The Telegraph, and ever other newspaper and news website around the globe today, are pleased to inform us that Michael Jackson is dead and healthy and easily reachable via a Twitter seance. He’s even singing Heal the World to an audience of angels sitting on clouds (it would seem that angels have it all their own way).To prove it, psychic” Jayne Wallace conducted what is being called a Tweance, as part of a Halloween publicity stunt in a London fancy dress store. A while ago I wrote a blog named the Great Twitter Novel, the point being that we may have gone too far in our search for the ultimate trend.The question that somebody should really ask  is what now? I much preferred the traditional seances. A group of very drunk individuals, with limited inhibitions, sat in a dark room, round a table, holding hands and communicating  with John Lennon,  Mata Hari and Jesus. The table invariably hovered a bit, glasses crashed unexpectedly against the walls and someone of course screamed. Your own private Rocky Horror Show. Please don’t tell me that Twitter can replace all that. Without sounding too ancient, I really feel that culture as we once knew it is an endangered species.  Michael Jackson is as much to blame as anyone. His Thriller and Billy Jean videos on MTV signified the end and complete burial of conceptual music. True, progressive music died off towards the middle of the seventies when commercialization and Disco took its toll, but the final stake fell with the entrance of dance videos. Suddenly it wasn’t the music or the lyrics that mattered, only the cinematography. The Abbey Roads, Tarkuses and  Dark Sides of the Moon have been replaced with a group of over tanned yuppies in bikinis eating insects on a tropical island.  Ask any group of twenty year olds where the expression Big Brother came from and I am sure you know what answer you’ll get.

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