![]() ![]() Which is where Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak comes in: you see, West isn’t a superstar, but he believes he is, and that’s part of what gave him big enough balls to record this album – one of the oddest, bravest releases from a top-selling major-label artist in recent memory. These days, the difference between a major hit, a minor success, and a flop is razor-thin when even a huge debut like Taylor Swift’s Fearless can bring in fewer than 500,000 units and still take the title for biggest first-week sales for a country album in 2008, it’s clearer than ever that we’ve traded superstars for a succession of transient celebrities who lack the power to hold our collective attention long enough to truly entertain us. Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the most obvious reference point for this phenomenon, but it used to happen once or twice a year it was part of the magic of the communal culture, where popular art transcended barriers of race, sex, and age simply because everyone was selecting their entertainment from the same relatively small menu. It seems like forever ago, but in the not-too-distant past – before Clear Channel and focus groups destroyed Top 40 radio, before cable television fragmented our viewing patterns, before file-sharing brought the music industry to its knees, and before the rise of 24-hour paparazzi "news" destroyed celebrity mystique – it was possible for pop stars to do things that genuinely captivated and shocked us.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |