Who's bigger? MJ or The Beatles?
- Thread starter Trekker4747
- Start date
And why is the MJ version called the Moonwalk, I wonder? Never did see an astronaut do it....
Ask fans/media at the time they named in -not MJ, although he did adopt the name as it became popular.
And even though the backslide exsisted before MJ did it, he certainly popularized it/made it famous. It's tied to him now.
Generally when people talk about "hits" they mean something that has garnered national or global prominence, there are present day artist really popular in my neck of the woods with "hits" (southeastern US) but no one outside 3-4 states would know who I was talking about.
I'm in no way denying he isn't a cultural icon--I think he's exceedingly overrated as far as actual talent goes especially compared to other artist of his time and after, imo he was more charismatic than musically gifted, but that's irrelevant. Everything you have said only confirms my point. "Black music" from black musicians wasn't allowed on white radio and television, but Elvis who combined R&B, blues, and Gospel he heard black singers performing was able to bring it to a national audience. Making something popular doesn't necessarily mean you were the innovator or even the best at it. I think it's sad that society needed a white man to tell them it's ok to listen to music by black people and that white man is deified for it. When one looks at the situation in America during the 50s, you have to conclude the far more talented and electrifying Chuck Berry -the author of the majority of his own material btw- has been denied his rightful Rock n'Roll crown merely due to the fact that Elvis was born melanin deficient in a combinaton of good looks, timing, marketing and promotional efforts which made pop culture the mass commodity of the post-WW2 era.
And you can not be serious comparing whatever it is Elvis did in that clip to what Michael could do here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7MmEMrCRfc
I'm in no way denying he isn't a cultural icon--I think he's exceedingly overrated as far as actual talent goes especially compared to other artist of his time and after, imo he was more charismatic than musically gifted, but that's irrelevant. Everything you have said only confirms my point. "Black music" from black musicians wasn't allowed on white radio and television, but Elvis who combined R&B, blues, and Gospel he heard black singers performing was able to bring it to a national audience. Making something popular doesn't necessarily mean you were the innovator or even the best at it. I think it's sad that society needed a white man to tell them it's ok to listen to music by black people and that white man is deified for it. When one looks at the situation in America during the 50s, you have to conclude the far more talented and electrifying Chuck Berry -the author of the majority of his own material btw- has been denied his rightful Rock n'Roll crown merely due to the fact that Elvis was born melanin deficient in a combinaton of good looks, timing, marketing and promotional efforts which made pop culture the mass commodity of the post-WW2 era.
And you can not be serious comparing whatever it is Elvis did in that clip to what Michael could do here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7MmEMrCRfc
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^Wow he could walk backwards! Seriously, there is no comparison to Elvis. He's Elvis.
Now I'm less worried about the gray in my beard.
To which I am not impressed. Strip him of the icon status, imo talent and stage presence wise he doesn't hold a candle to the likes of Chuck Berry, MJ, Freddie Mercury, Tina Turner, The Beatles, Mick Jagger, and James Brown.
Talent wise I'd definitely say he is inferior to Berry, Mercury, the Beatles, and Brown.
I notice when you listed the ingredients to rock'n'roll, you made a point to disregard COUNTRY as being mixed with blues and gospel. It was equal in influence and anyone who is familiar with oldies knows that. It wasn't just black music for white people, it was a mixture of traditionally black and white musical traditions brought together. Even with the gospel traditions, it was a mixture of black and white gospel traditions combined together.
But country is the musical form that is greatly minimized by people trying to play up only one side as being responsible for rock'n'roll. Without both musical traditions, it would have still remained segregated music. It wasn't just black music made acceptable to white teenagers. It was racially-integrated music accepted by ALL people. Country, blues and gospel was the original mix of rock'n'roll (Elvis' mix) and it later incorporated just about everything else.
If you listen to almost any Elvis record, it is going to sound ambiguous to what genre it is. His voice alone kind of sounds country and kind of sounds blues and kind of sounds gospel. It kind of sounds white and it kind of sounds black. He could make a country song sound bluesy and a blues song sound country. Most of the artists that you're naming don't sound nearly as ambiguous.
And there are examples of black artists who did the same thing as Elvis later on by bringing in country music or white gospel singers (Ray Charles) and combining it with their traditionally blues/r&b background. So, black performers were also allowed to take from white performers and white performers were able to take from black performers. That is what Elvis made it possible and acceptable to do. Elvis had a white gospel quartet, a white opera singer (replacing a white country singer) and a black bluesy gospel girl group as his backup singers. His background sound was of various traditions, too.
And unlike Pat Boone, Elvis didn't whitewash it either or turn it into a big band cover where the original genre of the song was hardly even decipherable. His sound was always quite raw and hyper-emotional.
Elvis was extremely revolutionary for his time. And you're misunderstanding the origins of rock'n'roll if you think it was just white people stealing from black people. Rock'n'roll wasn't black music. Rock'n'roll was integrated music with multiple genres, including white influences, too. And heck, Ritchie Valens turned Mexican folk music into rock'n'roll. That's how multi-genre it became. It wasn't the music of any one culture, but of all cultures.
But country is the musical form that is greatly minimized by people trying to play up only one side as being responsible for rock'n'roll. Without both musical traditions, it would have still remained segregated music. It wasn't just black music made acceptable to white teenagers. It was racially-integrated music accepted by ALL people. Country, blues and gospel was the original mix of rock'n'roll (Elvis' mix) and it later incorporated just about everything else.
If you listen to almost any Elvis record, it is going to sound ambiguous to what genre it is. His voice alone kind of sounds country and kind of sounds blues and kind of sounds gospel. It kind of sounds white and it kind of sounds black. He could make a country song sound bluesy and a blues song sound country. Most of the artists that you're naming don't sound nearly as ambiguous.
And there are examples of black artists who did the same thing as Elvis later on by bringing in country music or white gospel singers (Ray Charles) and combining it with their traditionally blues/r&b background. So, black performers were also allowed to take from white performers and white performers were able to take from black performers. That is what Elvis made it possible and acceptable to do. Elvis had a white gospel quartet, a white opera singer (replacing a white country singer) and a black bluesy gospel girl group as his backup singers. His background sound was of various traditions, too.
And unlike Pat Boone, Elvis didn't whitewash it either or turn it into a big band cover where the original genre of the song was hardly even decipherable. His sound was always quite raw and hyper-emotional.
Elvis was extremely revolutionary for his time. And you're misunderstanding the origins of rock'n'roll if you think it was just white people stealing from black people. Rock'n'roll wasn't black music. Rock'n'roll was integrated music with multiple genres, including white influences, too. And heck, Ritchie Valens turned Mexican folk music into rock'n'roll. That's how multi-genre it became. It wasn't the music of any one culture, but of all cultures.
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It isn't so much about an artist taking various genres and crossing them. It's that the majority population didn't accept it until a white man did it and validated it and the deification of said man especially when one looks at the actual talents. As you said Elvis made it acceptable, and why was he able to make it acceptable? You have take a look at the social climate of that time, why was he used as vehicle for this form of music when the original creators and innovators were far more talented and wrote their own music. His cultural icon status far exceeds his modest talents. I attribute his success to an inherently racist society and the astute management by his svengali, Col Parker. If anything he was mostly a puppet performing and dancing to to songs penned by others.
My issue has more to do with the majority culture only finding things acceptable until a member of that majority does it, like people who bash hip/hop and rap left and right, but oddly make an exception for Eminem who subsequently is the top selling rap artist of all time. In Em's case he's actually talented, but there are long time pioneering and creative rap artist just as talented if not more so, but outside of hardcore hip hop heads don't get their due. Tommy Mottola knew what he was talking about.
I'm 22 and clearly the racial landscape is no where near the same as it was back then, and that's a good thing, but don't pretend Elvis would have had the same level of success back then if he were black.
My issue has more to do with the majority culture only finding things acceptable until a member of that majority does it, like people who bash hip/hop and rap left and right, but oddly make an exception for Eminem who subsequently is the top selling rap artist of all time. In Em's case he's actually talented, but there are long time pioneering and creative rap artist just as talented if not more so, but outside of hardcore hip hop heads don't get their due. Tommy Mottola knew what he was talking about.
I'm 22 and clearly the racial landscape is no where near the same as it was back then, and that's a good thing, but don't pretend Elvis would have had the same level of success back then if he were black.
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He would have had no chance of being as successful if he were black, but that doesn't in any way diminish his accomplishments.
No more than Britney Spears being devoid of anything resembling talent takes away from the fact she's accomplished being the top selling artist male or female of the past 10 years, the first f to have her first 5 albums reach #1, but you can critique the culture/society that gave her the accomplishments.
ETA: I don't believe there was any debate over his accomplishments, what stirred my initial response was someone in this thread calling him an innovator, which I clearly disagree with. His management was excellent at rebranding but innovator? Hardly.
