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Originally Posted by swa(y)
"Its not that MJ single-handedly introduced black music to white people"
....but, that is more or less what ya stated!
"and NO ONE HAS BEEN or WILL BE BIGGER SINCE"
...thie first part may very well be true, but to state no one will ever be bigger...theres no way of knowing. im sure someone, once apon a time, said the same thing about chuck. reality is....100 years from now very few people will be listening to MJ (im sure he wont be forgotten about quite yet), and there will be another black pop star that has taken his place. its happened this way since the beginning of time.
"Elvis is a chump. the 60s blues scene which helped to integrate music in america was NOT AS BIG IN SCALE as the revolution which MJ brought to the scene. "
elvis WAS a chump, you are right. however, that doesnt contradict the fact that he was largely influential, and did indeed pull a lot of HIS influence from black music. the 60's blues scene is STILL popular. new people..KIDS, are still discovering it now, all the time. its just as valid as MJ, and despite that, featured artists that had talent beyond just singing and dancing. i could be wrong, but id bet people will still be listening to led zep and the stones long after michael is largely forgotten about. shit, im willing to bet the stones are just as popular, if not more than, michael now!!! i know they arent black, but they were largely influenced by black music that came around quite bit before mj came into the picture. certainly, michael jackson is NOT bigger than rock n roll.
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Yes there were people before MJ that crossed racial lines in terms of their success, but he came along at a time when those barriers that had started to blur in the 1960s were becoming firmly re-established. I never particularly liked the Thriller album but I'd say that when it came out it was the first mainstream album (in
my lifetime anyway) that didn't just
blur racial barriers in terms of its appeal so much as disregard them altogether. That album's success forced the industry into changing its marketing strategy for certain artists in a way that I'm convinced benefited individual artists like Prince as well as whole genre's like Rap. We'll never know if things would've changed anyway, but anyone around at the moment when things
did change would have to admit that Michael Jackson's success was at the very centre of it.