The bitter end
It all happened very fast — within a couple years of the Motown special. But even at the time of the “Motown 25” moonwalk, fame was old hat to Michael Jackson. He hadn’t even turned 25 himself, but he’d been a star for more than half his life. He was given the nickname the “King of Pop” — a spin on Elvis Presley’s status as “the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” — and few questioned the moniker.
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But, as the showbiz saying has it, when you’re on top of the world, there’s nowhere to go but down.
— “Michael Jackson, pop music legend, dead at 50,” CNN.com
I used to have a crush on Michael Jackson. For my eleventh birthday, Troop got me the Off The Wall album on cassette, and throughout the evening, my whole sleepover party took breaks from such important business as gorging on candy and painting our nails to bug out to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” on my parents’ ancient 30-pound cassette deck. Jackson looked so foxy on the cover: cool, in control, ready to dance and then have a nice quiet talk about horses. Tween-nip, he was.
Almost everyone has a story like this about their relationship with Michael Jackson, at least one story like this, and not just “everyone in the Tomato Nation readership.” Everyone in the world. Girls’ Bike Club jokes aside, it will take a few days for all of us to sift through our histories with Michael Jackson and figure out just how large he loomed for all of us, culturally; whether we can separate his work from his celebrity, the latter putting him in some exclusive company (Elvis, Princess Di, Babe Ruth), and whether we should; what a superstar forged in radio and MTV meant in a blog-and-Twitter world. And his face, how to make sense of that face — “those faces,” really, each one of them instantly recognizable.
Mr. Stupidhead and I somehow found ourselves discussing Jackson a few weeks ago over a couple of pints. I said then that, as icky as Jackson usually made me feel and as much as I couldn’t foresee a normal life for his kids, mostly he made me sad — that, really, he never had a chance at learning how to relate to other people normally, that he looked like an anorexic fortune-teller with doll hair, on purpose, still wearing those military-inspired jackets from his heyday that hung on him like he grabbed them off a rack at TJ Maxx without trying them on. And of course he must have known what we said about him, about the tawdriness that couldn’t even manage a southern-gothic type of grandeur, although I suppose his collapsing nose is a sort of equivalent to the family manse taken over by mildew and vines.
Imagine existing in that funhouse body for ten minutes, living with the irreclaimable warping, knowing that you’re a part of history, and doomed. I don’t apologize for liking his music, or excuse anything else he did, but I have to wonder what the autopsy will say about his heart, and if it just broke, in the end.
Tags: Babe Ruth Elvis Presley GBC Michael Jackson music news Princess Diana untimely demises
I think the primary take-away lesson from Michael Jackson’s life can be summed up as “don’t abuse children.” As terrible as his (alleged) crimes were, I still feel so sorry for the terrorized little boy he had once been. (His father was a man who held Michael by his legs and beat his head against the floor, and who told Michael that there were snipers in the audience of his performances ready to shoot him if he didn’t dance with enough energy.) Michael Jackson also provides us with yet another piece of evidence that a parent who allows or requires his or her child to work an adult job and to become the wage earner for the family is almost never acting in the best interest of the child, and if that parent ends up with a reasonably well-adjusted adult child, he or she has beaten the odds. The worst thing I’ve heard yet regarding his death is the report that his three children are likely to go live with his parents.
@ Sars… I wonder that too, about people who are really famous. As for MJ specifically, I think that person could have been his father Joe (sad as it sounds, someone who himself endured accusations of pedophilia against him from one of his kids).
Alas old Joe got caught about having had extra-marital affairs in the mid 80s, and while his wife did not divorce him for it, it did cause further estrangement with his kids (that’s also when the kids finally started each telling their own tales about abuse, I always wondered if they didn’t finally break their silence to retaliate for all the silent suffering their mother did, more than just bemoaning their own). In hindsight, that probably was the watershed moment, that was when Michael really went off the rails, when he stopped having something concrete to fear (one wonders if all those fears didn’t then turn inward, causing all the odd behavior to keep escalating unchecked).
Seeing footage of him as a kid is just so damn depressing, it’s so hard to believe that the cute energetic kid from Indiana with awesome pipes would turn out the way he did. It’s sad that he became such a freakish person and no one had the balls to try to stop it. I just wonder how it might’ve been if he’d had some serious therapy or other kind of intervention as a young man, if he could’ve been a well-adjusted adult.
I loved him when I was a kid. I remember quite vividly parking myself in front of the TV with my brother for almost all of his music video premieres in the late 80s/early 90s, I remember watching the original ending to Black or White and thinking, “What the hell was that?” That was when the love started to die I think. I didn’t understand why he felt the need to grab his crotch so much, and then he started looking weirder and weirder and then the molestation charges…I lost all respect for him as a human being. It was like part of my childhood had died and I was still just a kid.
The more I read, the more convinced I become that Jackson was an amalgam of “desperately trying to find and hold on to childhood innocence/musical genius & performer/sharp businessman/confused adolescent.”
