I don't give a shit that Michael Jackson died.

Nice pro-Michael Jackson article, but naturally I take umbrage at this attitude:

"In 1983, anybody who didn’t believe in the great man theory didn’t have a television set. Talent, grace, and charisma are all real, and magnificent, and historiography that doesn’t make room — lots of room — for these qualities feels curiously cold and impersonal. "

The "great man theory" is a simplistic and misleading (and somewhat defeatist) reading of the facts of the world. Michael Jackson did not single-handedly defeat the color-barrier in American pop culture. The statement is ludicrous. Even if you completely set aside the into-your-living-room ascendancy of other black entertainers (Bill Cosby as only the most blatantly obvious example), AND perhaps even more importantly the cultural context of the time, in which black/white cultural integration was riding a wave from integrated armed forces, integration of the education system, the civil rights movement, etc., etc., you STILL have to contend with the fact that Michael Jackson was not an up-by-his-own-bootstraps black ubermensch. Michael Jackson, like Buster Keaton, was born into a family of entertainers and TRAINED almost from birth in a process of complete training immersion - if anything he's one of the most compelling arguments AGAINST the idea of "talent" as a magical innate force. PLUS where would he have been without Quincy Jones? Where would Donovan have been without Micky Most? The Beatles without Martin/Epstein? Eminem without Dr. Dre? A quick comparison of the quality of any of these artists' work WITH their best producers/managers vs. the quality of their work withOUT their best producers/managers will show you in 30 seconds that "talent" in and of itself is a lie. SKILL is not a lie, but even in the supposedly egalitarian realm of skill there are opportunities and support systems and circumstances that combine to give one person the tools to accumulate skill, which are not provided to many other people. Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book "Outliers" makes this point very well when he goes into the back story of Bill Gates. Bill Gates, alone among ANYbody in the world, had the unlimited opportunity as a teenager to work on the most advanced computer that existed. By the time he was 20 he had more computing experience than anybody on Earth. Yes, he worked incredibly hard, and was smart and creative, but these qualities alone were not as exceptional in his genetic makeup as you might be lead to believe by the "great man" theory of history or the notion of "talent."
Credit is due to Michael Jackson, and Bill Gates, and the Beatles, etc - many other people might not have thrived as well even if given the same opportunities - but the reality is that it takes a complex web of many people working together in order for a Michael Jackson to happen. Each person in the machinery has to do their job exceptionally well, including Michael, for the result to be stellar.

(Certain examples are harder to fathom, young Dylan for example, but maybe there's also a certain "billion monkeys on a billion typewriters" factor as well - with 7 billion humans on earth [opposed to about 1 billion maybe a hundred years ago? I'm guessing], and some large portion of them with access to non-survival thinking time, you're going to get a higher possibility of an artist of brilliance emerging, just statistically speaking... Anyway, the point is that even an "artist of brilliance" can not realistically take quite as much "great man" credit as that Michael Jackson article tries to claim. Anyway it was an interesting an cool article. And I love Michael Jackson as much as the next guy or more.)