[Bret L]

On Jun 25, 5:13 pm, Clyde Slick wrote:
In music and dance, he did his thing, and better than anyone else,
when in his prime.
But it was of little interest to me.

He had talent, but his megastardom was arranged for political
purposes. A good singer and dancer in the R&B realm with crossover
power, sure, but then the posers that be decided they needed The Great
Black Hope in the _rock_ field. Everyone from Quincy Jones to Eddie
Van Halen, out of the goodness of their hearts and fondness for his
talent, lined up single file to make Michael monster.

Of course he proved 1) insufficiently black-what with skin treatments
and surgery and all- and 2) out-and-out nutty.

I became aware of this because of the rantings of Dave Marsh, a
talented but thoroughly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist writer whose
enthusiasm for the need to put blacks on AOR and on the lumpen midwest
concert stage, and his outrage at the labels' (probably necessary and
sensible, from a sheer business standpoint) refusal to let Nile
Rodgers and Bernard Edwards form a Pink Floyd-like prog dino band led
him to go outside the good sensibilities of Dynamic Silence and start
busting the companies' chops. It was about that time-probably not
because of Marsh, but the people who were giving Marsh his notions-the
labels decided a black _pop=rock big thing_ was an absolute
necessity.

That isn't to say he did not have talent, I reiterate. he did. But
LOTS of people do. He had talent and he had what every megastar since
Bing Crosby has had-corporate blunze to ram it down the bore like a
musket load. What made the MJ megamachine so notable was its
detailitis, its micromanagement. And the sheer variety of persons
whose efforts were corralled.

Howard Stern's book (one of them, there were two) talks about the MJ
machine and its efforts to corral him. They had everyone from Sinatra
and Ed McMahon to hard rockers and goat ropers talking him up, sitting
in on his sessions, you name it. Believe what you want, that takes
industry juice-to the headbanger crows, pop approbation is poison, and
you can well bet some deals were cut to make that happen.

By contrast, Madonna-the other megastar of the era-was certainly
propelled by corporate power too, but the difference was she
engineered most of it herself, with the help of a few talented
homosexuals (including a brother) and trendy female scenesters with
some juice. MJ for all his fair musical ability, could not have
organized a kegger in a brewery. His ride was soley the doing of other
people and he probably never even realized that.