Michael Jackson 1958-2009

21 Sequined Glove Salute or Let’s Hope Brutus and Antony Were Both Wrong

The King is dead. This is what all the memorials and tributes say, and Michael Jackson, the human being known as “The King of Pop” has ceased to be as a physical living entity. It is a sad day for his family and loved ones, including a mass of people who never met the man and only ever experienced his music; generations raised with the moonwalk, the single white glove and fedora, that swooping “whoo!”

He was worthy of that title when it was bestowed. Off the Wall and Thriller were a coup, a total take-over of pop expectations orchestrated by Jackson and Quincy Jones. They exploded everything that popular music could be and remain as a challenge to anyone who wants to make a pop record worth anything. These are the records that people will always look back to as a crowning glory, and the following music continued to be innovative and challenging, fighting off the hordes of Jackson wannabes to retain the throne. Bad, Dangerous, each had moments of captivation. I remember my 2nd grade teacher making a tape of Bad for me and leaving it on the patio of my apartment so that I could have “Smooth Criminal” and “Man in the Mirror”. That the music could be shared by 7 year-olds and 30 year-olds alike is a powerful testament.

But these are the years where the ugliness really began to come out, where the power of the music became overshadowed by Jackson’s personal life, his socially abnormal behavior. We expect our aristocracy to be eccentric but as a culture we took particular relish in tearing Jackson down. The title of “King” became a perverse joke, trapping a man in the impossible expectations of universal accessibility and adulation. Caesar became too big, too weird and we, the media, the snide aside and callous laughing all, we all played Brutus. With one hand we embraced the music and with the other we knifed the man.

It is the stuff of classical tragedy, the fall of the chosen one in such agonizingly public slow motion. As a salivating culture we may feel betrayed of a comeback story, but we are complicit in creating the situation that Jackson would have to come back from. Michael Jackson died years ago, when the “King of Pop” was rendered a figurehead in the “Wacko Jacko” sideshow. None of it has been particularly funny, in any kind of meaningful wit or way, it has been a prolonged debacle, a black hole implosion we were all sucked in to. The tragedy is not that he is now dead, but that he lived so long in the social condition he did.

So the King is dead. In the modern age, with PR oligarchies forcing constructed bands down our throats (all of whom owe a debt to Jackson) and the squalling democracy of the internet, Michael was a man adrift. When Mark Antony eulogizes Caesar in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he points equally at Caesar’s murderers, saying,

“The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones;
So let it be with Caesar.”

Let Jackson rest in peace, let his family mourn, let us all dance to “Thriller”, let us remember with caution the ugliness of celebrity and our part in it and let us have no more need for kings.