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The Times | June 18, 1984

Jackson cult is giving Kremlin the blues
From Richard Owen, Moscow

Michael Jackson, the black pop superstar, is a swindle, according to the Moscow cultural paper Sovietskaya Kultura. The twenty-year-old singing and dancing phenomenon, who has sold more than thirty-five million copies of the album, Thriller, has been foisted on pop music fans the world over by brilliant marketing techniques and the genius of Quincv Jones, Jackson's manager and arranger.
Both the album and the video tape of Thriller amount to “great show business swindles", Sovietskaya Kultura said.

It added that Jackson had once performed original black rock music but had sold his soul to a white audience. "He is apolitical in the extreme, a vegetarian, sentimental and a religious believer", the paper declared, damning the pop star for ever in the eyes of all good Soviet citizens. "He wanted to be a hundred per cent white so much that he underwent plastic surgery", it added. The Kremlin is increasingly worried that what a Ukrainian paper recently called "empty and senseless Western Music" is crowding out "glorious, inspiring, Soviet songs".

Along with Western pop songs come what Soviet youngsters imagine to be Western fashions and attitudes, exemplified in T-shirts adorned with the American eagle or the stars and stripes.
"We must not let the stars and stripes into our life at this time", one paper said, referring to the new cold war. Most Russian pop fans know all about Michael Jackson, including the fact that he suffered second degree burns when his hair caught fire during the making of a Pepsi Cola commercial.

Aware that both Jackson and Pepsi seem glamorous to Russian youngsters, Sov'ietskaya Kultura ridiculed the way in which the hair burning incident had overshadowed riots in Miami and violence in Lebanon in the American media. In Moscow's discos and night clubs the fans remained unconvinced. At one night spot the resident pop singer gave impeccable renditions of two bouncy numbers from Thriller to great acclaim before revealing that he had heard them on Western radio and copied them.
Jackson cult is giving Kremlin the blues…

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Вот такую статью из архива напечатала газета Таймс сегодня - нескоро в Европе забудут наши компартийные установки относительно "тлетворного влияния" западного образа жизни. Долго еще будут тыкать и вспоминать - что нечего пускать их звезды с полосами в нашу жизнь, а Майкл Джексон стал прямо олицетворением "пустой и бессмысленной западной музыки" и вообще всякого жульничества. Не то, что "великолепные, вдохновляющие советские песни". Между прочим, некая украинская газета об этом написала. Очень хотелось бы знать фамилию автора - но кто же сейчас признается. Мастера слова, опять сплошные блины.

Однако молодежь, во всяком случае в Москве, и тогда фанатела от Джексона. А не от Кобзона и Макаревича. Что обнадеживает.

http://archive.timesonline.co.uk/tol/viewArticle.arc?articleId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1984-06-18-06-003&pageId=ARCHIVE-The_Times-1984-06-18-06