Michael jackson bad album artwork
Jackson’s influence on the men, conversely, is not just undimmed it is – at least in the Anglophone world – definitive. Not that they can’t do all that stuff if they want to. Then along came Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, each with a different and novel way of being a superstar, and the spell was broken. This affected even the fresher and more imaginative Britney/Christina school those girls required their chops to get ahead. As long as you could sing soul, you didn’t need to have it.
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Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the mode she established was standard for women pop stars – due not only to her huge commercial impact, but also to the influence of TV talent shows which gauged female acts in particular purely on technical terms: who was the most forceful who had the greatest range, the most acrobatic melisma. This doesn’t in itself make Jackson or Houston better than the Velvet Underground – whatever that might mean. Jackson and Houston sold in the tens of millions since then, people who sound like Jackson or Houston have cumulatively sold tens of millions more. And, as Eno didn’t mention, a few of those bands flourished, but most sold even fewer.
It was Brian Eno who made the now famous observation that the first Velvet Underground album sold only 30,000 copies in the five years after its release (mind you, plenty of bands today would consider that a major success, which is another matter), but everyone who bought it started a band.