No. of Recommendations: 3
Truth is, we’re all going to be erased. Maybe the Beatles will survive for a hundred years. Maybe not. It’s a distracted, self-absorbed society anymore. No telling what shiny object will capture the public these days.
I'm of two minds about it. The distracted - and divided - cultural landscape might make things disappear faster, or it might give a little more lifespan to the superstars that preceded it.
On the one hand, you have Bing Crosby. Biggest entertainer in the world during his peak, but I don't think he has much recognition today among younger people other than the ritualization of his Christmas song. Subsequent "biggest entertainers in the world" (Elvis, Beatles, Michael Jackson) kind of displaced him in less than 100 years.
In my own experience, I developed awareness of the cultural icons from before my time not through experiencing their works firsthand, but through the echoes and parodies of them. W.C. Fields, Mae West, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, even the Marx Brothers - they showed up as caricatures in my Bugs Bunny cartoons long before I was old enough to appreciate any of their content. They were so immensely popular in their day that you could use them in new cultural works pretty easily and assume most of your audience would understand the reference. But at some point after their initial superstardom and then the subsequent "echo" and ripple, they mostly disappeared - because they were replaced by then-new cultural touchstones.
We're a more distracted world these days, so maybe that hastens the degree of cultural erosion? Or maybe it might slow that cultural erosion, since there's not likely to ever be another Michael Jackson - a single most popular entertainer that's more famous than Jesus (to coin a phrase) and utterly dominates global music. In a world where it's a lot harder for a single cultural touchstone to exist, especially in music, maybe that lets the biggest ultra-mega-superstars of prior eras last a little longer? Pop music continues to change and evolve, but it doesn't seem to be able to throw up the same kind of "Biggest Star That Ever Was" that it used to. The Beatles catalog might have more value longer - and thus get recirculated into culture longer - if we aren't going to make those kinds of global superstars as regularly anymore?
Or maybe we just skipped a few decades with no ultra-mega-superstars but we'll continue to mint them - with the time between MJ and Tay-Tay just a brief hiatus...
