The entire landscape of popular music has been shaped by Elton John whether he likes it or not.
Even if it’s a little difficult to see his influence these days, anyone who has ever dared to change up their image or dissect what makes pop songs work are always going to be taking cues from what John did in his prime. But unlike most artists that have to keep switching things up every single time they make a record, John was content knowing that he had a few years when he ruled the world.
It’s not like he never tried to switch things up with his career. His turn towards making soundtracks like on The Lion King is still one of the finest musicals that Disney ever spat out, and when working with Leon Russell in the 2000s, he managed to get back in touch with that singer-songwriter style that had been kept underneath that mountain of sunglasses for so many years.
But it’s hard to really argue with the kind of track record that John had going for him once the 1970s opened up. Most people would casually point everyone towards Goodbye Yellow Brick Roadto get the full picture of what John’s music was all about, but there was a lot more to him than one spectacular album. Everything from Madman Across the Water to Tumbleweed Connection to Honky Chateau were among the finest pop records of their time, but after a peak like Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, something had to give.
No one gets to be at the top for that long, and while John did eventually fade out of the limelight, it wasn’t like he didn’t understand what was happening. That was simply how the world worked for musicians, and the ones that stick around are usually the ones that still have a lot to say outside of wanting another hit. But if there’s one thing that John found tragic, it was those few artists that chased after their stardom all their life.
And you can’t really think of an artist chasing after their own fame without bringing up Michael Jackson at some point. While ‘The King of Pop’ remained one of the most famous people in the world up until the day he died, he had been dealing with disappointing sales for over half of his professional career. Any of his records could have been anyone else’s highest-selling work, but if it didn’t sell as well as Thriller, there was no point in trying.
Then again, John knew that Jackson could get too focused on the sales half the time, saying, “It’s impossible to sustain that kind of success. You look at people like Michael Jackson, who always wanted to sell more records than Thriller–how can you expect to sell more than that? You’ve got to realize that those things come along once in a lifetime, and afterwards, you’ve got to find your feet.”
Even if Jackson did manage to steer himself away from Thriller on a few of his albums, it was hopeless for him to try to compete with himself half the time. His magnum opus has the distinction of being the highest-selling album of all time, and now that record sales are less relevant, it will probably stay that way forever, so there’s hardly a chance of anybody competing with that kind of metric.
That may have haunted Jackson, but anyone else should see that as a testament to what they were working on. Almost any song on the record was a stone-cold classic from the 1980s, and while the title track still comes up on almost any Halloween playlist to this day, that hasn’t made it lose any of its lustre along the way.
