Two nights ago I was sitting with a friend who is a pop musician. We sat talking about pop music in Germany and the differences between Germany and America. She mentioned that someone at herrecord company said that they wanted to find “the next Bob Dylan.” I believe that there will be no more Bob Dylans, Beatles, or Michael Jacksons in the future. They belong to a different world, one that seems to have passed indefinitely with Michael Jackson’s death.
My generation experiences music in a fundamentally different way than my parents’ did. Postmodernism, making headway through the internet, has created an infinite number of musical subcultures. We go through music much more quickly now. If I take my own life as an example, I have over 100 gigabytes of music on my computer. During the Michael Jackson and Beatles years, a person went to a record store and bought a record or a cd. It was, as Walter Benjamin says in his brilliant The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, a ritual that gave an object an aura. The ritual of purchasing the record, admiring the artwork, and playing it all the way through is largely lost in modern times. Music today, often illegally downloaded, has less meaning. There is little emotional memory involved in downloading a song, as well as no network of people to associate the purchase with as in the record store days. We have ever greater freedom as consumers, but technology is consistently eliminating the people between the products.
Pop music has been irrevocably changed since Jackson’s heyday, when it was still written for adults. Looking back on the pop phenomena of my adolescence, icons like Britney Spears or Christina Aguilera didn’t have the same audience. As MTV and many others decided to focus on an easily influenced, disposable income heavy teen audience, pop music became increasingly oriented to an age group spanning from 5-18. As we all know, the tastes of this group are fickle and transient.
I got Thriller when I was 8 years old and still listen to it. Another favorite pop album of my early childhood, Ace of Base’s Happy Nation, has achieved lasting power only as kitsch, something to be pulled up on youtube for reminiscence, but something I will never really enjoy again.
As with the death of Bergman and Antonioni last year, I see Jackson’s death as the end of an era. Pop music seems increasingly strained, both financially and creatively, to produce the operatic spectacle demanded of it. It will be interesting to see what pop music will produce in the next twenty years, though probably not as interesting to listen to.
