King of Pop Moonwalks to Online Immortality

By Nalaka Gunawardene*

What a pity that Michael Jackson missed the 40th anniversary of the first Apollo moonwalk by only a few weeks.

He was only 10 when Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong took that historic first lunar step on July 20, 1969 and was probably among the 500 million people — the largest TV audience the world had known at that time — who watched it live.

Fourteen years later, Michael Jackson would invent his own kind of 'moonwalk'.

First performed for his song 'Billie Jean' on a U.S. TV show in March 1983, Jackson's dance technique that gives the illusion of the dancer stepping forward while actually moving backward gained worldwide popularity and became his signature move.

Like that historic 'moonwalk' 40 years ago, Jackson's untimely death on June 25, 2009 created ripples that was felt worldwide.

News of his sudden death crashed some news or social networking websites, and stalled others. Even the mighty Google, now the world's largest media operation, slowed down; Google News was inaccessible for a while.

His memorial service in Los Angeles on July 7 would probably become one of the most widely followed event online. But it is impossible to arrive at a cumulative audience figure because there is still no comprehensive way to measure web viewing.

Michael Jackson lived and died immersed in superlatives. For several years in the 1980s and early 1990s, he was the world's best known musical performer. 'The New York Times' noted that Jackson "at the height of his career... was indisputably the biggest star in the world" having "sold more than 750 million albums".

CONQUEST BY SATELLITE

He was not the world's first mega-star — in the zenith of their careers, the Beatles and Elvis Presley were similar globalised cultural icons. But two waves of communication technology, arriving in quick succession, propelled Jackson to unprecedented heights in popular culture: satellite television and the Internet.

The spread of satellite TV during the 1980s consolidated Jackson's star appeal worldwide. A generation earlier, fans in remote places from Mongolia to Fiji would have listened to their favourite western artistes on radio or records/CD. Now they could actually see performers on screen. When global satellite TV coverage finally extended to the whole of Asia in 1991, Jackson's conquest of the world was complete.

Jackson, one of the most recognisable icons of our time, understood the power of moving images, and was a clever user of the globalised media. While music videos had been in use from the mid-1970s, he took the medium seriously, investing significant amounts of time, creativity and money in their production. The arrival of 24/7 channel Music Television (MTV) in August 1981 coincided with Jackson's ascendance in the entertainment universe. Their combined force was unstoppable.

In 1983, Jackson released the 14-minute-long video for 'Thriller', which set new standards in music video productions. Along with earlier videos for his songs 'Billie Jean' and 'Beat It', it opened doors for other African-American artistes to have their music videos played on MTV.

Michael Jackson may have been quirky and idiosyncratic, but his enormous appeal to Asia's predominantly youthful population was sustained through good times and bad.

In multi-cultural Asia, the Jackson fan club cut across divisions of race, faith, language and social class. In more pluralistic societies people played his music loud in the open. In more restrictive or closed societies, they did it privately and sometimes secretively.

No Asian has yet landed on the moon, but spirited and agile Asian youth perform the moonwalk  in places as diverse as Karachi, Manila and Ho Chi Minh City.

Indian journalist and filmmaker Nupur Basu recalls an interesting experience. In the summer of 2000, she travelled extensively in South Asia to find out how far and wide the decade-old satellite TV was reaching, and what social, cultural and political impacts it had on people.

Traveling from Peshawar in Pakistan to Kandy in Sri Lanka, and many places in between, she met a cross section of people whose views were diverse as they were divergent on what satellite TV was doing to their culture and lives.

At one point, Nupur approaches a wizened Muslim in the remote village of Manikganj in Bangladesh, preparing to celebrate a local marriage. "So do you play songs during the ceremony?" she asks. "Yes," he grins, pointing to a huge loudspeaker nearby. "We play the songs of Michael Jackson!"

That wasn't quite the answer she expected in the heartland of Tagore and 'baul' music, but it revealed the far-reaching cultural influence of the performer and his global medium.

That encounter inspired Nupur to do a documentary film, 'Michael Jackson Comes to Manikganj', in 2001. Complementing the film was a book, 'Satellites Over South Asia: Broadcasting Culture and the Public Interest', by David Page and William Crawley, Both explored how satellite TV was creating a new South Asian popular culture that was both influential and controversial.

ONLINE THRILLS

Michael Jackson, however, could not take full advantage of the second wave. He was already heading into his legal controversies in the mid-1990s just as commercial Internet access started spreading. For a decade, too, the music industry had a love-hate relationship with the online medium, which was perceived as a major threat to the industry's more traditional business models. Only very recently have they started exploiting the inevitable.

The gradual roll-out of broadband Internet in recent years enables the delivery of not just text and audio, but real time broadcasting and unprecedented levels of interactivity. The ubiquitous mobile phone — with over 4 billion users and counting — would soon make content accessible from almost anywhere, anytime.

Had he lived longer, Jackson might have ridden the broadband and mobile waves just as he adeptly mastered the power of music video and satellite TV. In reality, he didn't manipulate these new media as much as their users and followers rallied around him.

Interestingly, the news of his death was broken not by a mainstream media outlet, but by TMZ, a celebrity gossip website owned by AOL and Warner Brothers. That in itself is a sign of the drastic changes taking place in news gathering and reporting in the always-on, instant media age.

It is difficult — if not outright hazardous — these days to anticipate trends in popular  culture and media, both evolving at bewildering speed. Just a couple of weeks ago, everyone was excited about how Twitter — the micro-blogging platform that combines mobiles and the web — was a powerful new tool in post-election mass protests in Iran.

I have no idea if the Ayatollahs are closet fans of Michael Jackson. But they must surely have thanked the King of Pop for creating a much-needed diversion in cyberspace precisely when the theocracy in Tehran needed it most.

(*Nalaka Gunawardene is a science writer and media-watcher who blogs on media, culture and society at http://movingimages.wordpress.com/)