Great article on the cultural significance of
Farrah and Michael to Generation X. Most everything that needs to be covered, is. These larger than life personalities that we grew up with, who seemed too famous to ever die, have died. The thoughts and questions that many of my generation will now be thinking(some will articulate, others will not, of course..) include these three points:
What have I done with my life?
Where am I headed?
I am aging.
These thoughts don't relate to the deaths of Michael and Farrah specifically, except that their deaths brought them about by simply occurring. As our generation continues to age, there will be other celebrity icons that die, and succeeding generations will wonder why these people are also mourned with more intensity than they would mourn the passing of one of theirs(ex: Heath Ledger was tragic, but the outpouring of emotion isn't even close to the same). Before cultural fragmentation(Media access was approximately 3 to 5 television channels per town or city, one or two radio stations per area(rural) to ten to twenty(city/urban) one, two, or three newspapers per town and upwards of fifteen relevant magazines nationally), everyone had the same entertainment, so everyone had the same celebrities. You might not have liked them, but you knew who they were. And they were everywhere!
Twelve million people bought Farrah's poster in 1976. The country's population was just over
218 million people. Presuming most of the people who bought the poster were Americans,
That's One Person for Every Nineteen in the Country. That will NEVER happen again.
Whether you loved The Poster or not,
you had seen it. Between "Charley's Angels", Wella Balsam, the Bathing Suit, and Lee Majors, she was
It. In 1976 Everyone knew of Farrah Fawcett. In 1976,
Everyone You Knew knew of Farrah Fawcett.
Farrah Fawcett
Owned the late 70's,
Thriller sold over 25 million copies worldwide. That feat has never been surpassed, and nor is it likely.
Bad was considered a disappointment because it only sold eight million copies!
Check out his other stats. There is no artist living today unifying enough to sell 25 million copies (66 million worldwide - Now) of any one record, let alone dominate multiple musical formats for years at a time. Not that there aren't supremely talented people out there, they just can't be singled out easily in the daily cacophony of society's Entertainment Bombardment. Cultural Fragmentation(Short, Short Definition: Too many entertainment choices) has seen to that.
These people were, at times, during an impressionable time, a part of our daily entertainment diet. We were children and teenagers then. Now we are adults, and now they are dead. They are the first of What's To Come, for All Of Us.
So now, most of us.. we revisit our childhoods, and then, we wonder where the future will lead, both individually and collectively. And there are, for many, the beginnings of realizations about themselves, in one form or another. We're now the age we made fun of when we were young. Weird, huh? I hope, as a generation, what we find about ourselves when we look inward leads to wisdom or happiness. I hope, that with the passing of two people most of us had never met and didn't really know(yet were so ingrained within our childhood memories), they could leave us just one more gift: a little more self understanding than we had before..
So thank you, Michael, and thank you Farrah, for some of the smiles I smiled as a child, and for your part in the memories I have from that time. It was.. nice to look back.
Now, about the future..
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