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以下是泰晤士报的一篇论述,写的很不错,透过Michael Jackson的死,我们有这样一个反思的机会...
这也许不会使你忘记,这个世界上还有多少需要帮助的人,你考虑过他们么?
*此链接歌曲将在三日后失效
(为方便阅读,我用省略号忽略部分内容)
After Jacko’s death we know that War is Over(Timesonline.co.uk)
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From his earliest days, Michael Jackson was a phenomenon. From the age of 5 he could be found watching James Brown’s extravagant stage antics for hours, copying what he saw. Gerald Posner records in his spectacular history of Motown how young Michael brought in the crowds, astonished seasoned executives, wowed the media. And, until the drugs got him, he didn't stop.
So Jackson deserves to be regarded as an extraordinary showman. A brilliant, dazzling talent. But as a pioneering figure in the history of rock and pop? I think that is more controversial. He wasn't, as some have suggested, the first black star to appeal to a mass white audience. What about Diana Ross and the Supremes? (“Listen, Diana Ross didn't become a star by being black,” as Gordy puts it.) Nor was he, by some distance, the first disco dance act. He brought the curtain down on the Motown era. As Gordy says of the Jackson 5: “They would be the last big stars to come rolling off my assembly line.” The last, not the first.
Jackson’s claim to greatness is more prosaic. He sold a lot of records. He may have competed with the Osmonds as a kid, but he outran them, outsold them, outlasted them. Indeed he outsold everyone. I think the right judgment on Jackson’s career is that he was a magnificent entertainer, a thriller (sorry), but not someone who shaped pop history.
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The answer is not that newspapers and others got their assessment of Jackson wrong. It is that in the nearly 30 years since Lennon’s death society has changed fundamentally. The culture war that has been raging for 50 years or so has come to an end. And popular culture has won.
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Yet another way of explaining politics, certainly the politics of the past 50 years, is through age cohorts. Alongside the class struggle has been the generation gap.
When the generation gap first appeared, at the beginning of the 1960s, it was thought to be the result of longer lives. Survivors of the US Civil War could expect to die before they were 50. Survivors of the Second World War might expect to live until they were 65. In these extended lives there came a new period. One of adolescence, of perhaps a decade between being a child and an adult. The alienation of these young people from their parents, something that became obvious in the 1960s, seemed a natural thing that would recur generation after generation.
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In the succeeding decades the battle over the 1960s and its legacy has raged in politics. It has raged more strongly and more fiercely in America than here (as things do), but it has raged here too (or some polite British word that means sort of raged). In the 1960s it was violent. But when young men grow up they generally stop being violent. So as they turned adult, the Sixties street-fighting men quietly carried their liberal values, their egalitarian assumptions, their pop sensibility, their democratic accents, their low-culture hipness into the mainstream. And they became doctors and dentists and Cabinet ministers and civil servants. They changed the elite from the inside.
Politicians like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton make no sense viewed through the traditional lens of class politics. In the clash of material interests and economic ideas they are vastly inferior figures to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Not so if politics is also seen as the clash of generations. For these were the first political tribunes of the post-1960s generation to reach the highest office, bringing major social change with them. What David Cameron means by modernising the Tory party is more about moving from old to young than from right to left. It is much more about accommodating to the 1960s than to abandoning Conservative economic thinking.
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No more. The battle is ending, the smoke is clearing. The wildest, stupidest ideas of the 1960s New Left have died out. And so too, slowly but surely, are the generations who came before the gap.
Barack Obama sees himself, explicitly, as the first representative of a new era — the era of peace after the culture war. “We have seen the psychodrama of the baby-boom generation play out over the last 40 years,” he told New York magazine in 2006. “I think people sort of feel like, OK, let’s not relitigate the Sixties 40 years later”.
The fact that across class, across race, among those of vastly different educational and material backgrounds an essentially innocuous showman like Michael Jackson can be big news is just one little sign that the culture war is done. We’re all pop fans now. Happy Xmas. War is Over. |
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发表于 2009-7-1 22:58:29
