(From the Motown 25 special: the Moonwalk debuts near the end of the video)
I have two very vivid memories of Michael Jackson from his superstar days. The first was clutching the Thriller album in the backseat of my parents' car and being eager to get home and listen to it. I can't recall, but it may have been the first record album I owned (well, co-owned with my sister).* My second recollection was going to my neighbor Jenny's seventh (?) birthday party. Her parents had rented (!) a VCR and the full-length video of "Thriller" for us to watch. We were all pretty scared in advance and we went down into the basement to watch it in the dark...
I was just thinking the other day about some of the early 1980s pop superstars--MJ, Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Prince, and the like. What about them as people, their lives, the culture in general resulted in so many megastars appearing in such a short time. Malcolm Gladwell's recent book Outliers. Clearly, all of them were very talented individuals, but so were many others. Some of the material below is taken from Garofalo's Rockin' out.
At the height of the disco craze, record companies were signing anyone and anything that recorded anything resembling a disco song. At the beginning of the 1980s, the recession that had worsened during the Carter administration caused record companies to consolidate their resources behind a few people. Key to this was finding artists who would relate to the largest number of fans.
At about the same time, MTV was in its infancy, the result of cable deregulation in the early 1980s. MTV was one of the most heavily focus-grouped TV networks ever to take to the airwaves. They knew their demographic and wanted to maximize their advertising potential. Because MTV was such a visual medium, the way an artist looked and/or performed suddenly became very important.
The demographic to whom these artists appealed were (like me) children of baby boomers--Generation X. I suspect there were a lot of us with a little bit of disposable income (i.e., our parents' income) to spend on record albums.
Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna were all born in 1958; Whitney Houston and George Michael were born in 1963; Bruce Springsteen and Lionel Richie were born in 1949. The first five would have been about 25 years old at the height of their popularity; the latter two would have been about 35. Jonathan Pontell would lump the first five into his Jones generation, which came of age between the baby boomers and the Generation X'ers. It seems to me that 25 is the perfect age to appeal to the younger (i.e., teenage) demographic: they're a little bit older than people like me, but not old enough to be fuddy-duddies. Richie and Springsteen would have been about the same age as my parents, perhaps appealing to that demographic as a result.
So, the changing strategies of the record companies in the early 1980s, the rise of MTV, and a handful of "Jones generation" artists all combine to create a perfect storm. Among the feats that Michael Jackson accomplished:
Thriller was #1 for 37 weeks and spent 122 weeks on the Billboard charts
He earned a total of 12 Grammy awards
Of the nine songs on Thriller, seven of them became top-ten hits.
Thriller has sold nearly 62 million copies, behind only the Eagles' Greatest hits, 1971-1975 (which had nearly ten more years on the shelf than Thriller
Springsteen's Born in the USA also produced seven top-ten hits. It sold 11 million copies and spent nearly two years in the top 40.
I can't help but wonder if the rise of the cassette (which was cheaper and more portable than the LP) and walkman (which was cheap and portable) impacted the megastar phenomenon as well. By the end of the decade, cassettes were outselling LPs at a rate of 13 to 1.
*Actually, this may have been the first one. Oddly enough, one of the members--the bass player--is on the faculty here at TTU