The storm surge of social and mass media has passed over us now and we’re well into a rising tide of memorials and tributes to Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson. Facing the deaths of two iconic figures in one day seems to have touched a nerve in my generation. Strangely, though, I feel disconnected from it all.
As others have noted already, Farrah and Michael were creatures of television, performers whose cultural significance is inseparable from that medium and - perhaps more significantly - in arguably its decades of greatest cultural influence, the 1970s and 1980s. As it happens, that period is precisely when I was in exile from television, the period when my parents turned “back to the land” and turned off almost all channels of popular culture in our lives. I was vaguely aware of Farrah Fawcett – from school classmates, I assume – and I can vouch that her feathered signature style still had sway in rural Washington State circa 1982 or so. I had to look up her name, though, to know how to spell it. I was more aware of Michael Jackson; my mother gave me a cassette tape of Thriller for Christmas one year and I liked it well enough. My mother liked it more. Thinking back, it was probably part of her belated, but concerted, effort to paste some pop culture knowledge onto me, trying to build some social currency into a kid going into high school fairly well unarmed with the lingua franca. Still, without broadcast television, without MTV, without reruns, those figures couldn’t take on the mythic stature they seem to have for people in my cohort.
Looking back I can appreciate the significance of Farrah and the Angels and I hear their echo in the contemporary love for Buffy and other feminist pop culture icons. I only learned much later how the MJ phenomena forced MTV to finally open its schedule to black artists, and was the leading edge of a remarkable emergence of soon-to-be iconic black artists and entertainers – The Cosby Show premiering in 1984, Michael Jordan going pro in 1984, Oprah in Chicago in 1984 and going national in 1986, Spike Lee started rolling his own in 1986 with She’s Gotta Have It. Spike Lee was actually the first to school me about this stuff – by the late 1980s I was a film student and it was his unabashed celebration of (and help promoting) these icons that for me, and I suspect for many others, gave a name to that latter day “renaissance.” I’m sure scholars and commentators with better knowledge than I will draw a line for us from MJ to Obama in some way, and I will probably believe the argument.
All of this is to say, the sense of loss and nostalgia for Farrah and Michael seems acute - amazingly deeply felt - and it’s an odd but familiar feeling for me to not share this moment. To me, it still feels like being two steps outside a culture given shape and history by television – a medium and its deities I came to know only second hand.
