BRIC POP: The Blog

With the death this week of Michael Jackson, I was reminded of the relatively unqualified adulation he had with people I met in the BRICs.  From Sina:

The superstar, whose music took the mainland by storm as it ventured on the road to reform, was everywhere on Friday, on websites and television, in conversations, on the roads and off them, and at special memorial services in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu and other cities.

Danwei has a terrific compilation photo of the newspaper headlines in China:

In Brazil, they were making plans in Rio to build a state of Jackson in the Dona Marta favela, where he had filmed the video for They Don’t Care About Us.  From Rede Globo, a sign in the favela reading “you’re with God, Michael”:

From India, I recalled his global cultural currency that made him fit quite comfortably into a radio set of Hindi pop I might hear in a Calcutta taxi or a stuck in the middle of a collage of Bollywood dance sequences in a videobar in Goa.  And Jackson reciprocated when he included Indian dance in the video for Black or White.  From what I’ve read online, there’s been a lot of hypersaturated media coverage, but I haven’t yet seen any reports of an outpouring in the streets with the aam aadmi (common man) in the same way that more than half million turned out and escalated mouring into riots in Karnataka when film star Rajkumar died.

I had included Michael in the original manuscript for BRIC Pop.  In Moscow, I spent a day interviewing young people for a consulting project I was working on.  Whenever I’m speaking to young, bohemian-looking people anywhere in the world, I brace for a ‘hipper-than-thou’ attitude of blase cynicism.  In a conversation with this very smart and hip-looking guy from the local office, I asked him who his favorite musicians were.  I figured he’d turn me on to some new indie rock or Russified “New Raveski” bands.  Instead, he named a few classic Russian rock and pop artists, and Michael Jackson.  Michael Jackson?  What about all the weirdness?

“That doesn’t change his music.  I just like the music he does.”

He had a point.  Michael Jackson could sure as hell make a pop record when he wanted to.  This guy seemed like the kind of Westerner who would only listen to unsigned bands and obscure artists with a password-protected Web page available to their 500 fans.  Was he attracted to Michael Jackson because he is somehow less sophisticated and needed to cultivate a better “cool filter”?  That’s usually the story you get from Westerners studying ‘emerging’ markets, but I think just the opposite.  The ability to enjoy just the content on its own merits, independent of spin machine context or even unpleasant reality, looked to me like a more sophisticated reading of pop culture, not less.

I’ll let the likes of Nancy Grace go on and on about all that other stuff.  The music and dance were great, and the world noticed.

Obrigado, спасибо, धन्यवाद, 谢谢,  Michael.