ETA: I don't believe there was any debate over his accomplishments, what stirred my initial response was someone in this thread calling him an innovator, which I clearly disagree with. His management was excellent at rebranding but innovator? Hardly.
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Definitely an innovator.
Perenially, its the Beatles, but then they are 4 against 1. If we said, MJ or Paul McCartney? MJ or Ringo? It might be a more fair question. MJ, if I'm being nice, was a great songwriter. The Beatles had 3, a freakish combination of talent.
Okay, how about this then? Which person will have the longest lasting and most profound impact on music specifically and society as a whole: John Lennon, Paul McCartney or Michael Jackson?
The question really comes to output. Did Jackson have, what only 5 or 6 albums in the last 30 years? The body of work for his solo career is very small. Hard to justify the years he spent on his later albums. It seems few would argue that you see all that effort in the actual music.
While the Beatles solo careers, even John's short one, seem much more productive.
Same is true of Elvis. He was constantly releasing new material, music, films, tours through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Which undeniably contributed to his death in the end, the constant touring.
While Jackson's recent vacation, whatever you call it seemingly did nothing positive for his mental or physical state.
Instead of this overtly ambitious 50 show schedule, Jackson would have benefited most from a equivalent to Elvis' 68 Comeback Special. A one time concert/and or tv special just to show off his talent. No gaudy costumes or makeup. No fancy effects. Just Michael, his voice and his dance moves. I think that would of been refreshing after all this time.
While the Beatles solo careers, even John's short one, seem much more productive.
Same is true of Elvis. He was constantly releasing new material, music, films, tours through the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Which undeniably contributed to his death in the end, the constant touring.
While Jackson's recent vacation, whatever you call it seemingly did nothing positive for his mental or physical state.
Instead of this overtly ambitious 50 show schedule, Jackson would have benefited most from a equivalent to Elvis' 68 Comeback Special. A one time concert/and or tv special just to show off his talent. No gaudy costumes or makeup. No fancy effects. Just Michael, his voice and his dance moves. I think that would of been refreshing after all this time.
You, know, I've been avoiding this thread the last few days because I had a suspicion it could get ugly. I've been pleasantly surprised to find that it seems to have stayed somewhat civil, taken as a whole. I'm not surprised that it verged awfully closely to being boiled down to a race thing at times, though--which is where I figured the ugliness to come in. Ah well.
Still: I've been thinking it over. I don't know if I can give a definitive answer.
I was born in 1973, and somewhere along the line I had become peripherally aware of the Beatles, but I didn't have much really direct knowledge of them. I mainly seem to remember that when I was very small, I had a little plastic submarine that I played with in the bath, and that by some cosmic coincidence it was yellow in color. I can't tell you where or when I first actually heard the song "Yellow Submarine". It's just one of those things that I knew from early childhood (I assume one or the other of my parents must have sung it to me--perhaps my father, who was far more of a popular music fan than my mother, who gravitated more toward the classical side of things).
Apart from that, I vaguely remember the media attention toward John Lennon's death; I was still pretty young, and details are fuzzy, but I remember it being something I heard about on television. At the time, of course, I had only the faintest idea who John Lennon was or why he was famous.
When Thriller became the big thing, I was a bit older and starting to become more aware of popular music. In fact, I can say with little fear of contradiction that Michael Jackson was one of my earliest experiences with contemporary popular music--that is to say, being interested in music that was popular at that exact moment in time.
And I enjoyed that record a good deal, and became a little bit of a fan of Michael Jackson (though not to a gigantic degree--certainly not in comparison to my younger brother, who was hugely enamored of MJ, to the point of having a 'Beat It' jacket and wearing one glove... though it was a just a cheap white glove with silver thread shot through it rather than being festooned with sequins). In the course of the brief Michael Jackson craze, I managed to acquire a copy of Off The Wall, which I actually enjoyed more than Thriller (and indeed do to this day--which is not to take anything away from Thriller, which is still a great record).
My interest in Jackson died off pretty soon, though; I was wandering off in other directions. I seem to recall liking Billy Joel quite a bit, and Men At Work, and Huey Lewis; I also started listening to a bit of Rush and Pink Floyd, owing to influences from my older brothers, and a little later some U2 and some Billy Idol.
Getting up now to about 1985, I found myself becoming interested in Chuck Berry, perhaps in part because of Marty McFly's 'performance' of "Johnny B. Goode" in Back To The Future. My father, who (as hinted above) had a deep and abiding love of the rock 'n' roll and pop music of his youth, sought to encourage this and dumped in my lap a couple dozen mix tapes he'd compiled over the years of '50s and '60's oldies. There were some Beatles songs in there, of course, and some Jackson 5 songs, too, come to that... though honestly, I found that I loved the '50s most of all... Elvis, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and of course first and foremost Chuck Berry.
And that was it. I came to discover that the music I loved best of all was that which had come before my time. I came to appreciate the '60s stuff a bit more, over time, and started to grow a moderate apprecation of '60s soul, especially the Stax/Volt Memphis soul.
I wasn't totally ignorant of what was going on in contemporary music at all, mind you, but it mostly didn't interest me all that much. By the time I hit high school, I had come to be pretty heavily into Pink Floyd and was also starting to branch out a bit into Metallica and Guns 'n' Roses... while on the other hand, through an acquaintance who ran the comic store where I whiled away a lot of my afternoons I was starting to get a taste of punk, especially in the form of The Clash and Social Distortion.
Now somewhere around about my senior year of high school, I really started to get into The Beatles. It was kind of a perfect storm. A good buddy of mine from some art classes, who dug classic rock in a big way, started putting me on to them (along with some Hendrix and Led Zeppelin). Another friend, part of the comic store crowd, was a huge Beatles fan and pushed me even further. And then--there was an English elective my school offered, called 'Poetry Of Song', which was very popular; it was pretty much what it said on the tin, looking at song lyrics as poetry. The teacher, being a bit of a Baby Boomer, unsurprisingly spent a good chunk of the class on the Beatles. You could almost have called the class Beatles 101 (I mean, yeah, there was a lot of other stuff we covered, but the Beatles dominated the whole thing--we covered their whole history and dissected many, many Beatles lyrics).
And that was that.
That launched me into a gigantic Beatles obsession. Frankly, in my late teens and early twenties, a huge amount of my time and attention was divided almost solely between the Beatles and Star Trek. Neither of those obsessions has ever totally died out... though the Beatles probably still lie nearer and dearer to my heart than Star Trek, at least these days.
(Mind you, Trek was something I loved as far back as I can remember... the first time I was sure I wanted to be something when I grew up? I wanted to be James T. Kirk.)
The Beatles wormed their way into my pop-cultural consciousness in a way that can never be equalled or exorcised. Their music is burned indelibly into my brain. Sometimes, in my youth, when I was bored while working some after-school job bagging groceries or the like, I'd keep myself entertained by 'playing' the Beatles on my mental Walkman, 'singing' the songs in my head--from start to finish, album by album. I knew the lyrics to every single song, word for word.
(I get annoyed, now, in my advanced age, when my brain can't immediately summon up Beatles lyrics with perfect accuracy, because there was a time when I absolutely could.)
Once, when I was about twenty, I had a week off of work and nothing better to do and I got in my car and drove. I started off by putting Please Please Me in the car's cassette player and I kept driving until I got to the end of the last song on Let It Be. That's when I decided to find a motel room, get some sleep, and figure out what the hell I was going to do next.
(For the record, the next step was to go to Chicago and wander around a little bit before turning back and hoping I'd have enough gas money to reach home, because I'd splurged a bit on the motel room.)
Since then, mind, my musical tastes have spread even further afield, but the Beatles are still damned close to my heart.
So there's not much question. The Beatles will always mean more to me than Michael Jackson. But Michael Jackson was one of the first acts in popular music to mean something to me as 'popular music'.
And yeah, you know, musically, MJ hasn't meant that much to me in a long time. I've really always been more of a rocker at heart. Musically, Michael Jackson's relevance to me personally has been on a long, slow downslide since Thriller. In recent years, he's been much more of a tabloid curiosity, a punchline, a public trainwreck.
Still. His death has affected me. It brought memories rushing back, of listening to LPs many years past, of my kid brother in that damn silly jacket. It reminded me that Michael Jackson left a singular and significant mark on modern popular music, and one that I hope far outlives some of the more outlandish non-musical oddities that became his chief stock in trade for the last couple decades of his life.
--g
Still: I've been thinking it over. I don't know if I can give a definitive answer.
I was born in 1973, and somewhere along the line I had become peripherally aware of the Beatles, but I didn't have much really direct knowledge of them. I mainly seem to remember that when I was very small, I had a little plastic submarine that I played with in the bath, and that by some cosmic coincidence it was yellow in color. I can't tell you where or when I first actually heard the song "Yellow Submarine". It's just one of those things that I knew from early childhood (I assume one or the other of my parents must have sung it to me--perhaps my father, who was far more of a popular music fan than my mother, who gravitated more toward the classical side of things).
