…when we talk about Michael Jackson.
The Michael Jackson death hasn't really hit me, not in the way that other deaths have: Princess Diana, Benazir Bhutto, The Exploding Hearts, Heath Ledger. Each one a sock to the gut. I admired his music, or at least some of it, from afar, but I never really gave myself over to Jackson entirely. Born in 1984, Jackson has, for the entirety of my awareness of popular culture, been the 'weird' Michael Jackson, the post-Bad psychological decline. Plagued by failing health, troubled with child molestation charges, and ridiculed in tabloids. I admire individual songs: "Beat It" and "PYT" and "Smooth Criminal" and "Man in the Mirror" (maybe the song that, thirty years from now, we'll understand as his psychological signature) and most of Off the Wall. And of course his recordings with the Jackson 5 -- I especially have a soft spot for one of their more underrated singles, "(Stop!) The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)." I admire his confidence and innovation as a dancer: it is not for nothing that Jack Haley Jr.'s That's Dancing!, the astonishing compilation about the history of popular dance on film, devotes one of its final segments to Jackson and his incredible skill, earning plaudits from Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire.
Maybe for me the disconnect is because as far as I can tell, the Michael Jackson that we mourn today has been dead for a long time - he faded away some time in the late 80s or early 90s, when the psychological pressure of being the world's most watched entertainer and the haunting memories of a traumatic childhood of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse became too much. By that time, Jackson had already begun to undergo plastic surgery and skin bleaching, but it was really with his purchase of Neverland and the self-isolation that brought that Jackson regressed fully into his attempt to reclaim his lost childhood.
But then I was walking up Amsterdam Ave. last night and passed a street cafe playing "Beat It" at full blast, and I was, for a few moments, overwhelmingly moved. Not for Jackson, though I recognize the tragedy of his life and feel an incredible sadness for his children, but for us, collectively, for his fans, and for the lost innocence for an American generation that his decline symbolized. For the rise of a newly antagonistic tabloid media in the 1980s that coincided with and fed off his decline. As with "Elvis" before him, "Michael Jackson" has overwhelmed us, overwhelmed his music, and finally overwhelmed Michael Jackson himself.
In reading appraisals of Jackson's life and career, I've noticed a few distinct approaches, and I'd like to address three thoughts on how the media has responded to Jackson's death:
1) Symbolism: many cultural comments have addressed Jackson's life as a series of symbolic moments, each fraught with psychological and narrative weight. Roger Ebert's astonishing article regarding Jackson in light of his performance in Sidney Lumet's The Wiz is chief among these, but also Amanda Marcotte's, which takes the course of the last two decades of Jackson's life as a study in self-delusion, the centerpiece of which was his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley ("He appeared to have no understanding of the world outside of the funhouse of celebrity, even marrying Elvis Presley’s daughter, as if pop stardom was some new monarchy and this was an alliance he had to create.")
2) A categorical unwillingness to address in any in-depth terms the very thing Jackson was best known for the last two decades of his life. The vast majority of polite think-piece obits I've read have relegated the pedophilia/child molestation charges to a few sentences or a brief paragraph buried near the end of the article (I'm looking at you, NY Times). When mentioned, most official media sources are making sure to remind their readers that Jackson was never convicted of the charges, despite the fact that libel charges cannot be brought up by dead people. Jim DeRogatis of the Chicago Sun Times is one of the major writers who breaks from the trend, making clear his feelings on the issue, even if it is buried in the third-to-last paragraph:
Nor could the disturbing facts that in 1995, he settled charges of having sexual relations with a 13-year-old boy by reportedly paying the child's family $20 million, and that a decade later, Jackson faced criminal charges for having sex with another minor.
Good for him. People always conveniently forget/misremember the fact that Jackson paid $20 million dollars to have the charges against him dropped. $20 million dollars. That is a lot of hush money, especially for something that wasn't exactly under wraps. I get it that Jackson was an arrested development case who had never progressed past age 12, but the man very likely committed heinous acts upon innocent children, and it's impossible for me to ever distance the man and his moral lapses from his music.
3) I would've been curious to be inside a photo editor's head last night: which Jackson to put on the cover? The young member of the Jackson 5? The King of Pop circa the release of Thriller? The latter-day plastic surgery grotesque? Many, it seemed, sought a middle value by placing images of Jackson from the early 90s: The New York Times chose a recent image, but the Daily News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Los Angeles Times went with images from his Dangerous tour, and the Post chose a promotional image from the same era. The WaPo hedged their bets with an image of a young Jackson and the same image as the one on the NY Times cover, while the Chicago Sun Times provided a fourteen-image montage taken from throughout his life. I think this approach is perhaps the most appropriate, because Jackson over the course of his life and career represented so many different things to so many different people that we need to understand him in terms of his multiple visual personae. He was all of these 'characters' and more in our popular narratives. The image at the top of this post is, in fact, taken from the Sun Times website.
To close, a Youtube video I haven't seen posted a lot. Standing on the precipice of his decline, Jackson delivers an astonishing performance of maybe his most self-revealing song. Two thirds of the way through the performance, the music breaks down, and Jackson, kneeling in the center of the stage, leads the choir in the song's anthemic refrain: "Take a look at yourself / And then make a change." It's haunting:
(Edited to add point #2 - I'm not innocent of forgetting to address Jackson's iniquities myself.)
Print This Post