I’m driving with my 14-year-old daughter and scanning radio stations when I hear a mellow love song. “That sounds like what we used to listen to in the ’80s,” I say. It’s the muffled electronic drums and smooth, soft R&B rhythm of the ’80s, the light floaty voice like DeBarge or Switch, but an echo of someone else.
“It’s a Michael Jackson song,” my daughter says, rolling her eyes. “He sounds like he’s choking on a peanut or something.”
She leans forward to poke the button. “Don’t change it,” I say, listening more closely. I have never heard this particular song, but the shadow of the beat takes me back — back to when Michael Jackson was the sexy yet innocent soul singer with Milky-Way skin and huge Afro who ruled the girls in my neighborhood.
This week, Jackson was cleared of allegations that he molested a boy in Los Angeles in the late 1980s — but still awaits trial in Santa Barbara on charges of molestation of a child at his Neverland ranch. But we’re listening to the Michael Jackson of my own youth, his voice spiraling into the car windows.
In my Southern California city, and all over America back then, in racially mixed working-class neighborhoods like mine, millions of young girls watched him on television as he clutched the microphone to his chest and bent over with the weight of his love for us, throwing out his brown fingers, pulling the air toward him and moaning, “I want you back!” Thousands of girls screamed and swooned the way others — white girls — did for the Beatles or the Monkees. But Michael Jackson and his brothers, as the Jackson Five, were the dreamboats of black America.
Now I look over at my daughter, my oldest, and can’t figure out how to tell her that in 1978, in these orange groves we’re passing just a few blocks outside my old neighborhood, her father and I used to park his sister’s beat-up Pinto and kiss for hours while Michael crooned from the cheap speakers in the door. “Let me show you the way to go,” Michael sang, his voice growling deep, catching with emotion. “I’ll never let you down, put your hand in mine …”
“Mom, can I change it now? I don’t want to hear this.” I glance over at my daughter’s lovely caramel face, her long black hair resting in curls on her shoulders. Her mouth has curled in more than disgust at the whispery voice.
“This song is crap,” my daughter says impatiently, “Nobody listens to anything by him.” She looks out the window. “Everybody hates him.”
For my younger daughters, 12 and 8, who never knew him as brown like them, as a singer and dancer who could captivate an audience of adults and children alike, he has always been a figure of shivery fear. Whenever we see the first ghostly shadows of his face on television news shows, someone turns the channel very quickly, sometimes even looking away until Michael Jackson is gone.
But my oldest daughter feels a more intense dislike, because she remembers when Michael Jackson looked something like her. Not his childhood or teen self; he resembled her in his early adult years, circa-”Off The Wall,” as he started to become lighter, with long wavy hair and toast-colored skin and that sparkly jacket. My daughter liked sparkly clothes then, too; she was in preschool.
We’re only a few blocks from my childhood home now, and I think about being in sixth grade, the only white girl in my dance group, as we performed on our elementary school stage to “ABC,” dancing a twirling, hip-rolling routine to imitate Michael and his brothers Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Randy.
With his wide nose, maple-syrup skin and that huge natural, he looked like a thinner version of my boyfriend, whom I met in eighth grade and went on to marry. At school dances, all our hella-tough friends did the robot and the Moonwalk; they pop-locked to “Dancin’ Machine,” and nobody made fun of Michael Jackson. Jermaine was the cool handsome older brother, Tito the quiet one — but Michael was the one who sang to us. When Michael went solo — I was a high school senior — we listened to all his hits. He was the suave, sure voice we danced to at house parties, or while cruising. He was safe but sexy, the favorite among every black woman friend I had, the alternative to James Brown, who the guys liked better because he was rougher and more political. The guy groups like the Spinners and the O’Jays and the Stylistics were big, but if you asked my girlfriends who they wanted, it was Michael, even as he was reinventing himself with hair products and what we suspected was eyeliner. He was misunderstood, he was soft enough to understand us, he wasn’t dangerous (not yet), and he was so pretty, with those huge eyes and delicate brows and sad mouth.
