    40

    milli

    wonder sold over 39 million records.  His name was Michael Jackson.

    At first glance, Jackson seemed like an eccentric.  Yet under the surface,

    he was anything but.  For years, the subject of family ties had been taboo.

    But Michael Jackson was, beneath the surface, the ultimate family figure.

    Jackson had worked with his brothers onstage since he was five.  He had

    been coached and managed by his father.  And he actually lived in a

    bedroom in his parents' home!

    What triggered this about-face between the pop heroes of the sixties

    and those of the eighties?   The Beatles' heyday had come when our stomachs

    were full and we were curious to taste the strange.  But Michael Jackson

    arrived when we were starving.  In the mid-'80s we craved refuge in the

    familiar.  Jackson, in his own eccentric way, brought us back to the values of

    our past.

    Signs that we were trying to wrap ourselves in the safety blanket of

    tradition showed up outside the world of pop as well.  In the '60s, the motto

    had said that you couldn't trust anyone over 30, especially parents.  But a

    survey in 1986 showed that a new generation of students felt their ultimate

    heroes were... their fathers and mothers.93

    When author Lisa Birnbach went out to visit college campuses during

    the mid-80s for an article in Rolling Stone, she was shocked at what she saw.

    Gone were the long hair and rebellious attitudes she had known in her

    student days.  Torn jeans had been replaced by jackets and ties.  What's more,

    students had abandoned majors that would allow them to explore new

    territory in favor of those which would make them a safe living.  They had

    tossed aside anthropology and comparative religion, and raced to take

    accounting and finance.   Abandoning the '60s holy grail of a psychedelic

    revolution,94  the collegians Birnbach saw had revived the attitudes that

    dominated college campuses in the '50s.95

    Other backward-looking symptoms increased dramatically during the

    mid-eighties.  The number of college students who clung to Christian

      on disks seem minuscule.  With just one album, this crooning, dancing

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