Submitted by Different_Insect_611 t3_11cncz3 in Music
Michael Jackson a couple months before his death. (Bad quality)
After all he went trough, dude was still shutting down streets like it was the 80's and 90's. And he's in the backseat of a SUV? Thought Beverly Hills folks were a little more used to celebs, going crazy over his forehead and 2 fingers? Lol.
Who comes close today?
Our amount of content available and cultural changes due to that would make this basically impossible for any celebrity to achieve in the modern world.
Swift would be the closest American and I don’t think you’d get close to this. It’s a product of an older era. Elvis, Beatles, Michael Jackson - the Internet has diversified our preferences so much that this phenomenon is unlikely to happen ever again
People were being force fed this content because, it was all they had - listen to one of a few dozen radio stations or turn on one of a few dozen TV stations.
Now, it’s pick from thousands of artists, music or movies or games, entertainment has exploded in a way you can create your own little “sphere” of entertainment that actually does, in a way, cater to your personal taste. You’re never exposed to content you didn’t specifically request.
I doubt this level of fascination being pervasive is possible to reach now or in the future, unless we have a technological decline, and our choices become stifled again like they were in the second half of the 1900s
Also, economic crash thats sustained for years and years could get us back to this sort of place
But, all things being equal, if the status quo is more or less maintained with access to technology, and economies dont absolutely shatter; this likely isnt in the cards to happen again.
You make interesting points about social media and the internet, but I just take petty issue with your phrasing that this would be impossible for any celebrity "to achieve". This shouldn't be anyone's goal. Fame of this level is imprisoning. I'm sire if it were formally studied there's a bell curve of how fame can be beneficial and then after a certain point the bad outweighs the good. Michael Jackson was well on the tail end of the other side of that peak.
You can make the argument Michael Jackson is the most famous person in human history so really no one
Jesus Christ? Muhammed? Budha? Alexander the Great? Julius Caesar? Napoleon Bonaparte? Confucius?
Where’s their best selling album of all time?
What about them?
Why's this being downvoted? There are remote villages in jungles who have heard of Jesus Christ but not Michael Jackson. (If you take issue with this please start a Michale Jackson missionary org, I'll support you).
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Taylor Swift I imagine.
Justin Bieber and Harry styles fucked up shit by eating food here in Australia.
I didn't even mention prime mj or him in different countries, those are even crazier. This is in Beverly Hills, he lived in LA, 50 years old, 2 months before his passing, all the accusations and bad press, just him in the backseat of a suv with tinted windows trying to leave. Thought it was interesting. I wouldn't recognize Harry styles at all personally.
More just that it still happens. Dudes Jimmy Barnes levels of popular but also yeah it's not unique
Bieber, Taylor and most of the K Pop folks
I've seen taylor or bieber walking and shopping in Beverly Hills (with security obv), but this is 50 year old MJ in the backseat of a car, it's on another level.
All the ones reddit doesn't like
Well that is because Reddit isn't real life. If it was, Thom Yorke and the rest of Radiohead would be treated like The Beatles arriving in America in 1964.
The thing about that is yes radiohead is amazing but when the Beatles came onto the scene the market wasn't as saturated
One that's really famous in that country and has a rabid fan base.
Kim Kardashian would be swamped by paparazzi and her fans would just be taking mobile phone pictures, but she's no where near peak MJ in popularity. She's just pretty surgery in nice clothes, very nice clothes, but it's harder to care about someone whose only talent is making themselves look good because they're rich enough to effectively be able to focus on just that as a career.
Some boyband of which there's increasingly less support for that kind of fan base in western countries, but J pop and K pop artists would be a much bigger deal in South Korea and Japan, so may expect similar reactions over there. It's been a while since a boyband in the UK was a force to be reckoned with due to a legion of screaming teenage girls adoring them. Take That in early 90s England had probably the most rabid fan base since The Beatles.
As another poster mentioned, the Internet has diversified our tastes too much for such a cultural monolith to occur again. Something more then human would be needed for such hysteria again. Maybe a Black Friday sale, but that's a completely different kind of thing and not a person.
Beyonce is popular, but she's not MJ big. No one really is. Maybe Trump, but that's more like a cult following and a swindle, plus he's globally speaking way more loathed then he ever was respected (he's also not an artist in the musical sense, unless there's some Kid Rock duet in the works).
FuckedUp4Life t1_ja42y3g wrote
No one. Absolutely no one.