Michael Jackson was one of music’s most successful and influential artists. The singer, who CNN reports died earlier today in Los Angeles at the age of 50 (reps did not immediately comment), recorded a series of pop classics as part of the Jackson 5 and then became a massive solo star. His 1982 album Thriller has been certified platinum 28 times in the U.S. and is the best-selling original collection ever released.
Jackson was born in Gary, Ind., on Aug. 29, 1958, and by the age of 6 the prodigiously talented singer and dancer was performing alongside his brothers. The Jackson 5 signed to Motown in 1968 and released a string of huge hits including “ABC” and “I Want You Back.” Jackson entered the charts as a solo artist in 1972 with the song “Ben,” and in 1978 he appeared in the big screen musical The Wiz alongside Diana Ross. The following year, his album Off The Wall established Jackson as a solo superstar. Yet, even the success of that release would be dwarfed by Thriller, which included a raft of global smashes, including “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.”
Jackson followed up Thriller with 1987’s Bad, which itself eventually sold in the region of 30 million copies worldwide. But the star’s public profile was badly damaged in the ’90s when he was accused of child sex abuse, and in recent years he had become an extremely reclusive figure. Despite his reputation as one of pop’s greatest dancers and all-round in-concert showman, he also effectively abandoned touring. However, Jackson had planned to play a series of dates in London, starting next month.
While his personal life often attracted criticism and controversy, the oft-dubbed King of Pop’s influence on the musical realm is unarguable. That influence was demonstrated in 2008 when Kanye West, will.i.am, Fergie, and Akon all contributed to the remixes that featured on the 25th anniversary release of Thriller. In his long career Jackson also worked with some of pop’s most talented artists, including both Paul McCartney and Thriller producer Quincy Jones.
R.I.P.
Whatever he became, his talent and impact were indelible. He was my first favorite artist – and I still recall dancing to Bad on the boom box in the late 80s (I was 4 at the time). What a shock!
I was never a fan, I confess, of his slick soul/pop — but damn it if a wedding reception ain’t a wedding reception without “Don’t Stop (‘Til You Get Enough)” and with good cause!
I am numb with shock. Actually I never expected to be as affected as I’ve been since I’ve heard the news. Partly this was totally out of the blue (even if there were health issues) but partly the fact that there had been so much craziness and controversy surrounding him for so many years that one sort of ignored anything he did after the 80s. But I was reflecting on this today and realized that in a sense these fatal flaws are also part of the ‘cultural fabric’ of a truly legendary icon like Jackson. We see this again and again. Monroe’s issues. Elvis’s problems including the terrible weight towards the end, so on and so forth. Between Thriller and Bad Jackson completely altered his physicality. This too is part of the legend. As is Neverland and so much else. Jackson was really a new beginning, a new kind of pop star. There are only a handful like him in American pop history, people who’ve meant everything to their age.
RIP—more applicable here than in the deaths of many others. His passing is practically Shakespearean when you consider just how far beyond redemption he lived (the consequence of his own actions and the actions of others). Part of me always felt there would probably never be peace in him until he died; but I largely find myself mourning the fact that he never had a fair opportunity to obtain that peace while alive.
I was NOT a fan per say, but fascinated by him. Raw talent flowed out of him the way it doers for so many prodigies. Like Beethoven, Mozart, Armstrong, Sinatra, Dylan and Lennon before him, he was born to music instinctually. I’m older than some of you here at WitD, and younger than a few. But as Sam and some of the other bloggers like myself can attest, we knew Jackson had the inner spark the moment we saw him on TV back in the 70’s. Diana Ross brought him to the attention of Berry Gordy, and he brought Michael to the world. I could never say he was my favorite but, damn, you couldn’t resist him. May he find the peace he sought in the other realm. He will never be forgotten. My sadness also goes out to Ed McMahon and Farrah Fawcett.
And to comment on Farrah Fawcett. I don’t think there was a teenage boy alive that didn’t have that poster of her in a swim suit flicking her hair and smiling directly at YOU hanging on the wall of their bedroom for J.O. inspiration. Thw woman was HOT! And, later in years, she would prove (with films like THE BURNING BED and THE APOSTLE) that she was a hell of an actress. I know she was severly suffering from cancer in the past year and I’m releaved to here that her0 suffering is finally over. I’m saddened by her death and my condolences go out to Ryan O’Neal and the rest of her loved ones. She was one sexy bitch! Dennis
I went to bed every night for over twenty years with Ed McMahon (and his ring leader, Johnny Carson). The legend that became THE TONIGHT SHOW was refined and perfected by this duo and has inspired legions of late night wannabe’s. Nobody did I’d better than Carson and McMahon though. From Ed’s famous introduction of “HEEEEERRREEE’s JOHNNY!” To his famous his famous “HI-YO” to kick off the monologue, Ed was the perfect pitch man, confidant and loyal listener. When a joke was funny or Johnny was on a ramble it was Ed’s hearty and uncontrollable laughter in the side seat that sold the punch lines. Ed just being there made the show funnier. Together Ed and Johnny took the show from the confines of a Hollywood soundstage and turned it into the coolest party in YOUR house. They were part of your family. Since them others have tried and come close (Letterman the obvious heir-apparent) but no cigar. God, this man gave me such fond memories. Bye Ed!!
All of you have added so much to the the memory of this incomparable iconic figure. In fact to say he’s iconic is an understatement. It’s late at night and my wife just came home with a Michael Jackson DVD at the request of the kids. My 13 year-old daughter is particularly fascinated with him, and none of them can quite understand why he died so young. Of course my wife Lucille, who is 46 now grew up with him. Like others here I wasn’t a huge fan of his music, but I recognize his genius, and how he shaped music as we now know it.
T.S. That was quite the eloquent assessment there, with the Shakespearean parallel and the fact that sadly he never gained piece while he was alive. Of course there will always be the detractors, as in the case of one rather nasty e mail I received bringing up all the child molestation stuff.
Kaleem and Movie Man: What can I say, your comments have brightened his legacy in most irrefutable terms.
Jon: I hear you, as I corroborated earlier.
Dennis: Lovely testimonial there, and one that certainly puts his staggering talent into the right perspective. Yes, the Fawcett and McMahon passings were most lamentable as well.
Sorry about some of the typo’s and spelling people. My computer is down and I’m literally blogging from my Blackberry! Bare with me! Dennis
Strip away the music, the wealth, and the hype, and you are left with a child pushed out into the limelight, who never goes back home, lost and alone in a world of artifice and empty celebrity, and who in a way never grew up. A tragedy indeed.
The parallels with Elvis are haunting. Iconic new music from troubled young men, the pinnacle of success, and the slow decline into caricature and self-loathing fueled by venal medicos with prescription pads.
[...] Excerpt from: A Very Sad Day… Michael Jackson Has Passed Away « Wonders in the Dark [...]
There’s one glaring difference between Elvis and Jackson and I don’t think I need to even mention it. Still, I agree that this rise and fall is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. I have never been a huge fan of his music, but am familiar with a lot of his work and do like it. Just a sad fall from grace.
I think you need to as I haven’t a clue.
As far as I know Elvis never had multiple allegations of child molestation?
True…although Priscilla was 14 or 15 when Elvis started dating her.
Just sayin’.
Dave, I was drawing connections, not comparisons. There is no bigger Elvis fan than me.
I got you, Tony, reading back now I can see where I interpreted things a bit differently than you likely intended. Agreed on Elvis – I was listening to the sit down show from the 69 comeback special this afternoon!
No worries Dave. Those Burbank shows are for me the greatest jam sessions of all time – pure and unalloyed rock.
I agree with most of the sentiments here. It is tragic for anyone to die so young. Never a fan of Jackson’s, yet he was a consummate performer and talented beyond compare. His personal demons, like Elvis, drove him to his downfall. Ironically, John Lennon, who recognized the entrapment fame, could cause and backed away from it all during his “house husband” years would still not escape an ill-fated destiny.
For Farrah, here is a woman who wanted to be more than just a sexy blonde. While a limited actress, she had the guts to reach beyond – tackling the stage, way before it was fashionable for Hollywood stars to take their summer vacations on Broadway. She reached for the sky and admirably in TV movies like “The Burning Bed”, “Murder in Texas”, and “Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke White.” She never quite received the respect she wanted, and now she is ironically over shadowed in death by the passing of Michael on the same day.
Ed McMahon’s death probably hit me the hardest. Growing up with Johnny Carson and Ed, the “Tonight Show” was a ritual. No one did or does late night TV like these guys. Ed was the perfect second banana and you could see the genuine affection these two men had for each other. Only about a year ago, Ed came to Ruth Eckerd Hall in Clearwater with a show titled “Tonight Show Memories.” Not sure, that is the correct title but that is the gist. A nostalgic look back down memory lane at his classic years with Johnny.
R.I.P.
in THE NEW YORK TIMES:
An Appraisal
Tricky Steps From Boy to Superstar
By JON PARELES
Which Michael Jackson will be remembered? The unsurpassed entertainer, the gifted and driven song-and-dance man who wielded rhythm, melody, texture and image to create and promote the best-selling album of all time, “Thriller”? Or the bizarre figure he became after he failed in his stated ambition to outsell “Thriller,” and after the gleaming fantasy gave way to tabloid revelations, bitter rejoinders and the long public silence he was scheduled to break next month?
In the end, the superstar and the recluse were not so far apart.
Mr. Jackson built his stardom on paradox. As a child star he was precocious; as an adult he was childlike. His only competition was himself. Within the razzle-dazzle of his songs, he sang about fears and uncertainties in that high, vulnerable voice: flinching from monsters in “Thriller,” wishing he could just “Beat It” when trouble began.
He was a racial paradox, too: an African-American whose audience was never segregated, but whose features grew more Caucasian and whose skin grew lighter through his career, to discomfiting effect. His own face had become a mask.
All of Mr. Jackson’s show-business skills — the ones he learned under his father’s sometimes brutal instruction and then within the Motown Records hitmaking assembly line — were at once a way to please the broadest possible audience and to shield himself from them, safe within his own spectacle.
Despite all his time onstage and on the air, Mr. Jackson stayed remote: styled, rehearsed and choreographed. He had one of history’s largest audiences, and it never really knew him.
There was no denying his talent. His voice leaped out of the radio in Jackson 5 songs like “I Want You Back,” even for those who didn’t see how he danced on television. He internalized Motown’s philosophy of making music for a broad audience — not just a black or white audience as pop grew increasingly segmented in the 1970s — and when he took over his own career, with “Off the Wall” in 1979, he applied that philosophy to the newest sounds he could find, in and out of discos.
His ambition was seductive when he urged “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.” He offered something to everybody on “Thriller,” which may have been the most strategic crossover album to date: a duet with a Beatle in “The Girl Is Mine,” dizzying electronic beats in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” rock guitar in “Beat It.”
