Familiar Stranger

A Michael Jackson's title as the King of Pop should never be disputed. A As innumerable tributes have made clear he was and will remain one of the foremost recording artists in history, by numbers (the 13 Grammy wins, the 13 number one singles and the fact that Thriller remains the all-time best-selling album in the world) and by talent. A His movements as a dancer were as fluid and gravity-defying as anything performed by Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire and his voice often seemed to transcend vocality to become a succession of yelps and squeals that became one with the music. A At his best, Jackson seemed to be able to transcend his own body to become a gestural, rhythmical extension of the songs that increasingly became our soundtrack to the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. A But even more than this, Jackson remained the King of Pop Culture best embodying that figure who has best rode the 20th Century - the celebrity. A Todd Gitlin famously referred to celebrities as "familiar strangers", "familiar" because we are constantly exposed to details of their public (and private) lives through media and "strangers" because they must, necessarily, remain forever unknown: after all, everything we read, or watch, or hear about them has already been mediated, cut down, edited and condensed to fit the medium with which we're engaged. A Unless we know them personally the best we can hope for is to know the image they project. But this doesn't stop us caring about them or feeling as though we know them. Indeed it can actually encourage us to want to get to know them better. A The parasocial relationships we develop with celebrities (that sense of knowing someone even though we don't know them) can be as strong as any other relationship we form with the people we regularly encounter in our lives. It is why so many grieve for Jackson when they heard of his death today: after all, he was there when they were growing up with Ben, Thriller might have been playing on their first date and quietly, as the years passed, they might have tut-tutted his latest scandal or controversy over dinner. A The image is crucial to a celebrity. It is constructed out of all the information the audience has to hand, the performances, the films, the television appearances, the gossip, the candid shots, the concerts and guest appearances. A For many years it was the film star who was at the apex of the celebrity. Film stars were the most famous people in the world, the people everyone else wanted to be. But it was the music stars - the superstars - like Michael Jackson and Madonna (following in the wake of Elvis, the Beatles and Frank Sinatra) who knocked them from their perch because, especially with the advent of MTV, it was the music stars who were best poised to take advantage of all the media had to offer. A They could replicate their images in a thousand different forms - from songs, to music videos, to talk shows, to advertisements, to posters, dolls and trading cards - they could become the most familiar strangers of all. A Along the way they certainly changed society. A Jackson became the first African American performer to have music videos aired on MTV. There is no question that he encouraged greater racial acceptance and tolerance. Through his successive videos (and allied personal transformations) he offered us all different ways of being, a figure that was emulated, then questioned and alternately shunned and respected. A Through his showmanship and high production values he made music videos art forms in their own right. Thriller was a micro-movie; the first appearance of Black and White aired in primetime; he created entire films like Moonwalker, Ghosts and Captain Eo out of the practices he had honed in these clips; his HIStory album was promoted with giant statues of himself - indeed, so great was his celebrity that he could galvanise other celebrities around him in a deliberate effort to change society, most notably with "We Are the World". A And of course Jackson is emblematic of how fragile the celebrity image can be, how hard it is to negotiate that balance between private life and public face. The tensions of the Nineties - the strange behaviours, the marriages, the rumours of surgery, the charges of molestation, the mysteries of Neverland ranch - all worked to distance the celebrity, to rupture the image, to make the familiar stranger seem more strange than familiar. A But perhaps most of all, Michael Jackson is emblematic of the power of media - its ability to enable relationships to be built with people we may never physically meet or know and, as evidenced in the frenzy of Googling, texting and Tweets that have followed Jackson's passing, its ability to unite us in speculation, remembrance and grief. A Anyone who doubts the media's importance - or power - would do well to remember today and the man who for 40 years used it, mastered it and was dogged by it - the true King of Pop, Michael Jackson. .

Load more