The King is Dead
Originally published at The Null Device Blog. You can comment here or there.
Everybody in the world now knows that Michael Jackson has died.
Some people respond with fawning praise, some with tasteless jokes, others with wailing agony, and others respond by shopping.
I dunno. Whatever you thought of his music or his person, he was an inescapable part of the childhood of really anyone in their 30’s - the guy racked up so many hits in the 80’s and was so omnipresent on MTV and the radio it was hard not to be exposed to him over and over again. The guy was a megastar by 1980, and a downright cultural phenomenon by 1985. He was also stunningly talented - a gifted singer and songwriter, a groundbreaking dancer, and was visionary enough to see the possibility of the music video in an era when most videos were just “pretty haircuts on a soundstage.” Thriller was a rare recording that managed to bridge many markets at once, incredibly successfully - it was funky enough for urban markets, comfortable enough for the conservative suburbs, and featured guest spots by both veteran Paul McCartney and (relatively) newly-minted rock royalty Eddie Van Halen. Much like every home in the 70’s seemed to have a copy of Frampton Comes Alive , seemingly every home in the 80’s had Thriller on vinyl or cassette.
Everyone my age has a Jackson story. I remember riding the bus to school, singing “Beat it” and “Thriller” at the top of my lungs with the other kids. I remember a nebbishy kid in my 5th-grade class trying to win popularity with his screener copy of the long-form Thriller video. I remember painstakingly trying to recreate the Thriller cover art on a cassette J-card for my tape dub of my neighbor’s record. I remember the only good thing about Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” being Jackson’s cameo. I remember seeing those 4 steps of the moonwalk with my jaw hanging agape, and then spending the next week trying to duplicate it in my stocking feet on the kitchen linoleum (and failing repeatedly).
The guy was a Performer with a capital P.
But the guy was human. Really, really human. I suppose that having a weird childhood before you became and international pop star at the age 11 is going to warp you a bit. Add the aforementioned stardom before puberty, a near-un-toppable feat in the entertainment industry when he’s barely in his twenties…there’s nowhere to go but weird and down. His odd manchild antics, his truly bizzarre alleged personal life, his slow transformation from an babyfaced kid to what Robin Williams described as “a photo-negative Katherine Hepburn”, his sad and desperate self-appointment of “King of Pop,” his even sadder attempt at creating a family life, the decline of his music into irrelevance and near self-parody - a guy at the top has a long way to fall, and he was about as high as anyone ever got.
The sideshow is over for him now, mostly. I’m sure there will be wrangling and conspiracy theories for years to come, but I doubt we’ll see the kind of “he’s really still alive!” hysteria that followed the death of Elvis - that the oddest man in pop music died a strange and unexpected death somehow seems even more plausible than the death of the drug-addicted, deep-fried Presley. There were always glimmers of a comeback, just as there had been for that other King, but the never really congealed, emerging ill-formed and half-baked. Now, there won’t be a comeback, but he can’t really sink much further into weirdness.
It’s been a long, very strange trip. Pop culture will probably not see the like again.