His established stardom helped get his African-American face onto MTV, breaking what seemed like a color line, in what was a hugely beneficial step for both. Mr. Jackson wasn’t just an old-school show-business expert who could sing and dance onstage in real time; he was also more than ready for the music-video era, turning his songs into high-concept video clips that fit the chorus-line production of old Hollywood musicals into television-sized nuggets.
His dance moves were angular and twitchy, hinting at digital stops and starts rather than analog fluidity — except, of course, for his famous moonwalk, the image of someone striding gracefully without ever leaving center stage.
The world-beating success of “Thriller” was Mr. Jackson’s triumph and burden. He had the sales, the Grammy Awards, the screaming audiences in every country he toured. And he would spend the rest of his career trying to repeat the experience working many of the same maneuvers into his music: another duet, another rock guitar, another ratcheting dance track. Mr. Jackson never stopped being catchy, but behind the sheen some of the songs grew darker and stranger, like “Smooth Criminal,” with its intimations of violence, on the 1987 album “Bad.”
Mr. Jackson labored; his albums came four, five, six years apart. The hip-hop era had arrived, with its bluntly candid lyrics and quick-and-dirty productions, both contrary to Mr. Jackson’s style; he tried to keep up the crossover with raps from the Notorious B.I.G., but that didn’t buy him street credibility.
The songs grew increasingly divided between benevolent messages like “Heal the World” and spiteful ones like “Why You Wanna Trip on Me” on his 1991 album “Dangerous.” On his 1995 album “HIStory” — which started out as a greatest-hits collection but added a second album of new songs — Mr. Jackson’s fury boiled over in new songs like “They Don’t Care About Us” and “Tabloid Junkie.”
Part of the pop audience — and critics, too — took pleasure in Mr. Jackson’s setbacks. He had long been billing himself as the King of Pop, and the cover of “HIStory” shows him as a giant statue, the kind that gets toppled when tin-pot dictators (or pop idols) are overthrown.
The underlying sweetness that had made Mr. Jackson endearing, even at his strangest, had curdled, and he couldn’t resuscitate it for his final album, “Invincible,” in 2001. All the pieces he had put together, all the paradoxes that he had been able to resolve with sheer musicality, started to fall apart. He was working on a stadium spectacle for shows in London this summer, and we will never know if all his skill and showmanship could have given him a new start.
The entire nation -and the world- is in deep grief. You hear nothing else, and that’s the way it should be.
R.I.P.
I have been crying since I heard the news yesterday. It’s just too painful.
If anyone we should be looking at the loss of Farah Fawcett who brought
national attention to anal cancer a rare incideous disease and her lust for
life…it really makes me sick that we focus on this freak instead…no matter
how talented he was!
Is anybody thinking about the children who were his victims. I feel sorry for his family’s loss but all this attention is unwarranted. HE WAS A FREAK !!! Hopefully, our good Lord will allow him to RIP.
This is such sad news. Even though he was a very controversial figure, he was also extremely talented and gave a lot to the entertainment industry. I saw him and his brothers and sisters in concert at Radio City Music Hall around 1975 and the show was fabulous.
Ok Janet-did you know that Mozart was writing Opera at the age of 4 and liked to play dress up with his “lady” friends till he died at 35? Did you know that Walt Disney was an Opium addict and was obsessed with model trains? Beethoven was stone cold deaf and wrote his best music after losing his hearing. Tchaikovski was homosexual. Rock Hudson wore dresses. Truman Capote, Tennesee Williams and Gore Vidal were all practicing bottoms (aka-the feminine member in relatinships) and all obsessed with their mother. Are all of these titanic talents freaks? Look in a mirror before you start laying labels on people. Jackson was bizarre, no doubt. But, wouldn’t you be if you were ripped from family life as an adolescent and thrust into the spot light like he was. Just because he didn’t fit into your norm doesn’t make him a freak. I’m sure there are plenty of skeletons in your closet.
just like he wanted to buy the elephant man remians .ithink some one should buy his and have him stuffed and sent to disneyland so people can pay a price to look at him , the same thing he wanted to do,ps, you cant cheat death no matter how rich or sick your ,he always wins
Who the hell is this guy above?
Well I can see Schmuley is allowing all the mentally challenged to comment on this thread. That last one must be from Fairview NJ.
As far as Michael Jackson is concerned…. I will withold comment.
Count me as one who aches over this. It’s a tragedy of epic proportions, and no moralistic twist can lessen the loss.
If I may, I’d like to direct readers to a very fine eulogy by film critic Richard Corliss that attempts to make sense of Jackson’s darker side while remaining respectful. I think it’s the best piece I’ve read since the pop-king’s passing:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1907344,00.html
That is quite a revealing piece there Jon, that goes a long way in explaining this troubled icon, and thanks for linking it here. Geez, his father always told him he was ugly. I guess that didn’t set the stage for the life he led in his later years.
Finding Neverland
He was a music legend and a legendary oddball. Now that he’s gone, perhaps we can finally answer the question: who was Michael Jackson?
David Gates
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jul 13, 2009
True, for a while he was the king of pop—a term apparently originated by his friend Elizabeth Taylor—and he’s the last we’re ever likely to have. Before Michael Jackson came Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles; after him has come absolutely no one, however brilliant or however popular, who couldn’t be ignored by vast segments of an ever-more -fragmented audience. Not Kurt Cobain, not Puffy, not Mariah Carey, not Céline Dion, not Beyoncé, not Radiohead—not even Madonna, his closest competitor. When the news of his death broke, the traffic on Twitter caused the site to crash, even though he hadn’t had a hit song for years. But starting long before and continuing long after he lorded over the world of entertainment in the 1980s—his 1982 Thriller remains the bestselling album of all time—Jackson was the Prince of Artifice. As the prepubescent frontboy of the Jackson 5, he sang in a cherubic mezzo-soprano of sexual longing he could not yet have fully felt. As a young man, however accomplished and even impassioned his singing was, he never had the sexual credibility of a James Brown or a Wilson Pickett, in part because of his still-high-pitched voice, in part because he seemed never to fully inhabit himself—whoever that self was. In middle age, he consciously took on the role of Peter Pan, with his Neverland Ranch and its amusement-park rides, with his lost-boy “friends” and with what he seemed to believe was an ageless, androgynous physical appearance—let’s hope he believed it—thanks to straightened hair and plastic surgery. (No one—least of all Jackson himself—would have wanted to see the Dorian Gray portrait in his attic.) He did his best to construct an alternate reality on top of what must have been an initially miserable life: imagine Gypsy with—as Jackson claimed in interviews—a physically abusive father in place of Mama Rose, set among Jehovah’s Witnesses. Which was the more imaginative creation: his music or his persona?
In retrospect, so much of what Jackson achieved seems baldly symbolic. This was the black kid from Gary, Ind., who ended up marrying Elvis’s daughter, setting up Neverland in place of Graceland, and buying the Beatles’ song catalog—bold acts of appropriation and mastery, if not outright aggression. (Of course, Elvis and the Beatles had come out of obscurity, too, but that was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away.) He made trademarks of the very emblems of his remoteness: his moonwalk and robot dances and his jeweled glove—noli me tangere, and vice versa. He morphed relentlessly from the most adorable of kiddie performers (his 1972 movie-soundtrack hit, “Ben,” was a love song to a pet rat) to the most sinister of superstars: not by adopting a campy persona, like those of his older contemporaries Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne, but in real life, dodging accusations of child molestation, one of which led to a trial and acquittal in 2005. (One shrink concluded at the time that he was not a pedophile, but merely a case of arrested development.) The 2002 episode in which he briefly dangled his son Prince Michael II (a.k.a. Blanket) over a balcony in Berlin, above horrified, fascinated fans, seemed like a ritualized attempt to dispose of his own younger self. And eventually his several facial surgeries, a skin ailment, serious weight loss, and God knows what else made him look like both a vampire and a mummy—Peter Pan’s undead evil twins. That is, like the skeletal, pale-faced zombies he danced with in Jon Landis’s 14-minute “Thriller” video. When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.
But whatever strictly personal traumas Jackson may have reenacted and transcended—and then re-reenacted—he performed his dance of death as a central figure in America’s long racial horror show. He was, quintessentially, one of those “pure products of America,” who, as William Carlos Williams wrote in 1923, “go crazy.” To take the uplifting view, enunciated after his death by the likes of the Rev. Al Sharpton, he was a transracial icon, a black person whom white Americans took to their hearts and whose blackness came to seem incidental—along with Nat (King) Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Sam Cooke, Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and, inevitably, Barack Obama. As a singer-dancer, he clearly belongs not just in the tradition of Jackie Wilson, James Brown, and the Temptations—who seem to have been among his immediate inspirations—but also in the tradition of such dancing entertainers as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, who, in turn, drew from such black performers as Bill (Bojangles) Robinson. In the 1978 film version of The Wiz, Jackson even appropriated and reinvented Ray Bolger’s old role as the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz. And as a messianic global superstar, he resembles no one so much as his father-in-law, Elvis Presley (who died long before Jackson married his daughter), a transracial figure from the other side of the color line. When Presley’s first records were played on the radio in Memphis, DJs made a point of noting that he graduated from the city’s all-white Humes High School, lest listeners mistake him for black. Given the ubiquity of television, nobody mistook the wispy-voiced young Michael Jackson for white, but it seemed, superficially, not to matter.
Yet Jackson, always the artificer, surely knew that part of his own appeal to white audiences—who contributed substantially to the $50 million to $75 million a year he earned in his prime—lay initially in his precocious cuteness, and when he was a grown man, in his apparent lack of adult sexuality. He was energetic, charismatic, and supremely gifted, but sexually unassertive—unlike swaggeringly heterosexual black male performers from Big Joe Turner (”Shake, Rattle, and Roll”) to Jay-Z (”Big Pimpin’?”). He neutered himself racially, too: his hair went from kinky to straight, his lips from full to thin, his nose from broad to pinched, his skin from dark to a ghastly pallor. You can’t miss the connection between these forms of neutering if you know the history of white America’s atavistic dread of black male sexuality; the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, for supposedly flirting with a white woman, is just one locus classicus. That happened only three years before Jackson was born; when he was 13, he was singing “Ben.” No wonder Jackson chose—with whatever degree of calculation—to remake himself as an American Dream of innocence and belovedness.
No wonder, either, that the artifice eventually turned scary, and the face of the icon came to look more and more corpselike. Readers of Toni Morrison’s latest novel, A Mercy, might recall the passage in which an African woman tells about her first sight of white slavers: “There we see men we believe are ill or dead. We soon learn they are neither. Their skin is confusing.” That’s the middle-aged Michael Jackson to a T. Jackson arguably looked his “blackest” on the original cover of 1979’s Off the Wall; by Thriller, the transformation had begun. Off the Wall was his declaration of manhood: it came out the year he turned 21, and it was his greatest purely musical moment. Why did he feel so deeply uncomfortable with himself? The hopeless task of sculpting and bleaching yourself into a simulacrum of a white man suggests a profound loathing of blackness. If Michael Jackson couldn’t be denounced as a race traitor, who could? Somehow, though, black America overlooked it, and continued to buy his records, perhaps because some African-Americans, with their hair relaxers and skin-lightening creams, understood why Jackson was remaking him-self, even if they couldn’t condone it.
As with Ernest Hemingway—another case of deeply confused identity and (who knew?) androgynous sexuality—we need to look past the deliberate creation of an image and a persona to appreciate the artistry. A more masterly entertainer never took the stage. In 1988, the New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff called him “a virtuoso . . . who uses movement for its own sake. Yes, Michael Jackson is an avant-garde dancer, and his dances could be called abstract. Like Merce Cunningham, he shows us that movement has a value of its own.” Better yet, Astaire himself once called Jackson to offer his compliments. As a singer, Jackson was too much of a chameleon—from the tenderness of “I’ll Be There” to the rawness of “The Way You Make Me Feel” to the silken sorrow of “She’s Out of My Life”—to stamp every song with his distinct personality, as Sinatra did, or Ray Charles, or Hank Williams. But these are demigods—Jackson was merely a giant. (And how’d you like their dancing?) As a musical conceptualizer, probably only James Brown has had a comparable influence: Jackson and his visionary producer, Quincy Jones, fused disco, soul, and pop in a manner that can still be heard every hour of every day on every top-40 radio station—only not as well. Tommy Mottola, former head of Sony Music, called Jackson “the cornerstone to the entire music business.” The best recordings by Jackson and Jones—”Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “Billie Jean”—belong identifiably to their time, as do Sinatra’s 1950s recordings with the arranger Nelson Riddle. Yet like Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String” or “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning,” they’re so perfect of their kind that they’ll never sound dated.
The night before he died, Jackson was rehearsing at the Staples Center in Los Angeles for an epic comeback—a series of 50 concerts, beginning in July, at London’s O2 Arena. If that sounds impossibly grandiose, consider that all 50 shows had already sold out. People around him had been wondering if he was really up to it, and the opening had already been put off by a week. He was 50 years old, after all: long in the tooth for a puer aeternus—eight years older than Elvis when he left the building, and a quarter century past his peak. Jackson had had health problems for years. Drug problems, too, apparently: in 2007, according to the Associated Press, an L.A. pharmacy sued him, claiming he owed $100,000 for two years’ worth of prescription meds. And money problems: in 2008, the ranch nearly went into foreclosure—he defaulted on a $24.5 million debt—and even the $50 million he stood to realize from his potentially grueling London concerts might have seemed like chump change after the glory years. And of course, just problems: his very existence—as a son, as a black man—was problematic. In his last days, did the prospect of a comeback, of remythologizing himself one more time, excite him as much as it excited his fans? Did his magical moments in performance have an incandescent density that outweighed what must often have been burdensome hours and days? Ask him sometime, if you see him. Whatever his life felt like from inside, from outside it was manifestly a work of genius, whether you want to call it a triumph or a freak show—those are just words. We’d never seen anyone like this before, either in his artistic inventiveness or his equally artistic self-invention, and we won’t forget him—until the big Neverland swallows us all.
The Transformer
When a piece of pop art dies.
David Hajdu
Michael Jackson was a great many things, as we’ve been reminded in innumerable encomia since his death, and his special place in pop-culture history has to do not only with the multitude of his qualities, but also with his elemental thingness. When I think of Jackson, my mind goes immediately to the 1980s, when he emerged in full force as a performer with those colossal hits of the early video era: “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” “Thriller,” and more. I picture him bedecked in epaulettes and satin, zippered tight into that glimmery, sexy-scary military uniform, which carried all the thematic content of Cabaret in one outfit. Though he began performing professionally with his brothers in the Jackson 5 as a child in the 1960s, and though he had his first solo success in the Seventies, Jackson is very much a figure of the Eighties, and I mean no disrespect to a great artist now departed when I say that he brings to mind a particular kind of figure specific to the mid-Eighties: an action figure called a Transformer. I can’t help but suspect that Jackson would have relished being remembered in terms of a wondrous toy, a commercial object of juvenilia designed to enact miraculous transformations from humble living form to one of all-powerful robotic magnificence. Indeed, I can easily imagine Transformer as a title for one of the albums he is understood to have recorded but never released in the eight years since his last CD, Invincible.
In the lingo of the music business, musicians are known as artists, and the art they create is called product. Michael Jackson, indisputably a fine musician–indeed, one of the most original and influential singers in the history of American music–clearly conceived of himself as product; and he made the packaging of that product–his self-construction, in both marketing and surgical terms–his artform. It has been a commonplace of cultural journalism for years now to decry the commodification of the arts. For Michael Jackson, nearly as much as for Andy Warhol in another sphere, the commodification of the artist was the art.
A student of P. T. Barnum, Jackson no doubt understood the marketing value of his self-inflicted freakishness. He had a tent-show master’s gift for providing sensation and melodrama, as well as rousing entertainment. It was a gift in wane since his trial for child molesting, at which he was acquitted in 1993; still, when the news first came yesterday evening that Jackson had been hospitalized in the midst of rehearsing for what was supposed to have been a series of extravagant comeback concerts, I received a round of emails from longtime Jackson watchers who couldn’t resist wondering if we were all giving in to a tasteless publicity stunt. The idea, cynical as it may sound, was essentially a compliment to a one-time virtuoso of the tabloid arts.
“Remember when we was young, everybody used to have these arguments about who’s better, Michael Jackson or Prince?” asked Chris Rock in an HBO concert special five years ago. After a beat, Rock said, “Prince won.” The point seemed incontestable at the time; while Jackson grew increasingly reclusive and fell inactive musically, Prince retained his usual prolificity and adventurousness. Yet, Jackson’s best records–especially his breakthrough solo album, Off the Wall, from 1979–endure as perennially irresistible dance pop, more fun (if less challenging) than most anything in the vast output of his old purple rival. Speaking for myself, I (1) cannot dance and (2) cannot sit still for more than a few seconds of “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough.”
Jackson’s singing, like that of other primary artists such as Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, or James Brown, is easy to imitate but all but impossible to equal. If influence is a measure of a value, Jackson is almost immeasurably significant as a vocalist. The evidence is in the sheer number of singers to follow him who have emulated his style: his distinctive laryngeal tone, his tight vibrato, even his ticky hiccups and penchant for turning open vowels in long warbles. Without Jackson as their model, George Michael, Babyface, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, and countless others simply would not be the singers we know.
The great tragedy of Jackson’s life is that, in the end, he was no longer the singer we once knew. He had long ago transformed into another sort of creature, a weird monster who had once made us want to dance, not run. We’ll never know now if, on the stage again in London, he would have been able to change back.
David Hajdu is the music critic for The New Republic.
Michael Jackson: The Man Who Wasn’t There
John McWhorter
I have been telling friends for fifteen years that Michael Jackson would not live past fifty, although I didn’t expect to be so precisely on the mark. An overdose, a botched medical procedure, or maybe just something as fortuitous as a car accident.
That is, I sensed nothing as mundane as a death wish or as common as self-destructive tendencies. It just always seemed to me that there was something unreachably and definitively absent about the man. For all of the eclat, there seemed to be nothing actually there – surely, before long he would just blow away.
I was no more immune than anyone else to feeling a loss oddly incommensurate with the fundamental evanescence. I grew up hearing the boy-child version of Michael crooning the Jackson Five’s hits in that creamy falsetto, and in college, he helped me cope with the drudgery of my dining hall job as one cut after another from Thriller became a hit and played endlessly on the P.A. system. Almost every song on that album had the precious quality of bearing hundreds of listens – to this day, who in America doesn’t jump to the dance floor upon hearing the opening vamp of “Billie Jean”?
Apparently even Iraqis do: the New Yorker told us recently that Michael Jackson is preferred music among Iraqi prisoners. How many other American pop songs of 1983 get them moving? People not born in 1983 can do snippets of the dance Michael did in the marvelous Thriller video. Ever try to do a moonwalk? Even if you got kind of good at it, Michael Jackson doing it can still take your breath away.
In the early eighties there was a good deal of talk about him as the world’s greatest entertainer – and it was a rare instance where the hype was more than that. People used to say it about Al Jolson – but the modern viewer is baffled as to what all the fuss was about. They said it about Sammy Davis, Jr. too – and while he holds up better than Jolson, nothing he did makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. With Michael, there was The Voice, The Moves, and a whole somehow greater than the sum of the parts.
The problem was that as he got older, parts seemed to be all there was; the whole became increasingly difficult to perceive. The skin bleaching was strange enough – and his telling Oprah that it was vitiligo and expecting to be believed even stranger. Here was a black man – and one who was a megastar — actually using the kinds of products that look so peculiar and degrading in ancient black newspaper advertisements today. And then the facial surgery, which made him look not only whiter but more feminine.
The question, which he never even ventured an answer to, was why. Who was this personnage supposed to be? White? Gay? Perhaps we were to allow that he was just being “him.” But leaving unanswered just who that “him” was supposed to be was, most charitably interpreted, too far ahead of our times. It left him a faintly gruesome cipher.
Or, why the high voice? As males mature their voices deepen: “High Talkers” of the kind depicted in the Seinfeld episode are vanishingly rare. Michael’s castrato-style vocal tone was an affectation, more alteration, as it were, although likely one that became so much a habit for him that it was, in essence, him. How many men do you know who talk in a light falsetto 24/7?
One cannot help noticing a possible connection with Jackson’s vaunted identification with children and his desire to inhabit the realm of childhood as an adult. And plenty of us are kids at heart – but most of us don’t talk like them.
Here we will recall certain unsavory allegations as to how concretely and in what fashion Jackson was interested in connecting with children, especially non-female ones. It is unnecessary to dwell on the issue at this juncture, but what we did know is that he went through decades of adulthood without any outwardly apparent normal romantic relationship with anyone.
His relationships with his wives were rather oddly formal and brief – when Lisa-Marie Presley made sure we knew that their relationship included sexual relations, what was key was that she would feel the need to let us know that.
Never did we see Jackson with her or the other wife cavorting and consorting in the fashion of Brangelina or, in better days, Jon and Kate. These were “wives,” not wives – recalling in Michael’s earlier days his purportedly “dating” Brooke Shields. Today having become real to us with her memoir of postpartum depression, Shields back then was a rather saliently blank model and sort-of actress – for him, a kind of paper doll, i.e. “date.”
Who did Michael Jackson really connect with? He was not one for hanging out with men or women of his age group, for example. Ask most people who Michael Jackson’s best friend was and the answer would be Elizabeth Taylor. However, open up your laptop and start with a blank page. Your job is to script a scene between Jackson and Liz Taylor. How would you begin? What in the world did they ever say to each other?
During an interview with Barbara Walters, holding hands with then-wife Presley, Jackson mentioned that his father had sometimes scared him so badly that he regurgitated into his mouth. The childhood was horrific, in a way that would have left most people scarred. Jackson’s response was apparently to seek a childhood he never had – but doing so as a grown man can only mean spending your life playing a part, even if you no longer know you’re doing it.
It was sad to see. The essence of Michael Jackson as an actual human being was so elusive that it was especially flabbergasting to hear him, when making a public cri de coeur against his prosecution for child molestation, actually referring to something as immediate as an examination of his penis. More typical was his appearance on an early episode of the Simpsons – in the guise of an obese white man — and uncredited. Concealment as always, not really there or of this world, albeit in the world spotlight.
This quality of his was such that his career was likely over long ago. Thriller was perhaps the last moment when hit pop music for people beyond tween-age could be so basically innocent and unprobing of the individual soul. Even back then, part of the charm was the arrangement – his vocal skills acknowledged, Jackson didn’t write or orchestrate that opening vamp to “Billie Jean” nor did he create the dense festival of sonic joys under “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),”which are certainly part of the reason I have now purchased Thriller three times.
But even by Bad in 1987, Michael’s crotch-grabbing in the video of the title song was a “bad” move indeed. It was fake – looking more like Diana Ross every year, he looked about as plausible taking a page from increasingly popular rappers as Bonnie Raitt would have. It wasn’t him – at a time when pop was more and more about exploring the self. As time went by the hit singles were fewer and farther between. “Scream” from the HIStory album in 1995 was the last song of his that got around in any real way.
Six years later when Invincible never really rang the bell in the old way, Jackson interestingly cried racism (against Tommy Mottola). But if anything, the problem was that by then the question as to his own blackness was decidedly abstract. Or at least, he wasn’t “real” as it was put by then. By 2001 black rappers were all over the pop charts with cuts about themselves, in da club, in da car, in da hood, in da honeez, all up in dat bizness, whatever – rap is all about the “I” as some more literary-minded aficionados have it.
But “I” is exactly what Michael Jackson never wanted us to see, if he even knew what it was himself. Interestingly, a Michael Jackson circa 1980 would be a smash on American Idol today – but would likely fail to get much of anywhere afterward like Taylor Hicks and Ruben Studdard. Winning over a cross-section spectrum of American call-in voters today requires a certain faceless, generic quality that does not translate into stardom in the real-world market of niches and attitude. Jackson was on his way to becoming a nostalgia act.
Michael Jackson’s was an entirely constructed self. The temptation to call this “quintessentially American” in the vein of the story of our President’s quest for self-definition must be resisted. The self that Michael Jackson constructed was a mask. Fittingly, Jackson was last officially sighted in public through the window of his van, wearing, as apparently was his custom, a veil over his mouth – i.e. a mask over the mask.
Michelangelo said that when he sculpted the David statue, David was already inside the block of marble and his job was just to take away what was not David. Jackson worked against nature’s endowment just as diligently, but surely the pale wraith he became was not something that had been waiting to see the light of day. Rather, what Jackson seemed to find was a negation, a mangling of personhood – what else can we say of someone attending a court date for child molestation in his pajamas? The irony is that despite this man’s towering stature as a keystone of American popular music’s history, there is surely a part of all of us that sees the man as more fortunate resting in peace.
Michael Jackson: An Imperfect Icon Who Was America’s Global Face
John Nichols
This is a big world, with many remote corners where America is known only as a distant and different land. But Michael Jackson touched almost all of them.
The music star’s death Thursday, at age 50 after suffering an apparent cardiac arrest is an international event. And we ought to recognize why that is so.
For all the eccentric – and ultimately unsettling – behavior that would see the “king of pop” ridiculed as the “king of weird” –-or worse– Jackson was for a significant part of the 1980s and 1990s as much or more the face of America as Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton.
“He brought human beings together across the barriers of race and class and gender,” explained Michael Eric Dyson, the author and commentator who is a professor of sociology at Georgetown University. “He projected into the world (the genius and strength) of African-American culture.”
The better part of a quarter century before Barack Obama was credited with remaking America’s global image, Michael Jackson presented the United States as a country where an African-American kid from Gary, Indiana, could on the basis of remarkable talent and drive become fabulously successful, fabulously influential and fabulously wealthy.
One did not need to revere Jackson or his music to recognize that at a particular point in this country’s long and complicated history of wrestling with its better angels and darker demons, the singer projected to the world the sense and the promise of a multicultural and tolerant United States.
For a time, on the basis of the enormous popularity of his Off the Wall and Thriller albums, he was not just a dominant figure in popular music. He was the dominant figure in popular music. Inducted twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame – as a solo artist and as a member of the Jackson 5 — he earned 13 Grammy Awards and 13 number one singles as a solo performer — achieving worldwide sales in excess of 750 million albums.
The key word is “worldwide.”
Jackson’s 1991 hit “Black or White” charted at number one in the Australia , Austria, Belgium, Cuba, Denmark, Finland, France, Israel, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, the Unites Kingdom, Zimbabwe and, of course, the United States.
“Black or White” was an angry song with an anti-racist message that was reinforced by a video digitally enhanced to show Jackson smashing windows with graffiti reading “KKK Rules” and “No More Wetbacks.” The ubiquitous video featured the singer dancing with Africans, Asians, Native Americans, southern Asians and Russians.
Jackson was not an expressly political artist — he told Ebony magazine in 1992 that “I never get into politics.” Yet, because of his immense celebrity in the 1980s and early 1990s, his determination to treat people with AIDs respectfully (like that of Princess Diana and Elizabeth Taylor) took on significance that was both political and cultural. That commitment was most on display, following the death of Ryan White, when Jackson used public appearances – particularly one at Bill Clinton’s inaugural gala — to plead for more funding of HIV/AIDS research and care.
Jackson’s charities were many: programs for refugees and the victims of violence such as Warchild, the “We Are the World” project and his own Heal the World Foundation, as well as the the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, the Red Cross, UNESCO and for many years the United Negro College Fund.
His stumbles, especially in recent years, were disturbing, at times horrifying. There was about this desperate manchild more than a hint of the tragic and self-destructive.
The tragedy and the trials will be remembered, for a time.
But, as with Elvis Presley and so many brilliant artists whose lives ended after their stars had been tarnished, it will be the iconic influence – an influence stretching across boundaries of race, class, gender and nationality — that is most remembered when we speak of Michael Jackson, and the ultimately most significant.
‘King of Pop’ leaves the legacy of a boy prince
Famous since childhood, singer was never comfortable in adult world
COMMENTARY
By Michael Ventre
Most kings are destined to be remembered as kings, not as the person they had been before ascending to power. Even though Michael Jackson earned recognition as the “King of Pop,” the legacy he leaves is that of a boy prince.
Michael Jackson was never comfortable in the adult world. Early on he recognized he would be the happiest in the land of Ferris wheels, cotton candy, docile animals and 24/7 playtime, and he clung to that life. He looked at film of the Jackson 5, circa 1968, noticed the front man was a kid, and wondered whatever happened to that boy’s childhood.
Michael Jackson passed away today. It’s always sad when parents outlast their children. It’s even sadder when the inner child and the adult can’t decide who will go first.
In 1966, when Michael Jackson was almost 8, the Jackson 5 was born. Soon after, these talented young men from Gary, Ind., found themselves playing in seedy nightclubs and dodgy strip joints. That isn’t so bad, in most cases. The musical artist who demands only a dignified path to stardom usually spends a lonely life in the garage or basement. Humble beginnings, or even humiliating ones, come with the territory.
But when you’re a kid, and your father is pushing you ever harder to work and achieve and succeed like Joseph Jackson pushed, the road becomes mean and the spirit turns cold. Michael’s boyhood was Dickensian, even though he grew up in a tight African-American family from an unforgiving industrial region of the Midwest that went on to become rich.
The world knew that Michael Jackson — the 8-year-old with the mini-Afro, the 1,000-watt smile and the footwork of a vaudevillian — as being perennially upbeat. But inside, he had to be wishing that he could skip the next gig and hang out with some kids his age. He had to be lamenting the fact that while the family was going places, he wanted to remain behind a little longer in childhood.
As he grew older, he became a greatly admired creative force. The “Off the Wall” album in 1979 sent his star into a new galaxy. “Thriller,” in 1982, became the biggest-selling album of all time. He had movie projects, he bought the Beatles’ catalog, he did “Captain EO” for Disney theme parks, he co-wrote “We Are the World.” He seemed to have his gloved hand in everything.
Fame made him tabloid fodder
But amid all the success, there was the residual dissatisfaction and longing. The more famous he became, the more he seemed to withdraw from the attention, usually in highly peculiar ways. Much of what was written about him was fiction. Yet because he had a chimpanzee, because he owned Neverland Ranch with all its childlike wonder, because he seemed to alter his physical appearance with each public appearance, he was constant fodder for the media, legitimate and otherwise.
He also made headlines with two marriages, first to Lisa Marie Presley and then to Deborah Rowe, with whom he had two children. The scrutiny intensified.
Like any showman, Jackson drew the spotlight to himself. He was quiet, soft-spoken and fragile, but he knew the business as well as anyone. The freak, the eccentric, the “Wacko Jacko,” might all have been unflattering descriptions, but a lot of the buzz was the result of his own orchestration. He knew that when Michael Jackson set one foot onto any stage, the klieg lights would illuminate it. And when he could work it to his advantage, he did just that.
The struggle between the naïve child and the savvy grown man turned Michael Jackson into a riddle of which the press and the public never grew tired.
The interest was never greater than during Jackson’s trial on sexual molestation charges near Santa Barbara, Calif., in 2003. He was eventually acquitted, but it revealed the most inappropriate aspects of Jackson’s desire to be among children. Whether you were a cynic who felt he was a pedophile who escaped justice, or whether you were a supporter who believed he was a misunderstood genius who only wanted to help people, he certainly seemed to invite trouble, whether through naivete or lasciviousness or a strange brew of both.
After that, there were various Michael Jackson reports. He was living in Bahrain. He was living in Nevada. He was preparing a major tour. He was pondering an extended engagement in Vegas. He lost Neverland Ranch. He made a deal to save it.
What usually was missing from any Michael Jackson report in the past 25 years or so was the music. There was a time when soul and rhythm and blues ruled, when Motown was a dominant force in the record business, when acts such as Stevie Wonder and Diana Ross and the Temptations and the Four Tops and Marvin Gaye were as big in their world as the Beatles and Elvis Presley were in theirs.
They didn’t get that way through subterfuge, gimmicks or spin. They crafted radio-friendly songs that were vibrant and passionate and original, and they made an impact on the music business that is still felt today in newer generations of artists.
The Jacksons were right in the middle of all that. They produced hits such as “I’ll Be There,” “I Want You Back,” “ABC” and “Never Can Say Goodbye” that burned up the charts and remain pop classics. Then Michael went solo and combined songwriting prowess with performance legerdemain to become one of the most astonishing acts ever. Songs such as “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “Rock With You,” “Billie Jean,” “Beat It” and “Thriller,” to name a few, have endured — and will endure.
Perhaps those songs will make future generations forget about the unusual and the unfortunate involving a modern-day prince with king-sized accomplishments and a child’s imagination.
No Celebrity Supernova Burned Brighter Than Jackson At the Peak of His Career
By Richard Corliss
Michael Jackson’s glorious decade began with a forgotten failure. Michael hadn’t yet turned 20 when he got his first co-starring role in a big movie: The Wiz, a black version of The Wizard of Oz that had been a hit on Broadway. Jackson was cast as the Scarecrow, and he studied hard for the role, his impossible flexibility and cheerful demeanor making him an ideal companion to Diana Ross’s Dorothy. But nothing in the project jelled. The Wiz was an expensive flop, with one important asterisk: Jackson struck up a friendship with the film’s musical supervisor, Quincy Jones.
For nearly a quarter-century, Jones had been helping singers sound their best: Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald. The Wiz was just a bump in Jones’ yellow brick road, or perhaps a fortunate detour. Jackson, already ensconced at Epic Records, asked Jones to produce his next album. It would be a great career move for both men. Off the Wall, their first collaboration and Jackson’s fifth studio album, was the one that shaped MJ’s style, spawned some hits and sped him toward superstardom. (See the top 10 Michael Jackson moments.)
The new assurance was evident from the album’s first single, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” With a disco beat indebted to the Bee Gees’ Saturday Night Fever and a lyric that was suggestive enough to reportedly incur the disapproval of Michael’s mother Katherine, the song went to No. 1 on the U.S. charts. Jackson’s voice hadn’t changed, but he amped up the level of urgency and authority and tried out the first of the grunts and squeals that would become a vocal trademark. That was surely thanks to Jones; you can almost hear him pushing Jackson to stand tall and sing what he feels, even if words can’t possibly express it. “Everybody sang high in Motown, even Stevie [Wonder],” says Jones. “I wanted to feel the full range of his voice, and I wanted him to deal with more mature kinds of themes. That’s why ‘She’s out of My Life,’ a song that Tommy Baylor wrote about the very bad ending of a marriage, that I was saving for Sinatra, I did with Michael. Because Michael I don’t think had ever dealt with an emotion that deep in just a regular normal romance. And he cried on every take. Every take we did, he cried. I left the tears on the record because it was real.” Off the Wall launched four singles into the Billboard Top 10 and eventually sold 20 million copies. That made it a giant of its day; it would be a midget next to the album that followed.
Even in his 20s, Jackson’s ambition was as hard as his voice was soft. Privately he never hid his desire to become the biggest force in entertainment, and when he and Jones regrouped to begin work on Thriller in 1982, Jackson had every intention of making a career-defining colossus. The amazing thing is that he made such a lovable one.
Jackson and Jones sifted through more than 700 songs by the best professional songwriters in a quest to find nine perfect tracks. “We turned that album upside down,” says Jones, and arguments over material were common. Jackson loved the iconic bass line for “Billie Jean”; Jones did not — score one for Jackson. But gradually the two felt confident that they had a record that was all hits and no filler, something the entire world would love — and purchase.
Put Thriller on right now and you’ll be amazed at how easily the troubling last years of Jackson’s life melt away. For Generation X the magic is partly nostalgic; everyone between the ages of 35 and 45 remembers exactly where they were when they heard “Beat It” for the first time. But as a piece of music, it remains the greatest pop album of all time. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is the closest thing Jackson has to an overlooked song; not only does it open the album and set a frenetic pace, it also lays out Jackson’s ambitious musical agenda — from the disco beat to the rock timbre of the vocals to the closing refrain of “Mama-se, mama-sa, mama-coo-sa,” cribbed from a hit by Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango. Thumping and fraught, “Billie Jean” is a sound track to a late-night walk through a sketchy neighborhood. It actually makes Michael Jackson sound dangerous, which is no small feat. Jackson never got much credit for being a pioneer, but “Beat It,” his melding of rock and R&B, preceded the collision of Run-D.M.C. and Aerosmith by four years. Besides featuring a guitar solo provided free of charge by Eddie Van Halen (in a move his accountant no doubt regrets), it’s the best example of Jackson’s ability to bridge moods and genres. It’s tense and spooky. It rocks you while you dance to it. Like all of Thriller, it’s a sophisticated joy. (See the 100 best albums of all time.)
On its way to becoming the best-selling album of all time (until it was eclipsed in 2000 by The Eagles Greatest Hits, 1971-1975), seven of Thriller’s songs cracked the Top 10, and the record was immovable atop the Billboard chart for 37 straight consciousness-altering weeks. Consciousness-altering because Jackson was not just dominating the sound waves — he owned the world’s airwaves too. After The Wiz, Jackson never had a major role in a Hollywood film. Didn’t matter; in a way, he was too special a performer, too big a star, to be part of a director’s vision. TV would be his multiplex, MTV his studio, in the minimovies that defined the genre. Sony Music boss Tommy Mottola, who tried to shepherd Jackson through the later, difficult years, is hardly exaggerating when he says, “There was nobody before Michael Jackson, and there will never be anybody after Michael Jackson, that can do for video what he did. It put the MTV culture into the forefront … He totally defined the video age.” In fact, it was Jackson’s video that in effect forced the integration of MTV; until “Billie Jean,” MTV was mostly lily-white and content to be so.
“Billie Jean,” the first video off Thriller, snapped the neck of everyone who saw it. Based on an absurd real-life incident in which a woman accused Jackson of fathering one of her twins (“She says I am the one/ But the kid is not my son”), the song is a denial of paternity — a celebrity’s cry of victimhood. But the video is a straight-on display of Jackson’s star quality. Any pavement flagstone his feet land on glows a magical green. His moves are no less radiant. The spins, the strutting and hunching, show what Broadway missed out on when Michael decided to make pop music instead.
From “Billie Jean” to “Beat It” (both songs written by Jackson) was another leap forward, and up, with some dexterous star spins in every other direction. Jackson’s first video connection to contemporary urban street life, it argues that, between fleeing and fighting, it’s better to flee — dancing. The Michael character hears a rumble, dons his red jacket (the must-have fashion piece of 1984) and breaks up the battle by leading the gang members in a routine out of West Side Story but with starker, more staccato moves. A worldwide video as well as audio smash, “Beat It” helped send the MTV logo and format around the globe. For the next decade, if a performer wanted to promote a song, he or she had to make a minimovie to go with it.
Each succeeding Thriller video was more elaborate than the last, expanding in length and complexity. The title video ran nearly 14 min., with the song encased in a narrative that had Michael and his screen girlfriend (Ola Ray) watching a horror movie that comes to life — or rather, undeath. Surrounded in the woods by zombies, Michael becomes one of them, leading the creatures in choreography that would have exhausted any living being.
When it appeared Jackson could simply get no bigger, he divided his talent into 45 little parts and shared it. Inspired by Bob Geldof’s Band Aid, Jackson and Lionel Richie co-wrote 1985’s “We Are the World,” which raised millions for famine relief in Africa and, on the night of the American Music Awards, brought together almost every major pop singer in America in a Los Angeles recording studio. Parts of “We Are the World” have aged poorly (the whole thing went from idea to recording in just 12 hours), but the composition itself is a wonder — flexible enough to deliver a serious message and accommodate the vocal styles of everyone from Kenny Rogers to Bob Dylan. And when Jackson sings the bridge, it’s a classic, “’scuse me, genius coming through” moment. His style — so clear and urgent — tops them all. (See pictures of the young Michael Jackson in his own backyard.)
Any groundbreaking performer in the rock era is lucky to have a few transcendent summers. The magic amalgam of a star’s creativity and an audience’s rapture can evaporate after two years with, say, an Army induction (Elvis) or after four with a motorcycle accident (Dylan). Sometimes, just turning 25 will do it (Brian Wilson). Madonna lasted longer because she was the Mistress of Makeover. Most find it hard to maintain either popularity or emotional equilibrium. And the brighter they burn, the faster they burn out.
Jackson, as we know, hung around, adding notoriety to his fame and descending, to put it gently, into curio status. But even another two decades of steady hits would have been a decline from the fever pitch of Thriller. The album marked a moment in American history that few singers dream of, let alone achieve: the convergence of talent, material and production that finds universal acclaim. That’s part of what makes Jackson’s death so historic: he was one of the last singers — Paul McCartney is another — whose songs are literally known everywhere by everyone.
Thriller and “We Are the World” and his introduction of his signature step, the moonwalk, on the Motown 25th-anniversary show took Jackson to an unfathomable level of fame. Jackson was more than a crossover artist, but cross over he did. He was revered by kids black and white — authentic enough to please urban audiences and unthreatening enough to set suburban ones at ease. He was adopted as a cause by Nancy Reagan (they both liked red) but, despite “We Are the World,” was shrewd enough to keep his politics to himself. Still, he showed a succession of African-American cultural figures how to transcend race — Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Oprah Winfrey and, finally, Barack Obama. Michael was neither black nor white; he was sui generis, a brother from another planet.
Even as he cranked out another huge record — 1987’s Bad, still the only album in history to generate five No. 1 hits — he began to antagonize those who worshipped him. As he added a cleft to his chin and bleach to his face, as his cheekbones got higher and his nose keener, as he sat at a press conference next to Bubbles the chimp and hung out in public with Macaulay Culkin, the love and respect millions felt for Michael got more … complicated. The kid was adorable. The young man was a thriller. The older man, who clung to a dangerously naive belief in childhood innocence, was in trouble.
And there we reach the cliff’s edge. But before Michael Jackson toppled over it, he generated one final keeper, the toweringly indulgent but well-meaning “Man in the Mirror.” It’s one of Jackson’s most powerful vocals and accessible social statements. It also contains a fleeting glimpse of autobiography (“I’m starting with the man in the mirror/ I’m asking him to change his ways.”) But by then, we knew better than to confuse the singer with the song.
Michael Jackson’s place in exclusive pantheon
By Diego Urdaneta
Agence France-Presse
Posted date: June 29, 2009
LOS ANGELES—With a genre-transcending musical style, awe-inspiring dance moves and jaw-dropping record sales, Michael Jackson transformed the entertainment industry like few others in history.
The King of Pop, who died Thursday at age 50, goes to his grave still holding the all-time record for album sales for 1982’s “Thriller.” Over his nearly four-decade career, he sold more than 750 million albums.
