Mark Richardson

Michael Jackson is probably the last superstar we’ll ever have. Not because nobody else is talented. The world that made him is gone, and the kind of person he was doesn’t really happen anymore. And Taylor Swift doesn’t come close. Just calling it now. He came up in the last real monoculture. When something hit, it hit everybody on the same night. 47 million Americans watched the moonwalk at Motown 25 and the next morning every kid in the country was trying it on their kitchen floor. That’s not happening again. Taylor Swift sells out stadiums and there are still millions of people who couldn’t pick her song out of a lineup. Everybody now has a lane. MJ never had one. He was loved everywhere at the same time, because there was nowhere else for the culture to go. He shot the Beat It video with actual Crips and Bloods on set, from rival sets in LA, in the same room with him. Nobody else was doing that. Nobody else COULD. He was lonely and weird and broken, and he poured all of it into the music. There’s a reason you can still feel something in Billie Jean and She’s Out of My Life forty years later. That’s a person bleeding into a microphone. Not a brand. The biggest stars now are LLCs. They’re products. Taylor Swift is about breakups within a target demo. Songs are two minutes long because that’s what TikTok pays for. There’s no soul. MJ was a ridiculously talented person who actually moved people. Produced, wrote, danced, made short films it’s pretty insane. Anyways just saw the movie and was reminiscing. It’s like Hollywood. The era of superstars is waning. Don’t think we get another like him.