Apart from that, I vaguely remember the media attention toward John Lennon's death; I was still pretty young, and details are fuzzy, but I remember it being something I heard about on television. At the time, of course, I had only the faintest idea who John Lennon was or why he was famous.
When Thriller became the big thing, I was a bit older and starting to become more aware of popular music. In fact, I can say with little fear of contradiction that Michael Jackson was one of my earliest experiences with contemporary popular music--that is to say, being interested in music that was popular at that exact moment in time.
And I enjoyed that record a good deal, and became a little bit of a fan of Michael Jackson (though not to a gigantic degree--certainly not in comparison to my younger brother, who was hugely enamored of MJ, to the point of having a 'Beat It' jacket and wearing one glove... though it was a just a cheap white glove with silver thread shot through it rather than being festooned with sequins). In the course of the brief Michael Jackson craze, I managed to acquire a copy of Off The Wall, which I actually enjoyed more than Thriller (and indeed do to this day--which is not to take anything away from Thriller, which is still a great record).
My interest in Jackson died off pretty soon, though; I was wandering off in other directions. I seem to recall liking Billy Joel quite a bit, and Men At Work, and Huey Lewis; I also started listening to a bit of Rush and Pink Floyd, owing to influences from my older brothers, and a little later some U2 and some Billy Idol.
Getting up now to about 1985, I found myself becoming interested in Chuck Berry, perhaps in part because of Marty McFly's 'performance' of "Johnny B. Goode" in Back To The Future. My father, who (as hinted above) had a deep and abiding love of the rock 'n' roll and pop music of his youth, sought to encourage this and dumped in my lap a couple dozen mix tapes he'd compiled over the years of '50s and '60's oldies. There were some Beatles songs in there, of course, and some Jackson 5 songs, too, come to that... though honestly, I found that I loved the '50s most of all... Elvis, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, and of course first and foremost Chuck Berry.
And that was it. I came to discover that the music I loved best of all was that which had come before my time. I came to appreciate the '60s stuff a bit more, over time, and started to grow a moderate apprecation of '60s soul, especially the Stax/Volt Memphis soul.
I wasn't totally ignorant of what was going on in contemporary music at all, mind you, but it mostly didn't interest me all that much. By the time I hit high school, I had come to be pretty heavily into Pink Floyd and was also starting to branch out a bit into Metallica and Guns 'n' Roses... while on the other hand, through an acquaintance who ran the comic store where I whiled away a lot of my afternoons I was starting to get a taste of punk, especially in the form of The Clash and Social Distortion.
Now somewhere around about my senior year of high school, I really started to get into The Beatles. It was kind of a perfect storm. A good buddy of mine from some art classes, who dug classic rock in a big way, started putting me on to them (along with some Hendrix and Led Zeppelin). Another friend, part of the comic store crowd, was a huge Beatles fan and pushed me even further. And then--there was an English elective my school offered, called 'Poetry Of Song', which was very popular; it was pretty much what it said on the tin, looking at song lyrics as poetry. The teacher, being a bit of a Baby Boomer, unsurprisingly spent a good chunk of the class on the Beatles. You could almost have called the class Beatles 101 (I mean, yeah, there was a lot of other stuff we covered, but the Beatles dominated the whole thing--we covered their whole history and dissected many, many Beatles lyrics).
And that was that.
That launched me into a gigantic Beatles obsession. Frankly, in my late teens and early twenties, a huge amount of my time and attention was divided almost solely between the Beatles and Star Trek. Neither of those obsessions has ever totally died out... though the Beatles probably still lie nearer and dearer to my heart than Star Trek, at least these days.
(Mind you, Trek was something I loved as far back as I can remember... the first time I was sure I wanted to be something when I grew up? I wanted to be James T. Kirk.)
The Beatles wormed their way into my pop-cultural consciousness in a way that can never be equalled or exorcised. Their music is burned indelibly into my brain. Sometimes, in my youth, when I was bored while working some after-school job bagging groceries or the like, I'd keep myself entertained by 'playing' the Beatles on my mental Walkman, 'singing' the songs in my head--from start to finish, album by album. I knew the lyrics to every single song, word for word.
(I get annoyed, now, in my advanced age, when my brain can't immediately summon up Beatles lyrics with perfect accuracy, because there was a time when I absolutely could.)