“All the planets were aligned; everything was where it needed to be,” said Jerry Del Colliano, a professor at the University of Southern California.
“You take some luck, some talent, some ability, the right time in history,” he said.
While Jackson’s star dimmed late in his life, his death sent global shockwaves like few other celebrity passings could with fans across continents spontaneously singing and dancing his songs in remembrance.
Across the recording industry, virtually all artists from pop to rock to electronica declared Jackson to be one of the greatest influences in modern music.
“He has been an inspiration throughout my entire life and I’m devastated he’s gone,” pop starlet Britney Spears told People magazine.
“He made the music come to life!! He made me believe in magic. I will miss him!” said the hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs.
From another side of the music world, John Mayer, a blues and rock guitarist, said on Twitter: “A major strand of our cultural DNA has left us.”
M.I.A., the British-born rapper of Sri Lankan descent who recorded a track for the Oscar-winning film “Slumdog Millionaire,” said that Michael Jackson was “the first two English words I ever spoke.”
“The future sucks!” she opined.
Jackson’s death instantly transformed Britain’s celebrated Glastonbury rock festival, where the music temporarily switched to the King of Pop, uniting thousands in dance. Singer Lily Allen paid tribute by appearing on stage wearing a white glove.
Musical publications — from influential Rolling Stone to the US indie-rock online bible Pitchfork — all dedicated themselves to the King of Pop.
And his influence was not just in the United States. In nations as different as China and Denmark, fans flocked to mourn Jackson — and to remember the early era of cultural globalization that he represented.
The 13-time Grammy winner was “a real American export that has worldwide appeal and is beloved all over the world,” Del Colliano said.
Del Colliano said that Jackson — one of the few artists admitted twice to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame — belonged to an exclusive pantheon of musicians with historic influence such as The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra.
Jackson’s influence is partly a reflection of his own openness to different musical styles. On the “Thriller” album, Jackson goes from rock guitar on “Beat It” to late-disco-era dance on the title track to slower, more meditative tracks drawing on his African-American heritage.
“He has been such a pivotal transformational figure in American and global music,” the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader, told CNN.
“His music has torn down walls and built bridges,” Jackson said.
Michael Jackson was also on top of his game in adapting to the latest industry trends. He was the first African-American artist to appear on MTV, which while reluctant at first later hailed Jackson as its greatest asset.
Jackson showed the new possibilities of music videos with “Thriller,” a 14-minute production with special effects that more closely resembled a mini movie than the music-videos which were then mostly promotional footage.
Jackson also helped pioneer the idea of mega-concerts — grand theatrical spectacles where the music was just one part of the experience.
He used one televised concert to unveil the “moonwalk,” his forward-and-backward-at-once dance that was a stark contrast to his typically brash, almost jittery moves.
Jackson left the scene at a dire time for the music industry. New media — and the loss of big-target artists — have decimated record sales.
“It is not an accident that the music industry declined in direct proportion to the loss of radio and the loss of some of the biggest acts in recording history,” Del Colliano said.
Kaleem, thanks for all the articles but particularly the Corliss one, which is wonderfully written, and manages to focus on the music without letting the personality slip out of sight. I also like that squeezes in “Man in the Mirror” as “one final keeper” as that’s the song that made me a fan of the King of Pop at a very young age, before, as Corliss puts it, we reach[ed] the cliff’s edge.” Interestingly, he did not write the song but he definitely made it his own.
Glad you liked them MovieMan. The Corliss was indeed a fine one.
By the way, I couldn’t really understand Sam’s reaction (though I take it as genuine) until today. I’d watched a bunch of the videos last night, read some of Kaleem’s pieces, and had been thinking about Jackson and remembering, long ago, how I once felt about him when I was a little kid and an unadulterated fan – before all the bad press got too heavy. I hadn’t remember that in years (see the thread I directed Sam to for a more in-depth explanation).
I was burning a CD to play when I visit my family this weekend (my aunt was a Jackson devotee through thick and thin) and when I played the upbeat, energetic “The Way You Make Me Feel” I suddenly felt…sad for the first time about the whole thing.
Of course it’s silly to “mourn” someone you’ve never met as if you knew them, but I don’t think that’s exactly what’s going on here. The death is just a trigger for something else…for me, I rediscovered not just Jackson but a lost part of my youth, and the disappointment in the direction the pop star took certainly has its parallels elsewhere in my life (and everyone’s). We mourn our own lost innocence, and passing lives, and frustrated, disappointed relationships. Just as a movie or a piece of music can sometimes epitomize and mythicize something buried within us – a memory, an emotion – so sometimes individuals do too, and sometimes it’s the individual AND their work, or the fusion of the two.
And of course, that’s what art’s all about.
Moving comment here MovieMan.. I completely see where you’re coming from. And you say far more lucidly here what I was trying to formulate earlier which is that the death of a public figure cannot be compared with that of a private individual precisely for some of the reasons you state. Thanks for this comment.
New comic book will pay tribute to Michael Jackson
I’ve finally posted a belated tribute of sorts to our fallen idol here.
Jon, you accidentally left out any kind of a click link here. But I will happily visit your site.
Actually, if you look closely, you’ll see that the phrase “a belated tribute of sorts” in my comment above is wrapped with an “a href” tag.
Jon, at 54 years old, I’m afraid my eyesight is ever so surely abandoning me!
No worries, Sam…that green is hard to spot! I don’t have the best eyes, either.
The Guardian
[The memorial was, in a way, Michael Jackson’s final performance
Half-memorial, half-music concert, this was, in a way, Michael Jackson’s last ever “gig”. But it was a surprisingly sombre affair, and far less of a spectacle than you might have imagined. The first striking thing about it was that, for a few historic minutes, it was televised live on all the main news channels, terrestrial and cable, enhancing the impression that this was, indeed, a bigger deal than the death of Elvis Presley.
Then you might have noticed how “black” it was, ironic considering Jackson was vilified for so long for betraying his roots, the rumoured bleaching of his skin an apparent denial of his ethnicity. All the performances, save the one by Mariah Carey and a surreally out of his depth Shaheen Jafargholi, a finalist from Britain’s Got Talent, were by African-Americans, although it was reported that Whitney Houston offered her services and was turned down.
The Andrae Crouch Choir set the strange yet solemn tone, singing, “Hallelujah, we’re going to see the king!” as Jackson’s gold coffin appeared. Carey’s version of I’ll Be There was a bit shaky; it was also the only performance, no offence to Usher, by any of the megastars of the last two decades. Given his stature, you might have expected Madonna or Prince, Jackson’s only rivals in terms of success and global reach, to turn up, or Beyoncé, Britney and Christina, the machine-R&B/cyber-soul generation that he helped spawn, but they were all conspicuous by their absence. Even Justin Timberlake, who has made a career out of aping Jackson’s moves and vocal tics, declined to appear. And where was Diana Ross?
Queen Latifah, reading a poem by Maya Angelou, began the programme of salvaging Jackson’s reputation, rescuing him from the mire of scurrile and gossip, and elevating him to godhead status. Lionel Richie added gospel gravitas with his rendition of Jesus is Love, but the first highlight, and probably the overall highlight, came courtesy of Stevie Wonder, who prefaced breathtaking performances of two of his most exquisite early ballads, Never Dreamed You’d Leave In Summer and They Won’t Go When I Go, by saying, “This is a moment that I wished I didn’t have to see”. When he turned to address the coffin for a personalised, impassioned final line from the latter song – “Michael, why didn’t you stay?” – it was overwhelming.
Smokey Robinson was affectionate and warm in his anecdotes but didn’t perform, which was a shame because he, more than anyone, influenced Jackson’s early singing style. John Mayer’s mainly instrumental version of Human Nature was tasteful but left you wondering why, of all people, he had been picked. Usher, a lifelong Jackson fan, was emotional from the start and, for a moment, seemed as though he might sing a version of She’s Out of My Life only with a change of pronoun to “he”; instead he sang Gone Too Soon from the Dangerous album. Jermaine Jackson’s voice displayed some of his younger brother’s feminised inflections during Charlie Chaplin’s Smile, Michael’s favourite song, while Shaheen Jafargholi’s Who’s Lovin’ You just made you miss the astonishing version of the Smokey Robinson song that Michael sang at his 1968 Motown audition.
The finale was meant to be a glimpse of the This Is It extravaganzas that never were. Kenny Ortega, director of those shows, came onstage to melodramatically announce that they would have comprised Jackson’s “triumphant return to the world” and “his greatest work”. But all we got were today’s celebrity invitees, the Jackson family, plus some random children, singing Heal the World; hardly the cosmic, amped-up version of Jackson’s dazzling 1997 world tour that Ortega had tantalisingly hinted at.
It was left to the sequence of images screened during the memorial, of Michael morphing through the ages from a young black boy into an adult, alien androgen, looking amazing in 1984 as he met Reagan in full stylised military regalia, in full balletic flight circa Bad, as a cosmonaut in that Scream video – some of the greatest images of one of the greatest pop stars the world has ever seen – to remind us of Jackson at his height. But this was all about the human being, not the hyper-creature of lore. Still, muted as it was, it was improbably moving.]
LA Times:
[Michael Jackson: A requiem for a king
In the end, they brought Michael Jackson to the one place where his life always made sense -- beneath a spotlight and in front of his adoring fans. The superstar, in a gleaming gold coffin, was celebrated in a Staples Center memorial service that was beamed around the world and, like the icon himself, strove mightily to be all things to all people.
With family, celebrity peers, politicians, preachers and even professional athletes taking turns at the microphone, the polished but emotional service was meant both as a farewell and as a deeply sympathetic framing of the star's complicated legacy.
The Rev. Al Sharpton brought the crowd to its feet by drawing a direct cultural line between Jackson's incandescent 1980s pop success and the 2008 election of President Obama. "Those young kids," Sharpton said of Jackson's massive crossover audience, "grew up from being teenage comfortable fans of Michael to being 40 years old and being comfortable to vote for a person of color to be the president of the United States of America." Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) praised Jackson as "a uniquely American hero," and music veteran Smokey Robinson judged him to be, simply, "the greatest performer of all time."
Sharpton and several other speakers alluded to media persecution of Jackson, who died June 25 at age 50, but one speaker who had known Jackson for more than four decades suggested that the reality is not that tidy.
"Sure there were some sad times and maybe some questionable decisions on his part, but Michael Jackson accomplished everything he ever dreamed of," said Berry Gordy, the Motown Records mogul who signed Jackson to his first record deal after an audition in the summer of 1968.
There were many memorable images, but for the years to come the signature moment may have been the public debut of sorts of Jackson's 11-year-old daughter, Paris Michael Katherine Jackson. Protected and, literally, veiled for much of her life, the youngster said through tears:
"I just wanted to say, ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him so much."
