FeralPost

The sentence “Michael Jackson is dead”, which I have already read at least twenty times, is utterly surreal.  It strikes me as a logical impossibility.  This is like reading that “Frosty the Snowman is dead”.  This is like reading “my childhood is dead”, and I know that it is that way for billions of people around the world.  The world seems enchanted, filled with the grieving citizens of Cape Verde and Paraguay and Nepal.   It is dark right now where I live. I see these other citizens in my mind’s eye, flickering like the lights at a million different vigils on every square inch of the map of the world.

We seem to be in for one of those disabling celebrity deaths that take a week or more to process.  Where nothing gets done globally.

My first thought when I read that Michael Jackson was dead was that if he were now dead, that must mean that he had formerly been alive, and that shocked me.  When I read something about a drug overdose, even at the terribly young age of 50, I was shocked by the ordinary nature of his death.  (Who among us would not expect something inconceivable, if asked to speculate?  A grisly, improbable accident; something grotesquely sexual; a shocking act of violence; a shatteringly sad suicide?)

I am shocked to learn that the rules of biology apply to him, to this being whose physical self resembled less and less and less anything easy to recognize as human. If you had told me that he ate platefuls of sand every day, washed down with glasses of motor oil, I would have been inclined to believe it.  He seemed no longer to have a race or gender—-these observations are merely clichés at this point—-and his impossible thinness had been disturbing for decades.  He seemed a biological singularity, an event existing outside the laws of aging and calorie consumption.

I am surprised, in fact, that he was among us for so long.

Things did not appear to be going well in the leadup to the London “comeback” concerts.  The newspaper headlines were not optimistic and cancellations appeared imminent.  With that background in mind, a normally rational friend first thought, upon being informed of Jackson’s death: “it isn’t real—he has just taken some strange drug to get out of those London concerts.”  It is one thing to play with the distinctions between races and genders, but Michael Jackson has always seemed to play with the distinction between life and death through his hyperbaric chamber, an attempt to buy human skeletons, his cadaverous frame, and a near-burial alive in prison.

The media is at a loss.  They cannot engage in the grief orgy that has met other celebrities in death, because they believe that Michael Jackson was a child molester, and that must be seen to temper their enthusiasm.  Except that, in the eyes of the law, Jackson was not a child molester.  Except that his trial was one of a series of failed American mega-trials that convince no one of their legitimacy, and so virtually everyone continues to believe that he was a child molester after all.  I myself have always been utterly stumped on this subject.  He so resembled a child molester in his habits and lifestyle that it was almost impossible to believe that he was not one. Yet he so resembled an alien, an exemption from human life, that was almost impossible to believe that he was a child molester.  Wasn’t child molestation too banal, too accessible an explanation for Michael Jackson’s total interests and the project of his life and appearance?  (He did not seek to resemble merely a more youthful version of himself, but rather a more youthful, female version of himself.  Does that help or hurt his cause?)  Is there such a thing as a trompe l’oeil child molester?

Yet there exist bodyguards and the occasional whacked-out celebrity who will testify that in private, Michael Jackson was utterly normal.  That he could somehow drop the mask, and speak in a man’s voice of simple tastes and pleasures.  That he could drink booze, eat pizza, and talk tits with the best of them.  I don’t know what to make of this.  Maybe.

(Elizabeth Taylor was too distraught to eulogize Michael Jackson tonight on “Larry King Live”.  For Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson was an actual person and not a concept.  I feel sorry for her.  What must her world be like?)

Not even a vapour-trail of politics follows him; he was utterly apolitical in intention.  All his causes were untouchably humanist, leaving people of every possible creed and nationality humming side-by-side.  To be a fan of Michael Jackson was to be aware of his Bulgarian fans too.  When he had become nearly comically unfashionable in the United States, his international popularity was untouched.

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I did not come from a musical home.  “Thriller” is the first album I ever bought, at age twelve, and it wasn’t only my favourite music, but it seemed to me to be the first music ever.  Of course, music existed for millennia before that, but nothing that meant much to my twelve year old self.  Michael Jackson was not only more relevant than Mozart; for my purposes, he was Mozart.  I had no connoisseurship of music at all, but even then Michael Jackson seemed to occupy a totally other realm of musical production from all the other pop stars I soon discovered.  A hand of God—even for those who do not believe in God, or do only occasionally—was obviously upon him.

Michael Jackson was possessed of technical excellence at the level of perfection in songwriting, singing and dancing.  He could incarnate specific emotions to a degree that seemed to suggest a temporary psychosis rather than fine acting. Who could doubt the reality of “Dirty Diana” or “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” as they unfold in time, who could doubt the reality of the narrative or the experience of the singer?  Michael Jackson was not only a well-practiced musician or the product of child stardom. There was no doubt about his depth of religious feeling.  When he sang and danced, he truly appeared to channel something, to shimmer and sob as if in communion with another world.  Everyone spoke of something “else” being present in his voice, in his recordings, in his performances, that could not be explained by away by childhood practice sessions that would otherwise convert every Britney Spears into a Maria Callas.  There are no atheists at a Michael Jackson concert.

I had felt stoppered, calm, a little proud of myself for not reacting to this celebrity death of an imaginary person with tears.  I watched an hour of Jackson TV without much of a response.  But all I had to do was pop “Thriller” into my Discman a few hours later, and within seconds, the tears came.  My body feels sad, and the sadness is renewed by the music.  To hear the immediacy of that voice is to realize that the world has lost something utterly excellent and utterly unique.  It is like hearing that some magnificent animal, something like a tiger, has just gone extinct.

And now he is dead and I am sorry for that, but mostly I am deeply shocked and cannot yet take it in.  Michael Jackson is dead.  Q.E.D.  I believe in Michael Jackson.  R.I.P.

Tags: Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, pop music

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 3:27 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.