This article and accompanying Bertoon appear in today’s edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday (28.06.09).
I was a hundred per cent certain that the first time I had heard Bob Marley sing was on a Xandir Malta re-run of the Banana Split Adventure Show. That would have been some time in the late seventies or early eighties. I am not usually a pedant when it comes to this type of trivia but I did look for the actual reference to a Split episode that contained the Legend from Jamaica and guess what… there never was one.
The Splits show folded in 1970 and that must have been a good ten years before it appeared on that wonderful vehicle of people’s choice programs known as national TV in socialist Malta. I was convinced that I had seen (or at least heard) Bob Marley on the Splits because of the “Wo Yo Yo” tune that is world famous. The tune is actually to be found in the song Buffalo Soldier -released (posthumously) in 1983, a good thirteen years after the last episode of the Splits was filmed. So was my mind playing tricks?
Actually no. All I had to do to find out was google “Banana Splits and Bob Marley” and hey presto the answer was before me in the form of a BBC news item. What actually happened is that the Banana Split theme song – titled very unceremoniously “The Tra-La-La Song” is uncannily similar to Bob Marley’s refrain in “Buffalo Soldier”. So similar as to cause confusion among unprofessional listeners like myself – and not only. Speculation is rife as to whether the Great Rasta actually plagiarised the theme song. Apparently it would have been very hard for Bob to have heard the Split’s tune – he was not, after all brought up in an island with one TV channel for choice that was regurgitating decade old programs for the entertainment of its youth.
We are the World
My generation is a product of the late seventies and the eighties. Bob Marley or Black Sabbath was blasted out of the backs of mini minors driven by the teens we looked up to (and cringed) while we spent our pre-adolescent years on a diet of E.T., Star Wars (late I know) and Saturday nights watching Fantastico on the primo canale. In our case the keys to the doors of early adolescence, first kisses and reserves of clearasil, were held by the couple of Immaculate Liberation and Shocking Revelation soon to become the unchallenged King and Queen of Pop.
When I first met Michael he was glaring at me off a long sleeved t-shirt brought to me all the way from far-off Toronto by my emigrée cousins. There he was in his red leather jacket, curly hair and dark skin glaring daringly out of the picture. Sprawled across the t-shirt was one phrase: “I’m Bad”. It took several minutes of patient explanation from Kurt and Jonathan (that’s my cousins) for me to understand that the “badness” in question was actually very, very good. As in ultra-cool. Jackson-mania had still not hit the island so it was hard for young lads like myself to adjust to the lingo of “Beat It”.
Jackson would soon be thrilling and moonwalking all over the place and before you knew it the summer grooves blasting out of the “pimped” (although you wouldn’t use that description at the time) Escorts and Triumph Heralds would only be rivalled by the blasphemous lady of the conical brasserie. Summer in Marsalforn in the late eighties will always have Jackson and Madonna as an essential part of the soundtrack. How can I forget wooing my very first girlfriend (is it already a girlfriend at that age?) at the (now defunct) Pink Panther Pub while Madonna was controversially charming the crowds in Rome to the notes of “Like a Prayer”.
It was Michael Jackson who scrawled the words to the song “We are the World” that would be the main tune to Live Aid! – a worldwide initiative in the era before internet that brought awareness and support to the starving millions in Africa. We knew every word to the tune even if we could not access the lyrics in real time on the web. The world spun differently then but Michael was fast on his way to establishing himself as the undisputed King of Pop.
Dirty Diana
Fast forward to today and the world is a slightly different place to the idyllic, relatively slow moving eighties. Economic crunches apart, the most obvious change since then is the advent of the internet – an “invention” of another prodigious son of the fifties: Tim Berners-Lee. The fifteen minutes of fame of the Pop era are now much more easily attainable for the masses. The Netpop Age offers more minutes of public exposure to every citizen than any other era. Technology may be more and more tailored to the “i-ndividual” but this occurs in parallel to the ever more intrusive and pervasive cameras, websites and web pages that dominate our life.
The Age of Net-popularity is the age of networking and networks. I cannot recall where I read recently (probably the Economist) that the age old reliable systems of networking like freemasonry or alumni groups are fast being steamrollered out of the way as web-reliant networks such as LinkedIn kick in. Michael Jackson heralded the age of Pop and was soon to be crowned its King. His passing away was to happen in the subsequent era of Netpop that confuses emotion with curiosity, popularity with notoriety and opinion with fact. In the Net-age gossip is often confused with real news and the morbid curiosity on the private lives of others feeds many a popular machine.
The day Michael Jackson died (25.06.09) was the day Twitter crashed and the day Google’s security measures were triggered by an overwhelming number of people searching the same two terms: “Michael” & “Jackson”. The whispers of his death in Los Angeles spread like fire within a few hours. Always a sucker for superlatives, the American internet company America Online described the effect of Jackson’s death on the internet as a “seminal moment in the history of internet”.