Also, I don’t know if it was true or not, but I remember reading that Joe Jackson actually gave Michael some kind of hormones to keep his voice high. If it was true, then it could have wreaked all kinds of havoc on his body (although again, that could have been a wild tabloid story). I do believe that Jackson would have done anything necessary to keep his kids earning money.
What a beast.
“I don’t apologize for liking his music, or excuse anything else he did, but I have to wonder what the autopsy will say about his heart, and if it just broke, in the end.”
It’s things like this that make me say, “Damn she is an amazing writer”. Nicely said and with the added effect of making me cry. (That’s twice in one day! Good shootin’ Sars!)
“there’s just so much STUFF”
One of my lecturers once described him as the great interlocutor between our binaries, as someone who was both and neither black or white, beautiful or hideous, adult or child, innocent or guilty. Perhaps this might partly explain what makes the strangeness of his death so difficult to locate, culturally speaking.
I’m with Tulip…
I was a little young for Michael Jackson, I think (I was born in 1979). Or else I was too busy listening to my parents LPs from the 1960s to really get into him. I’ll get up and dance my arse off when an MJ song comes on at a club, but I’ve never considered myself a fan.
Of course, I found the news sad. I feel for everything that Jackson has lost over the years, and for his children. But I wasn’t upset.
But, dammit, Sars… You just made me cry. (I’ve lost count of how many times you’ve done that!)
I think I was too young – that, and a bit too self-absorbed, maybe – to really ever have “known” Jackson. Not the way kids who actually grew up in the 70s and 80s did; I was only two, by the time 1990 rolled around. Far too young to have seen the music videos, or heard his songs (save on the radio).
Mostly, I knew him as the weirdo man-child who’d had too many plastic surgeries, and brought children to his ranch without any other adults around, and was alleged to act inappropriately around them.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not saddened by his death. You could see how much potential he’d had – how much he could still do…if he just…
But it’s too late now. And it’s sad, that a lot of people aren’t going to remember him for his music – but for his behaviour, post-1985; he deserves a better legacy than that.
Back in the early ’70s, I remember dancing to Rockin’ Robin and ABC during 6th grade “indoor recess” when the weather was too miserable to go outside. Back then, for so many of us preadolescent and adolescent girls there was the Holy Trinity of Michael, Donny, and Davy (Jones) (with Bobby Sherman standing next in line); it’s notable, though, that this suburban, middle-class, white, Jewish east coast chick harbored the biggest crush on the African American kid with the sparkling eyes and the soaring afro hair from Gary, Indiana. Back then, so ironically in retrospect, he was our “kid next door” … the adorable, feisty, effervescent lead singer with the incredible dance moves whose music just made us get up and “boogie”.
As MJ and I both aged, and he became more eccentric and infamous, I drifted away from what I would deem “fan-dom”. I found myself having a difficult time compartmentalizing the man from the musician; while there was no denying his exceptional talent as a performer, musician, and businessperson, for me his personal life and various legal (Bubbles the chimp? Hyperbaric chamber? Facial demolition?) and illegal alleged proclivities began to overshadow his music. There was also the fact that he annoited himself the “King of Pop”, as that he went all “George Forman” and giving all three of his kids some semblance of his own name (including his daughter); I just couldn’t stomach the hubris that all of that implied.
It’s difficult for me to think of Michael Jackson as a “victim”; at what point do we become responsible for our current reality, despite what our past rained down upon us? I do agree that he was a tragic figure, and that his fame precluded honest relationships with people he could trust; I also concur that his parents (his dad in particular) is/was a selfish, abusive man who helped set the stage for what MJ would become. Having said all of that, his death – which, for me, was also the death of someone my in own age cohort – has hit me much harder than I would have predicted. I’m glad that he is finally at peace, and in a place where no one wants anything from him any longer, And I hope that – somehow – MJ’s kids are able to have something resembling a healthy, happy childhood, and that their memories of their father comfort them in their grief.
@Sars: “I think that, past a certain point in fame that huge, it’s no longer possible to threaten them with turning your back on them, because they’ll find someone else…”
You covered this in one of your GBC posts, I think; although there it was more referring to Tom Cruise, and also Bill Cosby. It’s that “critical fame level” where you’re famous enough that, when you fire someone, the public interprets it as their failing and not your tantrum.
GREAT. I just read that MJ’s parents have demanded, and received, temporary custody of the kids. I wonder–if it really IS temporary, will it be long enough for them to screw up the kids’ heads? I mean, screw them up MORE? Because they did such a fabulous job with their own kids; by all means, let’s let them have a shot at driving the new generation bughouse.
@Jaybird: I know, huh? Hear that whooshing noise? MJ spinning in his grave. (Except he’s not in his grave yet, because of a second autopsy, and because all the drama hasn’t been milked out of it…)
Those poor babies.
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