Once, when I was about twenty, I had a week off of work and nothing better to do and I got in my car and drove. I started off by putting Please Please Me in the car's cassette player and I kept driving until I got to the end of the last song on Let It Be. That's when I decided to find a motel room, get some sleep, and figure out what the hell I was going to do next.
(For the record, the next step was to go to Chicago and wander around a little bit before turning back and hoping I'd have enough gas money to reach home, because I'd splurged a bit on the motel room.)
Since then, mind, my musical tastes have spread even further afield, but the Beatles are still damned close to my heart.
So there's not much question. The Beatles will always mean more to me than Michael Jackson. But Michael Jackson was one of the first acts in popular music to mean something to me as 'popular music'.
And yeah, you know, musically, MJ hasn't meant that much to me in a long time. I've really always been more of a rocker at heart. Musically, Michael Jackson's relevance to me personally has been on a long, slow downslide since Thriller. In recent years, he's been much more of a tabloid curiosity, a punchline, a public trainwreck.
Still. His death has affected me. It brought memories rushing back, of listening to LPs many years past, of my kid brother in that damn silly jacket. It reminded me that Michael Jackson left a singular and significant mark on modern popular music, and one that I hope far outlives some of the more outlandish non-musical oddities that became his chief stock in trade for the last couple decades of his life.
--g
I am pretty apathetic towards the Beatles anyway. I always thought John Lennon was something of a jerk, it is tragic that some mutant murdered him, but he was an ass and a hypocrite, and most of music post Beatles sucked. Paul McCartney wasn't much better, but I did like the music from his later band Wings. I always thought those songs, (and some of Lennon's stuff) as the continuation of the Beatles, but as two seperate entities, if that makes much sense. What's sad about the Beatles were a great band and McCartney and Lennon (not in that order necessarily) were a great songwriting team, and it was too bad that they left on bad terms. McCartney tried to make peace and be friends with Lennon in the 70's but Lennon would not see him. I would speculate that if Lennon was still alive today that at least those two would of made another album together. We'll never know.
Michael Jackson was a big star before "Thriller", his career actually started only a few years later than the Beatles. MJ was a well known celebrity for 15 years before Thriller, as one of the Jackson 5. The Jackson 5 were the rage in the late 60's and early 70's, they were on numerous television shows, including Ed Sullivan, and Carol Burnett among others, had a Saturday morning cartoon, plus millions of dollars in merchandising from the sales of J5 lunchboxes, T-shirts and kids junk.
MJ did a solo album called "Off the Wall" which was wide selling and well received. This launched Thriller, the apex of his career.
Michael Jackson was a big star before "Thriller", his career actually started only a few years later than the Beatles. MJ was a well known celebrity for 15 years before Thriller, as one of the Jackson 5. The Jackson 5 were the rage in the late 60's and early 70's, they were on numerous television shows, including Ed Sullivan, and Carol Burnett among others, had a Saturday morning cartoon, plus millions of dollars in merchandising from the sales of J5 lunchboxes, T-shirts and kids junk.
MJ did a solo album called "Off the Wall" which was wide selling and well received. This launched Thriller, the apex of his career.
Dusty Ayres
Commodore
Re: Who's bigger? MJ or The Beetles?
Excuse me, but that above statement is true; outside of maybe me (41-year-old Afro-Canadian male who's a big Beatles fan) there aren't that many young blacks who love the Beatles or would know them as well as MJ and/or the Jackson 5. So there's no need for you to be that pissy.
Dusty Ayres
Commodore
Sorry, but neither Michael or Janet had anything to do with that skanky whore's ascent. She was already becoming one due to her time as a Mousekateer (as were Christina Aguleria and Justin Timberlake). If you want to blame something for them being popular, blame Disney and the music industry.
Dusty Ayres
Commodore
Re: Who's bigger? MJ or The Beetles?
Really? Just a song and dance man?
Try writer of his own music, dancer, and arranger as well. Did not peak with Thriller. Career only derailed because of mistakes in judgement and emotional issues. Near Elvis and Madonna as far as stage abillity is concerned (and he can also sing complex stuff as well).
Please stop letting your hate of the guy cloud the record.
Really? Just a song and dance man?
Try writer of his own music, dancer, and arranger as well. Did not peak with Thriller. Career only derailed because of mistakes in judgement and emotional issues. Near Elvis and Madonna as far as stage abillity is concerned (and he can also sing complex stuff as well).
Please stop letting your hate of the guy cloud the record.