If someone had told us that in 20 years he would be white as a powdered ghost, that he would be repeatedly suspected of sexual behavior with children, we would not have laughed. We would have rolled our eyes and said, “Michael? The one who begs us to come back, to give him one more chance?”
But my daughter is rolling her eyes now, with real anger over my sentimental hesitancy to change the station. Michael Jackson is still singing, his voice wavering and floating thinly from the dashboard. His nose is like a sharp weapon, I was thinking, his skin pale as bleached muslin, his hair hanging in quills about his etched cheeks. She says, “Mom! Turn it off! No one wants to hear him. He’s so desperate.”
All these years of seeing his face stare out from newspaper photos, from magazine covers, from the television screen — she, along with so many other African-American teens, considers this man not just someone who behaves inappropriately with children, but a scary presence.
But I remember when this same teenage daughter, at 2, begged to stay up late and watch the Michael Jackson special on TV. She was entranced by the precise dance moves and silver glove. That’s what he was by then, the silver glove, the pulled-up heels and spins, but he was so cool that she drew a her-sized picture of him, glove and hat and milky-tea colored cheeks and wacky joints, and taped it to our back porch door.
Whenever I try to tell that story, she says, “Don’t you ever tell anyone that I liked him or even that I listened to him sing!”
Hey, I want to tell her — he was the scarecrow in “The Wiz,” the black musical movie version of “The Wizard of Oz,” and our Dorothy, played by Diana Ross, trusted Michael Jackson’s shambling, cool-dancing character to lead her down the yellow brick road. He wore a Reese’s candy wrapper on his nose back then, as part of his costume. A brown, crinkled cup for a nose, for the scarecrow we all loved. What could he possibly fasten onto that damaged, sharpened nose now? What costume is he wearing, as himself, a man who lives a fantasy none of us understand?
He hung there on our back door for five years, dancing on the wood, until the marker-colors of his skin and clothes faded from the sun, and the true colors of his face faded from surgery and vanity and what we can only diagnose as self-hatred. That’s the unspoken reason my daughter hates him now. She says, “He hated himself so much he made himself into a white guy.” And in doing so, he erased someone who bore a resemblance to her. She says, “How sick is it to not want to look like anyone else in your family? You’re saying your parents really messed up.”
According to teens, listeners like her, his current music represents a pathetic attempt to win over people who won’t give him even two minutes; he’d be better off sticking to fans in other countries, not her and her friends, who listen to Norah Jones, Audioslave, Black-Eyed Peas, Outkast and System of a Down. My daughter and I have spent hours discussing current music, and she finds it hilarious that Justin Timberlake, as white as can be, has recreated himself as M.J., replete with glove and spins and hat. A white guy reinventing himself as a black guy who’s transformed himself into a whiter guy. And my daughter, who can check seven boxes on a racial category list due to her mixed heritage, laughs when white guys try to impress her by declaring, “I listen to Eminem.”
“Really?” she replies, coolly. “Why?”
Her current favorites: the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Clash.
I tell her I don’t think Michael Jackson ever got to be a child himself. He was performing constantly, like many child stars who grow up to have mercilessly unhappy adult lives. I was 11 when I danced to his songs, and he was 12, already enduring long hours and road trips and endless work. Maybe that’s why he made Neverland, his ranch in Santa Barbara, into a child’s paradise. For the childhood he never had.
“But why would any kid want to go there?” she says. “Who would want to hang around with him?” If the charges are true, Neverland is a child’s nightmare. And forever, while I remember Michael Jackson’s sweet soulful voice and perfect Afro, my children will remember his face as the representation of a fearful spectre, a haunting danger clothed in sparkling military garb. We are leaving my old neighborhood now, and the song is almost over. We are cruising over an old railroad bridge and I glance at her, gold-brown arm propped on the open window, her black curls moving in the breeze, her full lips. “You used to love him, when he looked like you,” I say. “Remember that picture you drew?”
