It was January 20, 2009, and a group of journalists from around the world, about half of them Americans, gathered in front of a giant TV screen in one of Harvard University buildings to watch a much anticipated ceremony – President Barack Obama’s inauguration. We watched as guests of honor were shown filing to their seats on the podium in front of the Capitol and commented on who was who. Food and drinks were being served for the inauguration watch party.
Then CNN showed a black lady wearing an ostentatious gray hat with a bow entering the scene, and a rumble went through the small crowd. “Who’s that?” I asked. It was a mistake. My friends looked at me utterly astonished. “How can you not know Aretha Franklin, the queen of soul?”
I didn’t. In the next couple of days the fact that I hadn’t known the great singer and a household name triggered an interesting discussion among the group of Nieman Fellows – mid-career journalists who come to Harvard for a year of study. How does popularity spread in the modern globalized world? What is the power of American popular culture around the world and why does one expect anyone coming from any corner of the world to know American celebrities? Why did I know, say, Ella Fitzgerald but not Aretha Franklin? How do you measure popularity? We started exchanging emails about pop icons from our own countries wondering if they were known to others.
The discussion led me to a piece of totally unscientific, but nonetheless interesting, research. And a half-joking conclusion that suddenly came to mind on Friday, when the news of Michael Jackson’s death came as a top news story in Russia, just like around the globe. And with it, some of the same questions we discussed back at Harvard in January. In the modern world, one can measure popularity in Jacksons. What is one Jackson?
I started making Google searches in various languages except Russian and Yandex searches in Russian (Yandex is Russian-speaking world’s most-used search engine) for a set of popular singers who came to mind: Americans Ella Fitzerald, Frank Sinatra and Aretha Franklin; France’s Edith Piaf, Russian pop diva Alla Pugacheva and great mid-20th century folk singer Lidia Ruslanova, and, for comparison, Cape Verdian performer Cesaria Evora, who captured the world stage far beyond the Portuguese-speaking community. A friend suggested A. R. Rahman, who was all the rage in India and many other countries with sizable Indian communities (that was before the Oscar that brought him wider international fame). Towering over my sample group was Michael Jackson with the late-January figure of 37,900,000 Google pages in English (today it has grown to 56,100,000) and, for comparison, 3,000,000 Yandex pages in Russian (today – 5,000,000). Pugacheva, on the other hand, had only 101,000 Google pages in English and staggering 4,000,000 Yandex pages in Russian. Using this unscientific but still telling method, one can conclude that Pugacheva is more popular in the Russian speaking world than Michael Jackson is and virtually unknown in the French- or Portuguese-speaking worlds, where each had only about 3000 Internet pages on her.
Jackson could easily be taken for a reference, I concluded. And that was the case in each of the language groups I sampled. If you take the number of pages in one language group – say French pages mentioning Piaf, divide it by the number of French pages mentioning Michael Jackson and multiply by 100 to avoid too many decimals, you’d come up with 5.7 Jackson rating in French. In Russian, Piaf’s Jackson rating is 12.1, which could mean that Piaf’s penetration of Russian popularity is greater in her native France itself.
Here is the table I made – with late January figures.
|
|
English (Google) |
Russian (Yandex) |
French (Google) |
Portuguese (Google) |
|
Michael Jackson |
37,900,000
|
3,000,000
|
14,900,000
|
13,500,000
|
|
Aretha Franklin |
3,440,000
|
65,000 |
605,000
|
217,000
|
|
Franklin/Jackson |
9.0 |
2.0 |
4.0 |
1.6 |
|
Ella Fitzgerald |
3,380,000
|
16,000
|
361,000
|
205,000
|
|
Fitzgerald/Jackson |
8.9 |
0.5 |
2.4 |
1.0 |
|
Frank Sinatra |
9,610,000 |
520,000
|
336,000
|
588,000
|
|
Sinatra/Jackson |
25.0 |
17.3 |
2.3 |
4.4 |
|
Alla Pugacheva |
101,000
|
4,000,000
|
3,270
|
2,930
|
|
Pugacheva/Jackson |
0.3 |
133 |
0 |
0 |
|
Lidia Ruslanova |
3,570
|
79,000
|
111
|
9
|
|
Ruslanova/Jackson |
0.1 |
2.6 |
0 |
0 |
|
Edith Piaf |
1,770,000
|
363,000
|
845,000
|
446,000
|
|
Piaf/Jackson |
4.7 |
12.1 |
5.7 |
3.3 |
|
Cesaria Evora
|
354,000
|
210,000
|
395,000 |
133,000
|
|
Evora/Jackson |
0.9 |
7 |
2.7 |
1.0 |
|
A.R. Rahman
|
3,110,000
|
197,000
|
320,000
|
204,000
|
|
Rahman/Jackson |
8.2 |
6.6 |
2.1 |
1.5 |
Does it mean that Ruslanova with 0.1 Jacksons in English, 0 Jacksons in French and Portuguese and just 2.6 Jacksons in her native Russian is a lesser figure than say Franklin or Jackson himself? Of course, not. It simply means that she lived in the pre-Internet age and sang in a genre that, although extremely popular in her time, still fell short of modern show business in the scope of its promotional activities.
Most likely, my table makes no sense whatsoever - perhaps a real scientist would come up with a better way to measure popularity in Jacksons. But it does serve as a reminder of Michael Jackson’s tremendous ability to command the world stage, and to penetrate the hearts and minds of audiences around the world. And as a reminder of how unevenly and often unfairly fame travels even in this globalized world with supposedly no borders for information.
But Jackson was an exception.
Andrei Zolotov, Jr. is Chief Editor of Russia Profile and Deputy Director of RIA Novosti Foreign Service.
