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Comment by alexgartrell | Hacker News Reader

Do you really think that Michael Jackson will have the permanence of Shakespeare or Jefferson? Young people mostly don't care about [him] or for his music, and he is unlikely to make the history books.

I agree with the spirit of your comment though, in believing that the linked article was elitist beyond reason. Anyone who would describe western society as contemptible because the "intellectuals" don't watch PBS needs to pick up a book (just like the "intellectuals" have done). The information density is way too low for someone with real stuff to do, which is why television is relegated to relaxation time, where bandwidth is a non-issue.

[Edited]

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Do you really think that Michael Jackson will have the permanence of Shakespeare or Jefferson? Young people mostly don't care about or for his music

I have no real comment on MJ as a musician, but I just wanted to point out that young people don't care about or for Shakespeare either, and haven't for a long time. They overwhelmingly tend to feel that it is something forced upon them that has little relevance to their lives. Obviously there are exceptions, but they aren't exactly the common case.

This is not a problem for Shakespeare's legacy, since high literature is not meant for only one particular demographic group. Pop music on the other hand is targeted primarily to young people of a particular time and place, which makes it transitory and eventually forgotten.

It's true that many young people don't care much about Shakespeare, but some people come around to reading him later in life, voluntarily. For my part, I haven't read much Shakespeare as an adult, but I have a poster about him and his language framed and mounted on the wall behind me... I mean, I now read a lot of stuff that I should (for want of a better word) have been reading in high school and college (and Shakespeare is part of that canon) and don't read much stuff I read when I was in high school. (It's true about the poster, though.)

Jackson's style of music isn't really my cup of tea, but maybe the former young people of the future will come around to him too, much as I came around to listening to the Beatles.

If not Michael Jackson, do you think any 20th century musician will have historical permanence?

He probably comes after the Beatles and Elvis, but after that, it gets harder to come up with musical performers who made a bigger global impact.

Let's see: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, john Coltrane... to name just a few that will be talked about and listened to 100 years from now....

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