“Yeah,” she says, looking out the window, away from the fading voice on the radio.
It may be weeks before the exact circumstances of Whitney Houston’s death Saturday are determined, but Tony Bennett has some ideas on how it could have been prevented. Drug legalization.
Just hours after the news of the singer’s death, Bennett was at a Grammys event in the Beverly Hills Hilton – where Houston died just a few floors above – and said, “First it was Michael Jackson, then there was Amy Winehouse, and now the magnificent Whitney Houston. I’d like to have every gentleman and lady in this room commit themselves to get on government to legalize drugs … Let’s legalize drugs like they did in Amsterdam. No one’s hiding or sneaking around corners to get it. They go to a doctor to get it.”
Bennett knows plenty about drugs — and the ravages of addiction. He’s been upfront in the past about his own experience with drug abuse and his near fatal 1979 overdose on cocaine. In his 1998 memoir, “The Good Life,” he wrote of passing out in a bathtub, an eerie foreshadowing of the discovery of Houston’s body in her hotel tub. And on Sunday, he shared a Grammy win with the late Amy Winehouse for a duet on “Body and Soul.”
Back in September, Bennett said that Winehouse “knew that she was in a lot of trouble” and “that she wasn’t going to live.” After taking the stage with Winehouse’s parents Sunday night, the 85-year-old Bennett told Rolling Stone that drug legalization would “get rid of all the gangsters that make people hide. One thing I’ve learned about young people, when you say ‘Don’t do this,’ that’s the one thing they’re going to try and do. Once it’s legal and everybody can do it, there is no longer the desire to do something that nobody else can do … I witnessed that in Amsterdam. It’s legal, and as a result there’s no panic in the streets. There’s no deals, there’s no ‘Meet me at the corner and I’ll give you something.’ You’re always afraid you’re going to get arrested. You have to hide. Why do that?”
You don’t have to be Zach Galifianakis to know that America’s 40-year war on drugs is a joke. Or as the Global Commission on Drug Policy called it last year, a flat-out failure, one with “devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” Arrests for nonviolent possession offenses continue to rise, disproportionately targeting minorities and creating a booming prison population. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Between 2000 and 2007, drug offenders represented 45 percent of the growth in the federal prison population.” Meanwhile, even the president of the United States can acknowledge, “I inhaled frequently. That was the point.”
But talking about drugs – and how we as individuals and a society handle them – can’t be managed with a simple “It’s all good.” To do so ignores not only the enormity and unmanageability of the international trade but the complexities of consumption. Smoking weed and running a meth lab out of your basement aren’t exactly the same things. We can’t just make blanket statements about “drugs” as if they’re all the same, not in a culture where we still expect limits on environmental toxins. And if you’ve ever wandered into a circle of thuggish, hooker-seeking British tourists in Amsterdam on a summer weekend, it’s worth asking – Hey, Tony Bennett, is this really the greatest argument we’ve got for how great legalization is?
Yet what really muddles the waters is the examples Bennett used, of Michael Jackson and his friend Amy Winehouse. The claim that “Once it’s legal and everybody can do it” problems go away is sadly untrue. Michael Jackson didn’t meet his maker shooting heroin into his veins; he died of “Acute Propofol Intoxication” — and his doctor, Conrad Murray, was subsequently convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Other drugs found in Jackson’s system at the time of his death were the FDA-approved Lorazepam, Lidocaine, Diazepam and Midazolam. Winehouse, meanwhile, died of alcohol poisoning.
Houston was no stranger to the illicit. In 2009, she admitted doing “heavy drugs, every day,” including cocaine, to Oprah Winfrey. But the investigation into her death so far has focused on prescription medications. A plea for a saner approach to our misguided, punitive drug war is a valid one to make. But accessibility doesn’t cure the problem of abuse. And as Dylan Thomas, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jackson, Winehouse — and quite possibly Whitney Houston — discovered, you can die just fine without breaking any drug laws.
