Michael Jackson was the most influential artist of the 20th century. That might sound shocking to sophisticated ears. Jackson, after all, was only a pop star. What about the century's great writers like Fitzgerald and Faulkner? What about visual artists, like Picasso and Dali, o the masters of cinema from Chaplin to Kubrick? Even among influential musicians, did Michael really matter più than the Beatles? What about Louis Armstrong, who invented jazz, o Frank Sinatra, who reinvented it for white people? o Elvis Presley, who did the same with blues and gospel, founding rock in the process? Michael Jackson is bigger than Elvis? da a country mile.


First, there is no domanda that musicians in the 20th century had far più cultural impact than any other sort of artist. There is no such thing, for instance, as a 20th-century painter that is più famous than an entertainer like Sinatra. There are no filmmakers o movie stars that had più cultural sway than The Beatles, and no 20th-century writers who touched più lives than Elvis. Consider that thousands of human beings, from Bangkok to Brazil, make their living da pretending to be Elvis Presley. When was the last time te saw a good impression of Picasso? Even Elvis, though, is overshadowed da Jackson's career.

First, with the possible exception of Prince and Sammy Davis Jr., Michael Jackson simply had più raw talent as a performer than any of his peers. But the King of Pop reigns as the century's signature artist not just because of his exceptional talent, but because he was able to package that talent in a whole new way. In both form and content, Jackson simply did what no one had done before.

Louis Armstrong, for instance, learned Musica as a live performer and adapted his art for records and radio. Sinatra and Elvis were also basically live acts who made records, ultimately expanding that on-stage persona into other media through sheer force of charisma. The Beatles were a hybrid; a once-great live band made popolare da radio and TV, forced da their own fame to become rock's first great studio artists.


Jackson, though, was something else entirely. Something new. Obviously he made great records, usually with the help of Quincy Jones. Jackson's musical influence on subsequent artists is simply unavoidable, from his immediate followers like Madonna and Bobby Brown, to later stars like Usher and Justin Timberlake.

Certainly, Jackson could also electrify a live audience. His true canvas, though, was always the video screen. Above all, he was the first great televisual entertainer. From his Jackson 5 childhood, to his adult crossover on the Motown 25th anniversary special, to the last sad tabloid fodder, Jackson lived and died for on TV. He was born in 1958, part of the first generation of Americans who never knew a world without TV. And Jackson didn't just grow up with TV. He grew up on it. Child stardom, the great blessing and curse of his life, let him to internalize the medium's conventions and see its potential in a way that no earlier performer possibly could.

The result, as typified da the video for "Thriller," "Billie Jean," and "Beat It," was più than just great art. It was a new art form. Jackson turned the low-budget, promotional clips record companies would make to promote a hit single into high art, a whole new genre that combined every form of 20th century mass media: the Musica video. It was cinematic, but not a movie. There were elements of live performance, but it was nothing like a concert. A seamless mix of song and dance that wasn't cheesy like Broadway, it was on TV but wildly different from anything people had ever seen on a screen.

The oft-repeated conventional wisdom—that Jackson's video made MTV and so "changed the Musica industry" is only half true. It's più like the Musica industry ballooned to encompass Jackson's talent and shrunk down again without him. video didn't matter before Michael, and they ceased to matter at almost the precise cultural moment he stopped producing great work. His last relevant clip, "Black o White," was essentially the genre's cigno song. Led da Nirvana and Pearl Jam, the successivo wave of pop stars hated making videos, seeing the entire format, and the channel they aired on, as tools of corporate rock.

The greatest impact of the Musica video wasn't on music, but video. That is, on film and television. The generation that grew up watching '80s video started making Film and TV shows in the '90s, using MTV's once-daring stylistic elements like quick cuts, vérité-style hand-helds, nonlinear narrative and heavy visual effects and turning them into mainstream TV and film movie conventions.

If Jackson had only been a great musician who also invented Musica video, he still wouldn't have mattered as much. Madonna, his only worthy heir, was almost as gifted at communicating an aesthetic on-screen. The aesthetic Jackson communicated, however, was much più powerful, liberating and globally resonant than hers. It was più powerful than what Elvis and Sinatra communicated, too. Hence, that whole "Most Influential Artist" thing.


American popolare Musica has always been about challenging stereotypes and breaking down barriers. Throughout the century, be it in Jazz, Rock o Hip-Hop, black and white artists mixed styles, implicitly, and often explicitly, advocating racial equality. popolare Musica has always challenged sex roles, too. superiore, in alto 40 artists especially, from Little Richard and proto-feminist Leslie Gore, to David Bowie, Madonna and Lady Gaga have pushed social progress da bending and breaking gender rules.

Jackson was clearly a tragic figure, and his well-documented childhood trauma didn't help. But his fatal flaw, and simultaneously the fonte of his immense power, was a truly revolutionary Romantic vision. Not Romantic in the sappy way greeting card companies and florists use the word, but in its older, Byronic sense of someone who commits their entire life to pursing a creative ideal in defiance of social order and even natural law. Jackson's Romantic ideal, learned as a child at Motown founder Berry Gordy's feet, was an Age of Aquarius-inspired vision using of pop Musica to build racial, sexual, generational and religious harmony. His twist, though, was a doozy.

He not only made art promoting pop's egalitarian ethos, but literally tried embody it. When that vision became an obsession, a standard showbiz plastic surgery addiction became something infinitely più ambitious—and infinitely darker. Jackson consciously tried to turn himself into an indeterminate mix of human types, into a sort of ageless arch-person, blending black and white, male and female, adult and child. He was, however, not an arch-person. He was just a regular person, albeit a supremely talented one, and time makes dust of every person, no matter how well they sing. Decades of throwing himself against this irrefutable bacheca of fact ravaged him, body then soul, and eventually destroyed him.

At his creative peak, though, it almost seemed possible. Michael could be absolutely anything he wanted; Diana Ross one day, Peter Pan and the next. Every breathtaking high note, every impossible dance-step and crazy costume projected the same message. There are no più barriers of race, sex, class o age, he told his audience. You, too, can be and do whatever te want. We are limited only da our power to dream. A performer who can make te believe that, to feel it, even for a moment, comes along once in a lifetime. Maybe. If you're lucky.

As years pass and history sanitizes his memory, Jackson's legend will only grow. One day, in addition to being the most influential artist of the 20th century, he may well topple Elvis become the most-impersonated as well. Jackson, after all, only died a anno ago. Elvis has been gone since 1977. Another two o three decades and Michael might have the most impersonators from Bangkok and Brazil. Let's just hope that they don't take it too far.