Long Dies The King of Pop

Today Michael Jackson is still dead and people everywhere are still freaking out. As I am typing this, CNN just tweeted the date and location of the public viewing. OH and look they found his will. Michael Jackson "news" and photos were given front-page treatment by the local paper IN NEW ORLEANS for four consecutive days. At the moment, he's been displaced at the top of the NOLA.com feed by Dollar Bill but I'm sure we can expect that to change by this afternoon. According to Pew, "Fully 93% of cable coverage studied on the Thursday and Friday following his death was about the King of Pop." The fanfare is inescapable. Even if you shot your television and ran screaming from your house on Sunday, you may have run right out into a friggin second line for Michael Jackson attended by hundreds of people.


I've noticed several columnists, bloggers, and other generic opinion spewers write the same milquetoasty missive in which it is claimed, 1) The writer was not really a fan but 2) The writer prefers not to dwell upon the tabloidy freak show aspects of Jackson's life (but isn't going to not mention them) because 3) The music was "important" or it "really holds up" or some other non-negative acknowledgment (although the writer was not really a fan). What is it about the death of Michael Jackson that has stricken so many commenters with a sudden reticence to call crap crap?

Michael Jackson... or at least Quincy Jones and Pepsi and Disney and the rest of the machinery presenting Michael Jackson sold the world a sort of post-modern motown-disco fusion which, although catchy and cleanly engineered, never sounded like something produced by an actual person. Perhaps this was fitting as Jackson himself, owing to his unusual child-prodigy-celebrity upbringing, was about the farthest thing from an actual person a human being can be but more likely this is just coincidence. Jackson's well-trained voice and athleticism made him a perfect spokesmodel for the several products and fashions he was employed to promote. Jackson's legacy lies not in the music-like product he was associated with (Can we call it musicyness?) but in the innumerable industrially produced bubble-gum tabloid pop acts he helped pave the way for. Without a Michael Jackson prototype, we may never have been able to produce a Britney Spears... and THEN where would Chris Rose's career be?


As for the public freak show that we came to know Jackson's personal life as, contrary to the popular wisdom, I think there's some significance in that as well. Richard Kim at The Nation sums it up well

Without his extravagant eccentricities and ambiguous, obsessive relationships to race, gender, mortality and childhood (and children)--indeed without the conspicuously tenuous link he had to the category of the human itself--Michael Jackson would have been a B-list has-been. Most likely last seen on the latest episode of Celebrity Apprentice, his obit would have followed Farrah Fawcett's. In short, he'd be John Oates.

Our fascination with Whack-o Jack-o has never been only, or even primarily, with his prodigious skills. It was with the way he personified our culture's most central ambitions to whiteness, immortality, wealth, real estate and fame. Lodged somewhere between the superhuman and the alien, aspiration and disgust, Jackson was a grotesque reflection of our collective desires.

While never allowed to be an actual person, Jackson did become a personification of our collective ugliness. In the end as ugly, twisted and phony as the world that made and used him. Or, as Mike Gerber writes the world that took out its frustrations in ridiculing him.

Unlike say, Cary Grant, Michael Jackson had the ill fortune to be a celebrity when nightly scrutiny of a pop singer's personal habits became what passed for incisive commentary. Precisely when American power needed all the restraining that satire could throw at it, satire became obsessed with celebrities. Coincidence? Surely not. Part of this was the entertainment industry's self-aggrandizing belief that nobody in the audience knows about anything but entertainment--which, after fifty years, has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But even more powerful was simple risk-aversion. Any Jackson joke was risk-free. Since he was both celebrity and inhuman autopilot, the material flooded forth; and in that flood was protection, safety in numbers. That's why it all felt strangely impersonal, as if this "Michael Jackson" we were all laughing at didn't exist as a person. To the extent that anybody I knew spared a thought for the guy, the human being, they decided he deserved it for being so weird. Such is the compassion of the herd.

On the other hand, as Adrastos points out here, ridicule of the Michael Jackson phenomenon DID help bring Weird Al Yankovic's career to greater prominence in the 1980s. And the world was certainly a better place for that.

Title modified slightly post-publication. It's still a bit weak.