“Glee” managed to squeeze nine Michael Jackson songs into last night’s tribute to the King of Pop. But each of them seemed timid — a cast that loves to put their own over-the-top stamp on songs presented everything very carefully. The expected songs felt largely rote and by-the-numbers, tied in many instances to the original choreography and sometimes frame-by-frame replications of his old videos. It’s as if they didn’t dare anger the Jackson estate in any way.
You got the feeling the whole thing was built around a product endorsement, in this case “Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour,” which was mentioned twice and just happens to open in the U.S. right around the time next week’s “Glee” rolls around.
Part of the problem was the lily-white cast. This might be central Ohio, but can we believe there are no African-American males at William McKinley High School? Even when the singing group from the competing private school is on-screen, the only black male face is in the background.
New Directions has the big voice of Amber Riley, the only African-American with a speaking role until NeNe Leakes was recently added to the cast as the swim coach. But even Riley’s big voice seemed underused on a duet with Chord Overstreet on “Human Nature.” Leave it to Naya Rivera to bring the most soul to the proceedings, but her duel with Grant Gustin on “Smooth Criminal” seemed oddly staged (though it was backed by dual cellos, in the episode’s one notable arrangement).
When it comes to Jackson, apparently all anyone remembers are the dancing duels, so there was another one in a parking lot to “Bad” against the Warblers.
Either way, it’s a cheap way to impress drama on a pop song, just as it was in the original “Bad” video. (They’re going to dance their way out of this? Sure they are.)
And who said “Glee” was a drama anyway? Although all the minor crises of high school are explored over and over (to the sound of that annoying bell at the start of every scene), the show presents itself as a comedy, though there was just about one joke this week, when Mark Salling’s brooding Puck told Darren Criss’ character, Blaine, that he was a turncoat. “You’re a modern day Eggs Benedict,” he said, though he swallowed the line in such a way that most probably never heard him.
It was the kind of malapropism that was a natural for Heather Morris’ delightfully dim Brittany, but she hasn’t had anything much funny to say this season. And despite winning Emmys for her role as the ruthless cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, Jane Lynch hasn’t had anything interesting to do on the show for more than a season (and this was another one of those episodes that she wholly sits out).
The one kid who relates best to Jacko, it turns out, is the nerdy one, played by Kevin McHale (or at least he puts on the impression that he does, since he emits Michael’s trademark “whoo!” at various points in the show).
He also turns out the most heartfelt speech of the show, which amazingly turns the whole “It gets better” public service campaign on its head. When Blaine gets hit with yet another Slushee (the weapon of choice in Lima, Ohio) and is actually injured, McHale’s Artie suddenly blurts to Michael Morrison’s increasingly ineffectual teacher, Will Schuester, “Don’t give me any of that ‘It gets better’ crap because I’m not interested in it getting any better. I want it to be better!”
The eruption is immediately followed by Artie ditching his wheelchair for only the second time in show history in order to join Harry Shum Jr.’s Mike Chang on an excruciatingly exact replication of Jackson’s worst video – the tuneless, black-and-white “Scream” he did with sister Janet Jackson.
When it comes to picking up exact video images, though, the highlight must have been the morphing scene of character face into character face during the climactic “Black or White.” Except in this case, of course, it was much more “White or White.”
Doctors routinely meet with patients who make requests for specific medicines, tests and referrals to specialists. In this era of the Internet, consumer-driven healthcare and direct-to-consumer drug marketing, this is no surprise. And while an informed patient is a good thing, what may surprise you is just how hard it is for doctors to say no when a patient makes a specific request for something he or she doesn’t really need.
Right now, Dr. Conrad Murray sits in jail because he couldn’t say no to Michael Jackson when Propofol came up in conversation between them. But even doctors who aren’t tempted by an enormous monthly retainer and access to one of the world’s biggest celebrities are challenged by the word “no.”