The ceremony was by turns somber, evangelical, thunderous and hushed. There was humor, as well. Former Los Angeles Lakers star Magic Johnson recounted how his nervous first visit to Jackson's mansion ended with the pair sitting on the floor and feasting on Kentucky Fried Chicken; Brooke Shields, who was an especially moving speaker, told how she used to tease Jackson about his most famous fashion choice.
"I'd tease him about the glove," Shields said, referring to the solitary silver glove that became Jackson's trademark. " 'What's up with the glove?' and 'If you're gonna hold my hand, it better be the non-gloved one because the sequins hurt.' "
Audience members danced along with some musical performances and stifled tears at some of the many tributes to the singer. There were also shouts from the audience of "Power to the people," "Long live the king," and "We miss you, Michael!"
The memorial, a mix of measured grief and show-biz spectacle, was seen across the globe on television and computer screens and covered with the intensity of an election night and the overkill of a Super Bowl Sunday.
Forty-seven theaters in 24 states showed the event live. As a local event, it was a surprisingly smooth affair; there was a 30-minute delay to the scheduled start time, but the predicted crush of crowds outside the arena never materialized, which Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton credited to "a steady drumbeat of media coverage in recent days" telling fans without tickets they wouldn't be permitted near the downtown venue.
Excluding invited guests, the estimated 17,500 attendees were selected from about 1.6 million who sought entry.
The event was produced by Ken Ehrlich, the longtime producer of the Grammy Awards telecast. Other key figures included Tim Leiweke, president and chief executive of AEG, and, somewhat surprisingly, Bratton, who was a presence just off stage throughout the service. He also worked the press line before the event (which, to underscore the circus atmosphere, required stepping over manure left in the wake of his mounted officers) and personally guarded the gilded casket as it arrived at the arena's underground garage.
The event that seemed so smooth and precise to television viewers was more chaotic up close. Ehrlich made a number of major decisions on the fly, such as asking Robinson to open the service by reading letters from Diana Ross and Nelson Mandela. "I think this might work," Ehrlich said, rushing to hand the letters to the surprised singer, who then calmly climbed the steps to the stage, looked into the camera and greeted the world. Ehrlich also had the lighting changed for the entire arena a few minutes into the show. "It's way too hot in here," he told his lighting crew, using a shorthand expression for glare.
Jackson's casket was taken from Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills in a motorcade of ebony Rolls-Royces and SUVs on freeways cleared by police. It then was carried into the Staples spotlight by his brothers -- Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Randy -- who each wore a solitary sequined glove. Janet Jackson, the second most famous member of the family, left her seat and reached toward the procession, but instead of touching the casket she reached for her living brothers, giving each of them a reassuring grip on the arm.
Janet Jackson did not perform as many had expected, but Jermaine Jackson did with a rendition of a "Smile," the bittersweet song of encouragement composed by Charlie Chaplin for his 1936 film "Modern Times." It was Michael Jackson's favorite song, the crowd was told, and the emotion-choked performance by his older brother added to the poignancy of the lyrics, written by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons more than 70 years ago:
Smile tho' your heart is aching
Smile even tho' it's breaking
When there are clouds in the sky
You'll get by, if you smile
Other performances included Mariah Carey and Trey Lorenz performing "I'll Be There," the Jackson 5 classic that was also a key hit for Carey in 1992, and Stevie Wonder -- a performer who could certainly understand Jackson's struggle to handle a show-biz childhood -- giving an emotion-charged revival of his own 1971 composition "Never Dreamed You'd Leave in Summer."
Some performers sang to the audience, others to the casket. Some of the producers were reluctant at first to have the casket present, especially considering the Forest Lawn ceremony before the Staples event and logistics of moving the body across town.
"The family said to us that Michael was going to be there," Ehrlich said. "At first, I kind of gulped, but I went back to, 'If this was a Baptist service, the casket would be there. And it made a difference. They were singing right over the casket of Michael Jackson. I know what that did to Mariah. I know what that did to Usher. I know what that did to John Mayer."
Ehrlich said the pacing of the service mirrored black church services: Uplifting musical numbers followed by fiery, emotional speeches followed by brief pauses. "People had time to think about what they had heard before we went on to the next order of business," he said.
Viewers also studied the service for hidden meanings. Would long-estranged sister La Toya sit with her family? She did. Would the singer's two former wives, Lisa Marie Presley (daughter of Elvis) and Debbie Rowe (mother of Jackson's two eldest children) attend? They did not.
Two other key figures in Jackson's life saga, actress Elizabeth Taylor and singer Diana Ross, also did not attend. Both released statements saying they were not ready to grieve in public.
The next order of business for organizers is figuring out who will pay the bill. Leiweke blasted L.A. City Councilman Dennis Zine for publicly demanding on Monday that AEG and the family shoulder the costs. The issue is the estimated cost of police and emergency services (as much as $3.8 million) for the event, but Leiweke framed it as more than a civic matter.
"There should be a thing called common decency," Leiweke said. "This could have waited until after the family was through the memorial. It shows no class at all. Beware the man who shouts while standing on another man's casket."
The more enduring struggle, though, is over the legacy of Jackson, a man who rivaled Elvis Presley in fame but also was marked in his last years by his indictment and acquittal on child molestation charges and sometimes cruel commentary on his ever-changing visage.
The producers and participants at the memorial offered their version of that legacy: An essential pop-culture figure, agent of cultural change and beloved humanitarian.
"He was driven by his hunger to learn," Gordy said. "To confidently top himself, to be the best, the consummate student. He studied the greats and became greater. He raised the bar and then broke the bar."]
Washington Post:
[A Transcendent Last Act
In Death, as in Life, Jackson's Public Persona Reflects an Outsize Influence on Pop Culture
By Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
The final, posthumous performance of Michael Jackson was in the transcendent tradition of his previous shows: part musical feast, part religious experience, part examination of a man who seemed not a man, but something else his public was always trying to figure out. Boy? Demigod? Alien? It was, at times and fittingly, odd. There was deep, heartfelt, intimate emotion at the public memorial, but it was mixed with the fantasy and the sequins and the Mariah Carey and the Al Sharpton.
It was very sad. It was very long. "Maybe now, Michael, they will leave you alone," Jackson's brother Marlon said into a microphone at the end of the nearly three-hour remembrance and farewell. Maybe not. News reports have warned us there are impending legal battles and estate divisions and custody arrangements. The world will be breathing Michael Jackson gossip for a long time. But in a society obsessed with closure, this occasion at least signified the official end of the country's 12-day period of frenzied mourning, and the completion of Michael Jackson's 12-day transformation from ostracized to beloved.
The nationally televised and endlessly Twittered memorial took place yesterday morning at Los Angeles's Staples Center, where as recently as the night before his June 25 death the singer had rehearsed for a planned London comeback tour.
The public event immediately followed a private family service at Forest Lawn cemetery in Hollywood Hills, and a long, slow funeral procession through the streets of L.A., which was commented on by swarms of news crews hovering in helicopters. The cavernous Staples Center was filled with the estimated 17,000 fans who won a ticket lottery entered by 1.6 million people for the privilege of being there. They were given wristbands.
"I couldn't believe when he died," said John Castanon, 60, a mechanic from San Dimas whose wife had won two passes to the memorial. He fought back tears as he described seeing Jackson perform in 1969. Castanon said he was honored, 40 years later, to be at Jackson's final appearance.
Everyone, it seemed, wanted to Be There. In a sharp break from a culture convinced that timeliness is obsolete, that one can always catch the replay on TiVo or YouTube, everyone wanted to see this show live. Some seemed to already be looking back from the future, planning on how they would tell their grandchildren that they were there. Celebrities turned out en masse, for a starry program that included everyone from Motown record producer legend Berry Gordy to Queen Latifah to Kobe Bryant to Martin Luther King III and U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee. Diana Ross and Nelson Mandela couldn't make it, so they sent words of sympathy through an emissary, Smokey Robinson, the first speaker on the program.
Jackson's wall of brothers, seated in the front row next to his parents, sisters and three children, all wore matching yellow ties, and single sequined gloves, some on right hands, some on left, as if they had thriftily split pairs of them.
Jesse Jackson was there, just to be in the audience, as were Dionne Warwick and Spike Lee and Barbara Walters.
Once all of the guests, famous and non-famous, were there and seated and hushed, Michael Jackson himself arrived, in an ornate gold casket draped in flowers and brought to a position of prominence in the center of the stage.
And thus Jackson became a part of his own memorial, a showman even in death.
What a spectacular show it was, performed against a backdrop of simulated stained-glass windows and drifting clouds.
Carey, wearing a long gown with a plunging mesh neckline -- demure, for her -- performed her version of the Jackson 5 hit "I'll Be There," and looked meaningfully toward Jackson's casket.
The musician Usher also looked toward Jackson's casket during his song, then walked toward it and placed his hands on it.
Jennifer Hudson did not interact with the casket but sang a from-the-gut version of "Will You Be There," accompanied by a troop of backup dancers. Somber, funereal backup dancers, yes, but backup dancers nonetheless. No one tried to moonwalk. It would have seemed disrespectful.
Was this a concert or a memorial? An arena or a church? The mood of the fans swung between celebratory and morose, interrupting moments of silence to scream, "We love you, Michael!" and gasping, "Oh my God, it's him!" when the casket appeared. These fans, the true believers who stuck by Jackson through the trial, through scandals, through failed marriages, seemed desperate for reassurance that their adoration had not been misplaced, that Jackson was as brilliant as they knew him to be.
They cheered loudly when Gordy decided that the title King of Pop was simply not grand enough for Jackson. "I think he is simply the greatest entertainer that ever lived," Gordy said. Similar calls of approval came after Queen Latifah asserted confidently: "Michael was the biggest star on Earth."
The biggest cheers and sighs did not come after the platitudes, or the superlatives, or even the Jesus-like comparisons to the divine ("As long as we remember him, he will be there forever to comfort us," said Pastor Lucious Smith). The biggest cheers came after the assertions that he was just like us, that he was not weird at all. He liked Kentucky Fried Chicken, Magic Johnson revealed. The audience liked hearing that. "There wasn't nothing strange about your daddy," Sharpton said, thunderously addressing Jackson's children. "It was strange what he had to deal with." The arena erupted with a standing ovation.
But Michael Jackson was strange. His mystery is as much a part of his legacy as his music; fans will forever be picking away at him, trying to understand him. How desperately they wanted to understand him, to understand whatever physical ideal he felt he was moving toward, even as his pursuit of it took him further from normalcy.
His transformation of his own face took more than 20 years, as did his journey from beloved, giggling child-star to bizarre, fragile child-man.
The public's transformation of Michael Jackson, from mutant to messiah, took less than two weeks. "Michael . . . made us love each other," Sharpton called out. "It was Michael that made us . . . feed the hungry."
