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Do you really think that Michael Jackson will have the permanence of Shakespeare or Jefferson? Young people mostly don't care about or for his music I have no
by AlisdairO 17y ago
Do you really think that Michael Jackson will have the permanence of Shakespeare or Jefferson? Young people mostly don't care about or for his music
I have no real comment on MJ as a musician, but I just wanted to point out that young people don't care about or for Shakespeare either, and haven't for a long time. They overwhelmingly tend to feel that it is something forced upon them that has little relevance to their lives. Obviously there are exceptions, but they aren't exactly the common case.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mburney 17y agoThis is not a problem for Shakespeare's legacy, since high literature is not meant for only one particular demographic group. Pop music on the other hand is targeted primarily to young people of a particular time and place, which makes it transitory and eventually forgotten.
- maw 17y agoIt's true that many young people don't care much about Shakespeare, but some people come around to reading him later in life, voluntarily. For my part, I haven't read much Shakespeare as an adult, but I have a poster about him and his language framed and mounted on the wall behind me... I mean, I now read a lot of stuff that I should (for want of a better word) have been reading in high school and college (and Shakespeare is part of that canon) and don't read much stuff I read when I was in high school. (It's true about the poster, though.) Jackson's style of music isn't really my cup of tea, but maybe the former young people of the future will come around to him too, much as I came around to listening to the Beatles.