American medicine is a business — but a weird one. In any other sector of our economy, businesses are determined to give their customers what they want, however they want it. But in medicine, the “have it your way” mind-set doesn’t always jive. First, physicians have a duty to avoid doing harm. The choice of a drug or test based solely on a patient’s request can undermine that. Second, as everybody knows, we spend a big slice of our GDP on healthcare. Since the person who has control over expensive tests and the prescription pad is your doctor, there’s ever-increasing scrutiny to be responsible stewards of healthcare dollars.
All these factors come to life in the exam room. Case in point: I periodically get requests from parents to prescribe cough medicine for their child that contains codeine. Besides the codeine, the drug contains alcohol, naturally leading to a better night’s sleep for child and, hence, the exhausted parent. But there’s no evidence that this cough medicine helps the child get better any faster, and it may even be dangerous. Should I prescribe it or not? The evidence says no, but to say that can lead to a confrontation with an angry parent. Though cough medicines aren’t expensive, if it’s hard to say no to something that simple, it’s even harder when the stakes are higher — an unneeded new drug, a CT scan, a referral to America’s top cardiologist.
The phenomenon of how requests impact the patient-doctor relationship has been studied extensively by Dr. Richard Kravitz at the University of California at Davis. Kravitz’s research has shown that somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of patients bring a specific request to their doctor (the high end of that range is between a patient and his or her primary care doctor). Here are some of his sober conclusions: Patients who do not have their requests met rate their physician lower, are less likely to adhere to their doctor’s recommendations, and use more healthcare resources than those who do get their request.
Physicians who encounter the patient with a request report those visits to be stressful and unsatisfying as well. But if you’re wondering who wins, Kravitz suggests it’s the patient, though just slightly. He and his team looked at how doctors responded to patients’ requests for an antidepressant medication. Fifty-six percent of the time, patients got the drug they wanted.
Why is it so hard for doctors to say no? To be honest, it’s often just easier to say yes. Usually, we’re behind schedule, with a waiting room full of impatient customers, and we have a desk full of phone messages to return and charts to finish. To take even a few extra minutes and open the conversation — even a confrontation — about a request is time and energy we don’t want to expend. So we put pen to paper, rip the script off the pad and hand it to them as we rush out the door.
The other thing is that nobody really teaches us how to say no. It seems ridiculous, but neither Kravitz nor I could remember an instance during medical school or residency when we were coached about how to manage inappropriate requests from patients. Many of us probably figure out ways to parry the patient over time, but not without inflicting some damage. Back to the example of cough medicine requests for kids: I remember earlier in my career when, on a very stressful day, I walked into a room with a teenage girl and her mother. The mother directly asked for a codeine-containing cough syrup. I knew better, and I wasn’t about to let this parent have it. “No. Look,” I bluntly replied, “it only works because it contains alcohol. Why don’t you just go out and give her a glass of Scotch.” It was not my best moment doctoring. I’ve taken a long and bumpy road since to get better at managing patient requests. These days, I’m more likely to explain the issue, decline the request, ofter an alternative, apologize for any inconvenience, and make sure they know they can always seek a second opinion.
Kravitz’s research, in fact, does reveal that there are ways to say no that are better for both doctor and patient. In Kravitz’s aforementioned study where patients requested an antidepressant, he was able to categorize how doctors handled patient requests. The most successful method is for the doctor to exercise a little curiosity and delve deeper. It’s not surprising, for example, to find out that a patient who comes in with headaches wanting an MRI had a friend or relative who died of a brain tumor, or one with a cough who wants an antibiotic who knew someone hospitalized with pneumonia. If both patient and doctor can get to the root of the request, they can, in many cases, discuss it and figure out a third way.