The artist whose greatest tour was entitled “HIStory” managed to broke new barriers (on the internet) even through his death as millions of people thirsty for more information caused networking sites to shut down (that lovely US English word – “outage”). As the messiah of pop breathed his last breath the temple of information came crumbling down. It was not the day the music died (03.02.59), fifty years on. Rather ironically it was the day the internet died -or rather suffered a temporary cardiac arrest as the system could not withstand the pressure. This was amazingly summed up on Twitter by twitterer Alex Bellinger: “when the real time web breaks news, the news breaks the real time web”.
Thriller
What was actually happening was that the world was trying to get in on the news fast. Faster than ever. We wanted to check if the news was true. We wanted to know how other people were reacting to the news. We wanted to see if we could be part of this global tsunami of mourning that we were so sure would be coming on. Princess Di’s death was one of the first global deaths – in the limelight of the media. Since then the general public has gotten used to being on the frontline while peeping through the internet window.
As Michael Jackson was sped onto the back of an ambulance the last snapshots of the pop icon were taken and they would soon be sped around the ether for every voyeur instinct across the globe to satisfied. It is ironic that the Jackson family requested that their privacy be respected. Not this time it seems. The prodigy from Indiana had not even begun moonwalking his way into the heavens and HIStory was being played on radios, viewed on online video sites and read all over the place. People wanted to be part of this event and the internet offered the greatest opportunity ever to do so.
The geeks at the Guardian’s technology blog summed this new development up with the following three questions (answers in brackets): “Where were you when you heard about Kennedy being shot?” (radio, tv). “Where were you when you heard about Princess Di?” (radio, tv, text message, mobile phone). “Which messaging service did you hear about Michael Jackson’s death on?” (facebook, twitter, twitscoop etc).
Heal the world
Last week I blogged (and wrote) about the link between the new modes of communication and the empowerment of the masses such as those of Iran. Sadly, my ‘intelligent guess’ about how the protests would end up feeding the hungry net with images of brutality turned out to be right. Neda, an almost passive participant in the Iran uprising was shot dead by a sniper. I hope that locals will allow me to touch a raw nerve in the divide of local sensitivities but I must say that the bloodied image of the dying youngster being used in the campaign now reminded me so strongly of two iconic images of the eighties: that of the bloodied body of Raymond Caruana and that of a broken Madonna statue.
It is the media that might change but the message remains the same. Assaults on liberty and freedom are brought to the eyes of a world in the hope that someone, somewhere cares. As I said last week, governments might act with legendary bravado (vide Castro) and blame outsiders for the ills brought upon their people but ultimately they are nervous about their actions and like a real life Macbeth they set about washing the stains of that are the main witness to their evil deeds. While I was in Italy last weekend I read of an Iranian journalist who wrote his last letter openly on a magazine since most of the real Iranian press “migrated” to specialised magazines such as poetry or arts. In this letter the Iranian journalist noted that his fate would probably be death but that he would prefer dying while doing the job he loves than anything else.
One man who believed in a Popperian idea of liberty has passed away this week. Ralf Dahrendorf is best known as a thinker and his essays on liberty are not unknown to those engaged in the struggle. Dahrendorf began his life in an anti-Hitler society in Germany and devoted the rest of it to understanding ho best to preserve a liberty that had so dearly been fought for. One of Dahrendorf’s favourite phrases was “life-chances” – he meant choices. We should be free to choose – hence the nod to Popper’s idea that “since no one has found the grail of ultimate wisdom at least we must make sure above all that it is possible to give different answers.” Ralf Dahrendorf died on June 17th, aged 80.
You are not alone
The internet, the double-edged sword that can be both the pen of liberty and the propaganda of opiate opression, is no longer a novelty. With the death of the King of Pop we see another milestone marking the the end of an era. At the end of the day, and sadly for Jackson, the mark was not so much musical as technological. The day the internet died was the global village’s reality check about its new preferred mode of instant communication.
Even in our tiny reality the internet is helping to break old barriers. No longer can a spin easily depict public outrage against yet another development in a zone that had been designated for anything but development as some sort of jealous stint of the have-nots. It would normally take common sense to see that if a zone has been designated as Outside Development then whether it is Tom, Dick or Harry applying should make no difference. When such an application actually gets approval then the only surprise would be if there would not have been the minutest squeak of complaint.
Can you feel it?
That’s all for today but before I log out allow me to congratulate Emma and my cousin Kristoff for tying the knot. I am disappointed that I could not make it for an occasion that undoubtedly included great company and a little gourmet paradise. A toast of the very best Riesling from Luxembourg!
Jacques has been readjusting to Luxembourg weather while updating http://www.akkuza.com. Make your mark on history and come and join the discussion.
