Michael Jackson was a true international star. You may not think that seeing him perform in the US, or the UK, wherever - but you will be hard pressed to find any other individual who wasn't a world leader who was so well recognized the WORLD over. Not a single one. When people from small villages in Bangladesh, who don't know a lick of English or understand any of his songs, still knew his name...that's power. That's appeal no amount of Justin Timberlakes, Madonnas, Dave Matthews Bands, can only ever hope to dream of.
That silhouette of him doing the moonwalk - any one person sees that, they instantly KNEW who it was. Matt Groening of the Simpsons once said, good character design is when the character can be recognized from silhouette alone. MJ was the one human being who could achieve that, not only among Americans, but from people all over the world.
As with most people from my generation, and the one before it, my first experience with pop music - not rock, mind you, but simply pop - and my understanding of what pop music is, was, could be, came from Michael Jackson. I was born the year Thriller came out - little did I know that the year of my birth coincided with an event that would shape how every single song we'd ever hear (whether new artists knew it or not) would be shaped. When I was about 5 years old, Bad was released - and it wasn't like anything I'd ever heard. It was pop music, with rock, with electronics, dance, hip hop - it was all there. I went back and took in Thriller, which was superior. It was this honest, earnest voice that was surrounded by a lot of production genius. No matter how complicated it got - there was this voice. It sounded confused and starkly alone.
Jackson in his latter years was known purely for all the controversy - the crazy personal life, the barely avoided gay rumors, the accusations of pederasty, so on. What do we know? We know nothing. We know lawyers' statements, dubious statements from children...what do we really know? I'm not pointing any one direction. Perhaps he was just a really maladjusted human being who was never given the chance to have a real relationship with a girl while growing up, no real education on what is right or wrong, since from age 5 he was a huge star. I can't imagine what that experience would be like.
What I can tell, though, is that if he indeed was innocent of charges, what was perceived as impropriety was really Jackson doing what he thought was right. He was an insanely rich man-child surrounded by yes-men, including his family. If he did do what he was accused of: it seems he may just take it to the grave. Perhaps the stories will all come out eventually as the years progress. Who knows? There's a reason why scum like Gary Glitter don't get a second thought when they get caught, and people want to take a moment to reconsider Jackson; he was just such a child stuck inside an adult's body, it's hard to even conceive of him doing these things. But enough of that, if you ever consumed media in the past 15 years, you've heard it all.
Why did he do what he did? What were his motivations, his hopes, his fears, his perversions? Will we ever know? As the music became more and more generic, more of a parody of its former glory, we couldn't hope to get the answers we wished from his music as we did before. Our one source for this information was erratic public statements and sensational news articles. Jackson never helped his image any with some of his behavior, a lot of it absolutely unforgivable. That image of him holding his child over the balcony - even on an instinctual level, this was a person who had no idea how to parent. Why did he ever think he was justified in that? Why weren't people telling him it's just completely frowned upon to be sharing a bed with a child, whether there was contact or not? Who knows, really. We, the public, are separated by hundreds of filters and veils before the news gets to us. It's a game of Chinese whispers, in a thunderstorm, in a storm drain, with a hundred radios all blaring static at us at the same time.
It's some amount of sadness that shrouds the man's death, as we map the graph of his music and public persona, for we see the line just descending down, down, off the axis. It's a bizarre, David Lynch-like tale of a modern American tragedy, with the sharp rise to fame, the peak, the eventual fall, to the absolute disintegration of not only an icon, but a human being. Sometimes people just want to sit back and watch it, as Shakespearean audiences did centuries ago, or spectators of the bloodsport of coliseum did. His life was something that was beautiful and tragic.
Some may think I am defending someone not worth defending - I posit that I am doing no defending, nor am I on the attack. It's just worth it, especially at this time when public opinion is so easily recordable via blogs or social networking, to chronicle how this phenomenon played out and affected all of us as we witnessed it. A strange, haunted phantom just passed by our lives - it lived to entertain, was deprived of a childhood and at the end just destroyed itself so thoroughly, we just have no idea what to even think after it's gone. This phantom never left our public eye - it writhed and screamed right in front of us the entire time. It's an experience not many throughout the world ever get to share, for better or worse.
Whatever stories emerge, good or bad, those of us who grew up with his music can't deny what kind of an impact it had on us. Trust me kids, there was a time when you weren't cool unless you were listening to MJ, doing the moonwalk, had his posters up, etc. It's something the fleeting sheen of modern "musicians" (let's see Hannah Montana write the bassline for "Billie Jean". Or for Fall Out Boy to write dance rock that can get people shaking for more than 25 years after they were written. Can't. Be. Done.) can't hope to hold on to, for they are disposable tarts with very limited, dated shelf life. I'm not going to repeat the current cliche of "just remember the music" because you're not getting the entire picture. The modern American tragedy story can only be remembered when Michael Jackson is remembered as a life lived - the last consummate musical thriller.
I will say though, the Moonwalker game for Sega was fucking terrible.
.JPG)
Corn on the Grill
4 hours ago