The second way doctors in the study managed patient requests was to try to order some tests. While it can be a successful strategy to look for “objective data” to help reassure a patient, it isn’t always cheap or safe. Labs and X-rays don’t cost much individually, but the volumes of them that doctors order add up fast. Unnecessary tests beget more unnecessary tests. For example, if I order blood work for a patient who I don’t really think needs it, and one of the numbers — one that has nothing to with why I ordered the test — comes back slightly off, I’m stuck having to call the patient and tell them to repeat the test, even if the child is completely fine now. All of us have had a test or radiology result we ordered just to satisfy a patient come back to bite us like this.
Kravitz and I both agreed that “patient-centered care” or “shared decision-making” are euphemisms for negotiation. And perhaps, like other professionals, we in medicine ought to focus more on negotiation tactics (Kravitz’s last paper is called “Getting to ‘No,’” a riff on the famous business book about negotiation called “Getting to ‘Yes’). This may sound coldly corporate to the average patient who has ever wanted something from their doctor, but it’s a reality we need to address. In pediatrics, where limiting the overuse of antibiotics is a priority, it’s recommended that doctors not prescribe drugs in most cases of middle-ear infections. Instead, since evidence suggests most ear infections get better on their own pretty quickly, we can treat a child’s pain with over-the-counter drugs like ibuprofen. But just in case things don’t get better, we often keep an antibiotic prescription ready for the child for the parent to fill. Doctors call it a “safety-net prescription,” but MBAs know it as a contingency — a common negotiating tactic to satisfy both parties during a negotiation.
Finally, for doctors who are still entrenched in the belief that patients shouldn’t be asking for anything, or for patients who are too timid to speak up, Kravitz has some interesting findings: In cases where the patient had a specific request but didn’t make it because they were uncomfortable, pressed for time, or because the doctor’s bedside manner didn’t afford the chance, that patient left less satisfied. Doctors, too, rated the visit where something was left unsaid as more difficult.
The lesson here is that it’s best for the doctor and the patient to get everything out in the open, and for a healthcare system that affords the right amount of access and time — especially in primary care — to make that to happen.
I love Massive Music Moments.
I live for those times when an album explodes throughout American society as more than a product — but as a piece of art that speaks to our deepest longings and desires and anxieties. In these Moments, an album becomes so ubiquitous it seems to blast through the windows, to chase you down until it’s impossible to ignore it. But you don’t want to ignore it, because the songs are holding up a mirror and telling you who we are at that moment in history.
These sorts of Moments can’t be denied. They leave an indelible imprint on the collective memory; when we look back at the year or the decade or the generation, there’s no arguing that the album had a huge impact on us. It’s pop music not just as private joy, but as a unifier, giving us something to share and bond over.
Actually, I should say I loved Massive Music Moments. They don’t really happen anymore.
The epic, collective roar — you know, the kind that followed “Thriller,” “Nevermind,” “Purple Rain,” “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” and other albums so gigantic you don’t even need to name the artist — just doesn’t happen today. Those Moments made you part of a large tribe linked by sounds that spoke to who you are or who you wanted to be. Today there’s no Moments, just moments. They’re smaller, less intense, shorter in duration and shared by fewer people. The Balkanization of pop culture, the overthrow of the monopoly on distribution, and the fracturing of the collective attention into a million pieces has made it impossible for us to coalesce around one album en masse. We no longer live in a monoculture. We can’t even agree to hate the same thing anymore, as we did with disco in the 1970s.
If you’re under 25, you’ve never felt a true Massive Music Moment. Not Lady Gaga. Not Adele. Not even Kanye. As the critic Chuck Klosterman has written, “There’s fewer specific cultural touchstones that every member of a generation shares.” Sure, Gaga’s “The Fame Monster” spawned several hit singles. Adele’s “21″ and Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” were massively popular. Kanye’s brilliant “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” was beloved and controversial and widely discussed enough to give a glimpse into the way things used to be. But those successes don’t compare to the explosive impact that “Thriller” and “Nevermind” had on American culture — really, will anyone ever commemorate “21″ at 20, the way the anniversary of Nirvana’s album has been memorialized in the last month?
