The King and the King of Pop had a good deal more in common than musical innovation.

Elvis, son of an unsuccessful Mississippi sharecropper, came from hard times and rose above them.  He reinvented popular music by successfully combining the three main aspects of American music tradition: mountain or “country” music, popular ballads, and soul.  Not only did he do that, he helped facilitate the frame of mind that led to the civil rights reforms of the ’60′s and ’70′s, by bridging a cultural gap that had — except for jazz — remained largely untouched.  He did that on his own, actively resisted by the musical Old Guard and much of conventional society as well.  If music expresses the humanity of man, then Elvis Presley combined the streams of our musical perception and made us that much closer to being a human race, rather than races.

Michael essentially created a musical genre of his own, combining soul, disco and his own vision into performances that literally changed the face of popular music for a generation.  We’ll never know if  Jackson would have had the same influence had his chance not come at the same time as the birth of music videos and extravaganzas on the stage, but this is not meant to imply that he was just a showman.  He, like Elvis, was a product of a traumatic childhood, and that is reflected in the nuances of his songwriting, his production values, and — most certainly — in the latter half of his professional career.  His humanity, its image distorted but not beyond recognition, came through in his work.

Perhaps the forces that shape musical royalty — even celebrity in general — are fated to become the means of their downfall, as well as their muse. Continue reading →