culture history and one that I am only tangentially involved with. See, she was before my time. She left Charlie’s Angels when I was a wee lad of five and outside of reruns I never watched her episodes and no matter what I was too young to understand the jiggletastic wonder of the show. But for one moment in time she was the most desired woman on the planet if just for a television show, a poster and really, really good hair. That is probably the best definition of how huge she was. Every teenage boy had a poster of her in their bedroom and women everywhere went to the salon for the Farrah Fawcett look.

Her career did not age well. Yes, she did pull off some strong performances in made for TV movies but she never got past the 70’s bombshell phase. Every appearance harkened back to Charlie’s Angels, which is sad in a way. To have your entire life tied to one moment isn’t the healthiest way to live. I even find it tough to find a modern equivalent. Online people have said Pam Anderson or Jennifer Aniston but I tend to fall in the Jessica Simpson camp. She is someone who became famous but no one was ever quite sure why. We all knew that she had talent but that it was mainly her looks that carried the day. And no matter what happened we knew that she would remain in the headlines long after her mainstream popularity had vanished.

Then we have the more shocking death of Michael Jackson, which has completely usurped all of the coverage of Farrah’s death as well as the continuing unrest in Iran. There may never have been such an enigma in the mainstream of popular culture to the point that I am conflicted in writing about his death in any sort of personal way. Because I don’t know how to discuss it without speaking ill of the dead. Here you have one of the top music artists of all time and in the eighties and early nineties he was the man hands down whose later career became a parody of itself. On top of that you have antics that continued to make little sense: marrying Lisa Marie, dangling the baby from the window, and the plastic surgery that brought him to the point where not only did he not look like his former self but he scarcely looked human just to name a few. Then there are the allegations that were never proven in court but that make an all out media blitz mourning his death a bit unnerving.

So I will focus on his career. There is no one who exemplified the 80’s better than Michael Jackson. Thriller and Bad were the be all and end all of the era. Yes, it was the age of hair metal but every single person knew every song on those albums. They were that huge. We really were huddled around our TVs to see the premiere videos for Black or White (including the bizarre crotch grabbing on top of the car) and Remember the Time (look it’s Magic Johnson!) I had friends who looked forward to his performance at the Super Bowl halftime show. No matter how odd he was people cared about what he had to say.

I think the best way to look at his career is that he suffered from the tragedy of fame. It takes a certain type of personality to stand in front of the spotlight and accept the accolades and I don’t think Michael ever had it. He was raised to be a star almost from birth and as a result he had no grounding as an actual human being. If you switched him at birth with a child from another family in Gary he probably would have grown up to be a quiet, sensitive guy who sang in his church choir and kicked ass on the dance floor but he would never have tried to be famous. I think he spent most of his life trying to escape his fame and recapture the dream childhood that no one ever has. If there is a tragedy to this story that is it.