Numbers don’t tell the whole story about how these cultural atomic bombs detonated and dominated pop culture. But at its peak, “Thriller” sold 500,000 copies a week. These days, the No. 1 album on the Billboard charts often sells less than 100,000 copies a week. What we have today are smaller detonations, because pop culture’s ability to unify has been crippled.
I miss Moments. I love being obsessed by a new album at the same time as many other people are. The last two albums that truly grabbed an enormous swath of America by the throat and made us lose our collective mind were “Nevermind” and Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.” They sprung from something deep in the country’s soul and spoke to a generation’s disaffection and nihilism. They announced new voices on the national stage who would become legends (Kurt Cobain and Snoop Dogg) and introduced the maturation of subgenres that would have tremendous impact (grunge and gangsta rap).
Some might argue “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” had a unifying impact on a large swath of America. Others point to Alanis Morrissette’s “Jagged Little Pill.” Both albums were important. But did they pull together gigantic diffuse constituencies of Americans? Eminem is perhaps music’s biggest star of the last decade. He stands for many things (the freedom to be antisocial, self-empowerment, the legitimization of whiteness in hip-hop culture), and “The Marshall Mathers LP” was a huge success. But no Eminem disc has changed America or made a true generational statement.
Nowadays my music conversations run like this:
“So what are you listening to?”
“Aw, you gotta check out Danny Brown and Abbe May and Das Racist.”
“OK, cool. I’ve never heard of them.”
“What are you listening to?”
“Cat’s Eye and Ariel Pink and Little Dragon.”
“Oh. I gotta check them out.”
No connection is made. Pop music has historically been great at creating Moments that brought people together. Now we’re all fans traveling in much smaller tribes, never getting the electric thrill of being in a big, ecstatic stampede. It’s reflected in the difference between the boombox and the iPod. The box was a public device that broadcast your choices to everyone within earshot and shaped the public discourse. The man with the box had to choose something current (or classic) that spoke to what the people wanted to hear. Now the dominant device, the iPod, privatizes the music experience, shutting you and your music off from the world. The iPod also makes it easy to travel with a seemingly infinite collection of songs — which means whatever you recently downloaded has to compete for your attention with everything you’ve ever owned. The iPod tempts you not to connect with the present, but to wallow in sonic comfort food from the past.
Back when MTV played videos, it functioned like a televised boombox. It was the central way for many people to experience music they loved and learn about new artists. Thus MTV directed and funneled the conversation. Now there’s no central authority. Fuse, where I work, plays videos and concerts and introduces people to new artists. But people also watch videos online, where there’s an endless library of everything ever made but no curation, killing its unifying potential.
These days, there are many more points of entry into the culture for a given album or artist. That can be a good thing — MTV, after all, played a limited number of videos in heavy rotation. Now there’s the potential to be exposed to more music. But where there used to be a finite number of gatekeepers, now there’s way too many: anyone with a blog. This is great for the individual listener who’s willing to sift through the chatter to find new bands. But society loses something when pop music does not speak to the entire populace.
I remember the night “Watch the Throne” came out — at 12.01 a.m., Twitter lit up with download links and then people quoting lines and excitedly trading notes about the songs and the sound. One hundred-forty character instant reviews popped up in quick succession for hours. Questlove was blown away by a certain song. Michael Smith from ESPN by another. A professor I follow was captivated by both. It was such a rush to be in an intense community constructed around one album. In the midst of all that, I sighed. I thought, This is the way it used to be. Only smaller — even with Twitter to amplify our voices. When you listened to “Thriller” in its infancy, the nation listened with you.
Hollywood, too, is struggling to unite us. “Star Wars” and “The Matrix” and “Pulp Fiction” were so big they changed American film — as well as our visual language and Madison Avenue. You didn’t need to actually see the films to feel as if you had consumed them. Their impact was so pervasive, they seemed to bang down your door and announce themselves. The Harry Potter films and “Avatar” stand out for the size of the marketing and ticket buying associated with them. But did they bring large, diverse swaths of America together? Did they speak to something deep in the American soul?
It’s not just technology’s fault. In order to get everyone’s attention, an artist has got to be proposing some sort of revolution. It may be a social revolution (“Don’t join the rat race!”) or an aesthetic revolution (Nirvana bringing their punk-rock sensibility to the masses or Run-DMC rhyming over rock records). You’re stoking revolution when you rewrite what it’s possible to do in music (hip-hop in the ’80s) or what an artist can do in America (Prince wearing panties, heels and blouses and still coming across as cool as hell, Nirvana giving voice to the disaffection so many Gen-Xers felt).
When you’re stoking revolution, you have the chance to grab the intense love of a large swath of people, many of whom may not care for the particular genre you come out of but still get swept up in your innovative message. Today’s artists are less interested in aesthetic or social revolution than they are all about greed or nostalgia. As Simon Reynolds notes in his brilliant new book “Retromania,” retro — sonically, sartorially or stylistically — is a revolt against the present moment. It’s a plaint that something is missing (quality or purity or realness or showmanship or something else). But it doesn’t offer a solution; it’s escapist. It’s the enemy of revolution, which dares to imagine a new future, not a clearly articulated past.
Maybe there are artists out there who want to stoke some sort of revolution. There must be, right? But where? Perhaps they’re stuck in obscurity, unable to get the push they need. Last week at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee meeting, Steve Van Zandt from the E Street Band told me: “Nothing is inevitable.” What he meant is that no one is so talented that success is a given without a skillful manager with the vision and ability to sell them to the various facets of the music industry. “The Beatles would still be in Germany,” he said. “The Stones would be playing a dinner theater.”
He’s right — stars don’t just naturally ascend. There’s no meritocracy in music. Audiences don’t find great bands because their songs are undeniable. The infrastructure of the music business — the managers, the marketers, the radio programmers, the DJs, the A&Rs, the chief execs — all those people are necessary to help put talented artists on a platform large enough that they’ll be seen by a mass audience. But the music biz is slowly crumbling. It has lost its way and its mojo. When businesses have their back to the wall, they’re less likely to take chances on kids proposing some sort of revolution — even though that may be exactly what they need to do.
Maybe the audience doesn’t want revolution. Sociologists say millennials are less interested in rule-breaking and less trusting of the grand generational statement. Maybe they don’t want to try to speak for all their peers. Millennial king Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has no political component. It makes no statement; it’s just a portal to connect with your friends and acquaintances. Facebook can be used to connect politically minded people, but it doesn’t propose anything. It’s a vessel into which you can pour whatever you want. Also, revolutions are generally desired by the young, who have everything to gain from overturning society as well as a desire to put their mark on the world. But the modern audience of culture consumers is not just composed of the young. My colleagues at Fuse like to talk about “threenagers,” who are similar to what others call “kidults” — people in their 30s (and 40s) who are as into and invested in pop culture as teenagers and emerging adults typically are. The older you are, the less likely you are to want pop culture to offer a societal revolution. And you’re not likely to look for revolution from recording artists, who are younger and less wise than you.
With pop music struggling to create the Moments that once seemed common, we have lost something that could bring us together. There are niche joys everywhere, but nothing I can obsess over alongside a million others. Nothing that makes a big statement and speaks to what America is or should be or will be. Nothing that has a chance to pull me closer to my friends and acquaintances in a hallway or at a concert that’s really a lovefest. I want music that bonds me to my peers and my generation. I’m stuck with music that makes me happy, but makes me feel like I’m alone.
Touré’s latest book is “Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness: What It Means to Be Black Now” (Free Press).
Michael Jackson (Credit: Reuters/Kimimasa Mayama) 
Whitney Houston and Tony Bennett (Credit: AP) 
Darren Criss in "Glee" 
Conrad Murray (Credit: Reuters/Salon) 
Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain and Prince(Credit: AP) 