It was an orgy of praise, an exercise of excess and quantity, much like Jackson's life.
And then, at the end of the memorial, another kind of moment.
It happened after all of the Grammy winners had performed, and all the famous guests had ascended to the stage for a big group-sing of "We Are the World."
Jackson's 11-year-old daughter, Paris -- heretofore mostly hidden from the public eye -- was shepherded to the microphone by a phalanx of Jackson's siblings.
"Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine," she said, her voice breaking. "And I just want to say I love him so much."
The moment felt pure and private, the truest thing in the whole show. ]
Kaleem, thanks ever so much for posting these great and deeply-moving pieces on this thread. Yesterday was one of the saddest of days, and few were unmoved with the numerous testimonials, and that wrenching conclusion with Paris telling the world her feelings about her father. How true this is here:
“The world will be breathing Michael Jackson gossip for a long time. But in a society obsessed with closure, this occasion at least signified the official end of the country’s 12-day period of frenzied mourning, and the completion of Michael Jackson’s 12-day transformation from ostracized to beloved.”
Sam, Jackson’s death has led to some of the best cultural commentary around.
Honestly, if Jesus Christ came back and walked on the water of the Hudson Bay only to be shot at by Dick Cheney there wouldn’t be such an outpouring a grief, and why, because Christ wasn’t a deeply misunderstood manchild whose life was a tragedy and was merely the Son of God (allegedly). The biggest indictment of this most plastic of societies is that celebrities are treated like Gods. They’re not. They just get paid more than we do and have to put up with privacy invasions in life and eulogies in death from people they’ve never met as the price they pay. Billy Wilder saw it coming in Ace in the Hole over half a century ago, making circuses and money out of simple tragedies and deaths that shouldn’t have happened. Let it rest, for all this continual outpouring, this simply sickening spectacle, is simply playing into the hands of the paparazzi and gutter press who helped bring about Wacko Jacko’s fall from grace in the first place.
They said of Elvis that death was his greatest career move as it made him immortal, and the same is true of MJ, whose debts are now cleared. Indeed, if it was anyone other than Jacko there would be conspiracy theories that he wasn’t actually dead and was living on some paradise in the South Pacific while his debts were paid off by posthumous album sales.
They only keep printing it because we’re sick and morbid enough, not to mention intrusive and callous enough, to want to know every little detail as if it was a post mortem into the death of a family member. These people redefining the very term obsequious will go on about how he moved them, and how he made their lives better, and demanding to know the truth about why God is dead, but deep down if you were a member of his family, would you really like all this hullabaloo? No, you want to grieve quietly, but the public won’t let you do that, as if they knew the guy better than his own family and think they know better. It’ll all come out now, good bad and black as hell, and they’ll get no privacy.
As Claudius said, LET ALL THE POISONS THAT LURK IN THE MUD HATCH OUT!
Earlier Gods were also once celebrities exactly like the ones we have today! Jesus assuredly means less to the world today than Jackson! The Gods a culture ‘makes’ tells us something about the latter. So even if one has contempt for Jackson becoming a God or whoever one should still be interested in the larger phenomenon inasmuch as there is opportunity to learn something about the culture one inhabits. And I’m afraid the truth isn’t a superficial as you might think it is. As I asked before: why was Jackson able to tap into all of these currents in very unique ways? Why was he the biggest of the biggest? The culture isn’t short on celebrities. Why did this guy reach where he did? The same could be asked about Madonna who is the greatest pop culture icon of this age after Jackson. I don’t believe that even in this celebrity obsessed age people get to be as big as Jackson or Elvis or whoever without genuine and tangible achievements. So there’s a certain slippage in all of this protest. I can certainly understand the disgust that a celebrity-obsessed culture often invites. I often partake of this sentiment. But Jackson was an event, he goes beyond the usual definition of ‘celebrity’. When a billion people watch a memorial globally I think there’s something going on. Something that cannot be reduced to the usual labels.
Is ‘death’ the best thing that happened to Elvis or Jackson? Possibly to the extent that the legend became truly enshrined and the best work of each artist was certainly a thing of the past. But then one could say the very same for Jesus! We have come full circle. The most successful Gods die ‘out of time’!
What a lot of tripe! If the media circus tells us anything it is dismally disturbing. Countless lives are lost daily in futility and no-one blinks an eye. On a day that seven young US soldiers are killed in Afghanistan, all eyes are on a memorial to a man who chose to squander his life on profligacy and the banal.
The black funeral of Michael Jackson
Though he may have transcended or “escaped” blackness in life, Michael Jackson was rendered fully black in death. And that says much more about us than about him.
By Melissa Harris-Lacewell
July 9, 2009
Funerals tell us more about the living than the dead. It’s why anthropologists often begin with rituals of death as an entry point for understanding societies and cultures.
I remember watching the funeral of Princess Diana. It was a perfectly British event: the poignant, silent march of her children, the bells tolling at Westminster Abbey, the red coat pallbearers. But I remember being taken aback as the car carrying Princess Diana’s casket drove through the streets of London. I was surprised because at that moment the mourners began to applaud.
They’d stood for hours lining the streets and as the casket passed they needed to grieve collectively and publicly. Stiff-upper-lip British culture does not have a mechanism for such public grieving. There is no piercing death wail, no garment rending, no ceremonial dance. So, instead, the British applauded. That applause revealed the missing place in English life for public mourning.
The death and remembrance of Michael Jackson has been an interesting window into American culture, its relentless cable news cycle, and the overwhelming but false sense of intimacy our celebrity culture engenders. But for me it was the peek into African-American culture that was most intriguing.
Within a week of Jackson’s death I watched the avatars on my Twitter feed turn from Iran-solidarity green to iconic photographs of Michael Jackson. But the photos were exclusively of “black” Michael Jackson: some from his childhood, some from the “Off The Wall” era, and many from the “Thriller” era. Few of my African-American tweeps were visually remembering the Michael Jackson of the past decade with diminished features and whitened skin.
Memorializing Jackson included selective collective memory that allowed African-Americans to see him as belonging especially, if not exclusively, to black folks.
Some African-Americans were incensed by the misogynist, racially stereotypical BET Awards that gave the first public tribute to Jackson. Many have been critical of BET as a cable network for more than a decade, and the tribute to Jackson renewed those criticisms. The contrast of Michael Jackson with Soulja Boy felt particularly stark, regressive and embarrassing.
Memorializing Michael Jackson renewed critical conversation about the direction of black music.
Jackson’s passing inspired memorials that reflected local cultures. My favorite was the “second line” in New Orleans, those who follow the brass band just to enjoy the music. But it was the massive funeral in Los Angeles on Tuesday that was most revealing. Jackson was an international music icon and his memorial was covered on mainstream media. But it was black tradition most fully on display Tuesday.
African-American death rituals have long been celebratory as well as mournful. As a marginal people whose collective identity is rooted in struggle, death is celebrated as a release from pain, inequality and torment. As a deeply religious people, death is celebrated as an opportunity for reunion with God. As a people who were often denied dignity in life, the dignity of a proper “home-going” is a critically important sign of respect. Along with these celebratory aspects of funerals, death rituals among African-Americans are marked by loud, deep displays of emotion and public grieving that mark the sense of loss experienced by the whole community.
All of these aspects of black life were on display Tuesday. And it tells us more about us than about Michael Jackson. Jackson’s radical surgical choices largely eliminated his black phenotype. Jackson’s romantic choices did not include black women. His wealth and eccentricities set him apart from most black people. In the final years of his life, his music was much more popular in European and Asian countries than among black American listeners. But in death, black folks embraced Jackson.
Memorializing Jackson reminds me that death still is a segregated business in America. Funeral homes still anchor black neighborhoods and are a central path of black entrepreneurship. Though he may have transcended or “escaped” blackness in life, Jackson was rendered fully black in death. And that says much more about us than about him.
Agence Global Melissa Harris-Lacewell, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, “Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn’t Enough.”
Kaleem, thanks very much for this and I have no doubt what you say. I will read this.
“Countless lives are lost daily in futility and no-one blinks an eye. On a day that seven young US soldiers are killed in Afghanistan, all eyes are on a memorial to a man who chose to squander his life on profligacy and the banal.”
I think it is disingenuous to suggest that one is ever as moved about anonymous people dying somewhere in whatever cause than one is for icons. Now Jackson happens not to be someone you like. But I’m sure if I changed the name with someone you did admire greatly you’d find all this outpouring justified. In any case, and if you’ll excuse my bluntness, I find this standard line of focusing on Jackson instead of the troops, a bit cheap and banal. I’ve heard this a dozen times by folks on TV incidentally, almost all of them in the Peter King camp.
Leaving this aside I think we need to move away from this constant mythologization of military figures (alas this is all too common in the US). The media peddles this all the time. And no one dare disagree. Hey who doesn’t like ‘the troops’? I am not sure why soldiers are ‘heroes’ for one. I think we’ve lost the sense of what a ‘hero’ really is. This word has become completely cheapened. There are indeed heroes on every battlefield but this is distinct from calling everyone in uniform a hero as a matter of definition. But this is also a disservice to people in uniform when they are always placed on such a pedestal. So much are they made out to be ‘heroes’ that they almost cease to be ‘human’! They actually cannot be prone to that entire range of human emotions we partake of everyday because of course they are ‘heroes’ and must react differently. The same goes for policemen and firemen. I have the greatest respect for people in all three professions. All three represent to my mind those segments of society that ultimately no one cares about very much. We only bring them up in jingoistic or self-serving exclamations. So don’t feel too sorry for the soldier on his third tour of duty in Iraq, hey he’s such a hero he wouldn’t mind going there 4 more times! Don’t feel too badly for the police officer who gets shot on a dangerous beat. Hey he’s a fallen hero. How much do we ‘care’ about these ‘heroes’ the rest of the time? Does one need to get into how badly veterans are treated in the US and most other places? Walter Reed anyone? And this is just the most flagrant example. The same people who call firemen or policemen ‘heroes’ would gladly let them lose all their jobs than allow them some relief in a government sponsored program! This is a very convenient definition of patriotism. hey let those guys put out the fires and lose their life, let those guys get shot on the streets, let those guys die in far away places they probably couldn’t place on a map before they left.. let all of this happen.. we’ll of course call them ‘heroes’. They and their families can be happy. What more could they want?!
All of this is not directed against you Tony by any means but I mean to provide contexts to all of this. When the Iraq war was on I actually wish there had been a draft. I think there should be a draft in all wars so that a general population is never cavalier about these things. Of course we had the obscenity over the last 8 years of people with 5 deferments becoming the greatest warriors on the planet!
I think one can have a valid opinion on Jackson’s funeral either way. Of course for reasons I’ve already stated I think it’s to completely miss the point to believe that the media has somehow induced a billion people to tune in. But why should the troops be brought into it?