RIP Michael Jackson
ASIDE FROM A FEW remarkably tasteless jokes about the passing of Jackson, for me the most striking thing I've seen said about the man was posted by poliphilo, in comments on his LJ:
I vaguely remember going “wow!” the first time I saw the moonwalk - but once you've seen it you've seen it. It's a clever little trick, but it doesn't take you anywhere.
A statement like that could easily serve as a fitting epitaph for the 1980s, an era of clever tricks, but nothing that actually took us anywhere worth going.
Some years ago, in the course of a musical discussion, a friend asked whether anything good came out of the eighties. I couldn't think of a thing, at the time, and neither could anyone else in the room. Some weeks thereafter, I happened to belatedly remember The Cure. Having revisited the album Disintegration on numerous occasions in recent years, I am always surprised to find that it has withstood the ravages of time and taste remarkably well. Another artist of note from the eighties, one who I did not appreciate at all, was Prince. Couldn't stand the sight of him or the sound of his music, but I have since given him another listen and have been pleasantly surprised. The man has genuine musical talent and his music remains tolerably fresh to this day, but somehow, among all the strutting, pouting egotism and sexually-charged androgyny of his on-stage persona, the fact of his talent got lost - or at least lost to me at the time.
In general, though, I think the eighties were a musical wasteland and Michael Jackson was indeed the “Pop King” of that benighted era. The madness to which he descended after his reign in the charts is too well known to bear rehearsing here. Let's just say that I find the memories of him, ghostly white and surgically altered almost beyond human recognition, attempting lamely to defend himself against the dark rumors then in circulation, to be far more vivid and durable than anything else he did for public consumption. And as is often the case with Reagan, Thatcher, and other icons of the 1980s, I see more ink wasted trying to explain why a particular commentator was so besotted by Jackson at the time, than there is spent credibly rehearsing his supposed accomplishments and talents.