Yuku free message boards

atenolol wrote:

---

I don't disagree with you from your perspective. I think you are forty-seven or so. I believe you are correct today and for your generation. For my generation, however, who reached adulthood in the fifties or early sixties, movie stars were the biggest pop celebrities. Bogart or Errol Flynn or Clark Gable or Marilyn Monroe dying was a much bigger deal than any singer dying, even in their primes. I remember Buddy Holly or Johnny Horton being killed. It was news, but not big news. Gable or Monroe got the sort of headline coverage Jackson is getting today.
I think it began to change in the sixties with rock stars becoming the big icons. I would point out about John Wayne that his old movies were all over the TV in the sixties and seventies. I remember a poll in 1970 or so that showed that John Wayne, Lucille Ball, and Robert Young were the three best known performers. Without cable TV and only a few stations, shows like I Love Lucy or Marcus Welby were watched by almost everyone. No one is seen like that today.

It seems to me that The Duke was a specific "type" that was not as embraced by the world at large, but I will grant you I may not have been from the same era here, so it doesn't hit me the same. Still, I can't think that Wayne was as popular around the world as Jackson was (even as freaky "Wacko Jacko", if not solely for his music).

But you said yourself that even when John Wayne passed in '79, it wasn't that big on the TV news in 1979 as Jackson is today. But it can't be blamed on the idea that it's now because TV is so much more out of control ... because Elvis Presley had died even earlier than Wayne, in 1977 -- and John Lennon in 1980, and yet they were bigger than Wayne in their death coverage, as musicians, all around the same time period of TV media .

But then again, it can't be just about the age. I wasn't born until 1962 - long after Elvis hit it big in his pre-Army heyday of the '50s, and yet when he died in 1977 I was only 15 and yet I knew why there was such a huge amount of coverage dedicated to the man, and I understood it and it made sense to me. Same thing with John Lennon -- I still am a huge collector of the Beatles and Lennon today, and was only 18 when he was murdered... but technically, I grew up with the Beatles in their solo careers during the '70s and Lennon was really of the '60s generation where I was only 2 - 7 years young... so that wasn't really "my generation" either.

Don't get me wrong -- actors are huge -- always have been -- but I just think Pop Music Stars are bigger with the public. Maybe it's because their music was a soundtrack to so many people's lives? But yeah, as you say, maybe it didn't start getting that way until the '60s.

But there was always other World News going on, Frozen Ghost ... no matter who died where media overdid their coverage. And honestly, how often is there a pop star of this type who dies and commands such extreme media coverage? It doesn't happen every day, really.

Is there anything political about Jackson? No -- but controversial, yes. And so, it is now trickling in, are the details of how he died. Look at David Carradine recently who just died of weird circumstances ... was he covered nearly as much as Jackson? No... but an icon's death doesn't happen every day. I'd suggest that if the deceased singer was, say, Leonard Cohen or Tom Petty, it wouldn't get more than a blip. But if it was Bob Dylan or Madonna, the coverage would be much more.