Death Becomes Him

Michael Jackson may be dead from a biological point of view, but commercially, he just got reborn.

I always hated Michael Jackson's music. I find it tragic that this period of pop music will now be remembered as the Michael Jackson era when pop artists like Joe Jackson, Elvis Costello, the Clash, the Jam or Madness will be remembered as having played secondary parts, when they were in fact much more creative than the Jackson who died a few days ago. At least, that is how I feel about it. But the public taste is a mysterious object, and in any case, anybody can recognize that Michael Jackson's show was extremely professional.  Jackson was a hard-working man gifted with various talents and surrounded by professional, also hard-working musicians. Their music was certainly not my cup of tea, but they can be respected as extremely competent entertainers. In such a way, Michael Jackson deserved his success, or at least, there is no reason to find it "unfair" that he was successful. What is less obviously normal is the sort of semi-God status Michael Jackson acquired through his career, as many others did before him and will do in the future. Stardom in music is a particularly irritating phenomenon for several reasons. First, making music has never made anyone more intelligent or deserving to be listened to when making comments on non-musical subjects. When you think of it, it is astonishing that journalists always ask musicians questions about their lives or their political opinions, and seldom about their music. That is a pity. In all fairness, music is a difficult subject to talk about, but the point of view of a rock star about politics is usually utterly uninteresting. But since pop stars are often young and relatively immature people, it is not surprising that they often start to believe in their own genius. After all, if they were just regular people, why would these reporters always ask them about famine in Africa or the next election? Second, many people dream of becoming a star, but has stardom ever made anyone happier? In the case of Michael Jackson, we are even talking of a child star, but in any case, getting immensely rich before ever having had to pay an electricity bill is probably not the best way to become an adult. Even making friends, not to mention building a family, probably gets much more difficult in such circumstances, while the immediate satisfaction of all sorts of physical pleasures is not the best incentive to develop a satisfying inner life, be it intellectual or spiritual. But stardom concerns a tiny minority of artists, while the majority painfully try to make a living from their art. Some of them have real talent. In music, I've sometimes stumbled upon totally unknown artists who would have deserved to become big. One example of that kind of injustice is Just Kidding, an Australian rock band from Adelaide who made an album in 1987 called Watch The Fires, a masterpiece somewhere between the Clash and the Specials. I just thought they deserved to be mentioned somewhere at last. Only available in vinyl. And that brings me to the real point of this piece: what does the fate of Michael Jackson tell us about the musical industry and the way it works? And what does it tell us about intellectual property and the way it has been used? As much as the likes of Michael Jackson deserve to be paid for their work as long as there are people enjoying it, it does not make a lot of sense to say that they deserve exactly what they get through the current system of intellectual property. It does not because so-called intellectual property is not property. Rather, it is a micro-monopoly guaranteed by the government through legislation which may change with time; while property is a constitutional right, usually treated as a natural right. The intellectual property system has a specific purpose, to encourage creation, which may be an excellent one, but it only exists through public intervention, and therefore, the government, rather than protecting it at all cost like it was a natural human right, should consider the possibility that circumstances may change and that the best way to encourage creation in activities such as music may not be the same in 1900 as in 2000. In other words, intellectual property may be appropriate to a certain extent, but it is not sacred. Michael Jackson is only one among dozens of stars whose tragic destiny suggests that something may be wrong in the way artists currently make their living. Stardom as we know it in music may date from the Beatles, that is, a status of superstar combined with the reputation of being a universal genius in the context of a politically engaged counter-culture. Teenagers or young adults got propelled to fantastic lives full of drugs, easy romance and incredible self-assurance, and then committed suicide or died from overdose before 30. And that was made possible by the fact that the music industry could exploit the intellectual property system in a way it was probably not designed for. Repackaging of albums, selling the same song four or five times to the same people as parts of different compilation albums or in "remastered" versions, and finally getting paid for the rest of your life for a work done when you were 25 probably doesn't do much to boost your creativity. Even if one considers the intellectual property system as a kind of artists' welfare, it is still lousy. While superstars travel in personal jets, most musicians live in a permanent state of semi-poverty, perhaps waiting for the fairy manager to come and notice them. Most of them spend a long time waiting. But the musical industry, like any other industry, has merely adapted to the existing context. For reasons that are technical, cultural and legal, the musical industry seems to have concentrated their promotional efforts on a very low number of artists, making them sometimes immensely rich.  Capitalizing on the fashionable idea that music, or art in general, are primarily the work of "geniuses", psychologically tortured if possible, rather than simple hard-working and talented artists, the music industry has promoted "stars" often to the detriment of other artists with which they had signed contracts - exclusivity contracts, so that the said artists had their careers permanently blocked the minute they had signed. The intellectual property system as it is may have been an incentive to act that way because it allows for the creation of a limited number of golden geese. And best of all: you can actually kill the goose and keep the eggs coming. Michael Jackson may be dead from a biological point of view, but commercially, he just got reborn. Now that file-sharing has made it more difficult for stars and labels to simply sit down on royalties, we are seeing the price of concert seats go up while old-split bands from the 80's are reforming by the dozen - a blessing for my generation. The electro-pop band Heaven 17 has even reformed and played their first ever gig a few years ago. Now, that is an incentive to creation. I will stop here because I don't have any particular practical suggestion to make, except that the intellectual property system, at least in music, while it certainly has some merits, has its drawbacks too and should not be regarded as a permanent aspect of our legal systems. Michael Jackson's life is not the product of a healthy and perfectly normal state of things. Apart from the fact that about ten years of legal struggles against file-sharing have been a costly failure, at least for now, considering a completely different approach should not be considered a thought crime. A tax-based system of state redistribution based on file-sharing traffic would certainly have a socialist aspect about it, but not much more so than the current state-guaranteed intellectual property system. But as far as I can see, there is no perfect solution at hand yet. The adaptation to technological change will take some time and probably be more or less permanent. The question is open, but I have nothing to sell or to advertise for - except Just Kidding.