At the heart of popular music is recorded music – the ability to re-create, and re-play – a song or an artist indefinitely.  Classical music was not born to a world of recorded technology.  Each performance was unique, and to take part, either as an artist or as a consumer of classical music before the age of recorded technology, one had to actually be present at a performance.  Three-minute tunes did not suffice for this kind of listening.  The effort of going to the performance venue, the expense of admission, and the purpose of presence meant that listeners wanted to be rewarded for their efforts.  Longer pieces – symphonies, operas, concert programs – were made to satisfy listeners and artists alike in a world where each performance was unique and unrepeatable.

Recorded music changed all of that.  Now, the cost of gaining access to a single performance is perhaps the lowest it has ever been in history, in part because of the industrial nature of the recorded sound industry.  Just as a manufacturer can reduce the cost of a product through mass manufacture, a consumer of music can reduce the cost of a performance by purchasing the recorded version, and participating in multiple listening episodes over time, without sacrificing the fact that she is listening to a unique performance.  The cost of attending a performance is now divided so many times that each episode becomes as nearly free as it is possible to be, while the unique quality of the recorded session remains captured technologically – stuck in a moment, to borrow a phrase from U2, that we don’t want to get out of.

Michael Jackson is one of the best examples of what I am talking about.  Millions of fans love Michael Jackson’s work.  Millions of anti-fans have for long been very critical.  For the critics, it is the very recorded nature of his music that leads to the problem.  His songs have been recorded, and played, replayed, and then replayed again so often that their cost has been reduced, globally, for all of us, to nothing.  We can hear Michael Jackson at the drop of a hat.  Like Theodor Adorno, this causes many to criticize Jackson’s music as ‘low culture” – cheap; a-dime-a-dozen music that lacks artistry, originality, or even meaning.  All of these things, his critics note, seem to have been siphoned away, or better, leeched out, because of the fact of the existence, and re-performance or, the multiple recorded copies of nearly every musical act Jackson ever engaged in.  By this logic, because of the very number of fans Jackson has, and their avid devotion to his music, he is, ipso facto, not a great artist, nor even, perhaps, an artist at all.  He is overplayed.

For fans, this overplayed reality is evidence of his greatness and originality.  His music was so unique, and so appealing in meaningful, though not always definable, ways that millions of people came to want to hear his songs regularly, and shelled out the next to nothing it cost to do so.  If millions were moved by him, and wished to replay him, there must be some human, some artistic, quality to his songs, and thus perhaps to Jackson himself.

In both cases, the real claim Jackson has to authenticity exists in both his fans and his anti-fans.  Let’s face it, the wearing of a cod-piece and and a single jewelled glove, no matter how you look at it, is an affectation – a performance.  To find meaning in that act requires a personal leap of imagination, and of identification with whatever images are brought to mind by that performance.  It is, in short, a personal choice to assign importance to a pop star.  On the other hand, to give Jackson’s performance the time of day – to notice and be critical of the gloved-one and his glove and crotch patch – is to react to his image and repetitive presence.  Indifference to Michael Jackson is an attitude almost unheard of among people 50 years old or younger, and among many older than 50 as well.  It is for this reason, not just because so many people were fans, but because so many were decidedly anti-fans, even making purchasing decisions based on whether Jacko’s name was associated with a product, that Jackson is/was famous.

Jackson’s body has died.  But Michael Jackson, the beloved gloved one, wacko-Jacko, the King of Pop, remains alive to most of us because we have invested so little in re-playing his work so often.  He speaks to us now, as he always has, through his music, his costumes, and his dancing, and our own industrial reproduction of each of his unique acts.  Like John Lennon and Elvis Presley, and Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson is alive and well and living in our iPods.