Michael Jackson and the Death of Culture

The pop culture is rotting quickly. It didn't really last that long. Here Kevin Swanson traces the rise and the fall of pop culture, from Beethoven to Frank Sinatra to Michael Jackson and finally down to Eminem.

Kevin makes the point that social systems drive cultural expressions. Almanzo Wilder would have had Michael Jackson committed to an insane asylum. Over the last 100 years, the teen social life, the disintegrated family, the city life, the fornicating, unaccountable hook-ups and one-night-stands, eventually produced a form of culture that accommodated the social system we had made for ourselves.

But the end of this culture is in sight. Then what?