E-Verse Radio

Farewell, Prince Michael . . .

by Ernie on 27/06/09 at 11:01 am

I will admit to considerable sadness and surprise upon learning of Michael Jackson’s death. I first heard the news on the BBC yesterday afternoon, accompanied by endless shaky footage from a helicopter hovering over the hospital. I called my wife, Lynn, who was on a train en route to Washington, DC. There are very few celebrity deaths that would inspire me to do that.  His death seems important, partly because so unexpected. I suppose his presence, however distant and vague, has always been part of the world as I have known it. Since my birth in 1970, he’s been famous. The man was a walking tragedy, the butt of endless ridicule, the object of terrible and mad veneration by fans desperate for the merest glimpse of him. Although I was never a fan, in the strictest sense of the term, and he’s done little in recent years to deserve much serious attention, I have mellowed from my earlier, teenaged objections to his popularity and can now confess that I am sad that he is gone. Like most people, I enjoy quite a few of his songs. Last night, as I was writing in my journal, cars paused on the street below at the stop light, and I’d hear swells of his songs booming through the humid air before fading out in the distance (then a helicopter ran its searchlight down the block, flashing its blinding white into the windows of my office, reminding me of the peculiar fascist-aesthetic videos Jackson made in which he appeared as a titanic, Ozymandias-style statue around which helicopters buzzed like flies; in fact, a colossal statue was made, and towed down the Thames). He escaped into a real-life storybook, a child’s fantasy world. Children’s stories to this day are populated by princes, kings, princesses, and various other aristocratic, medieval denizens of fairy-land. Some of his royalist, or even fascist, visual statements, which appeared largely after the apex of his actual music career, no doubt owe to this aspect of his life, but they also testify to a growing and out-of-touch vanity that would seem almost unnerving or menacing if it weren’t just so damned silly. It seems he may have taken the title “King of Pop” quite seriously, and certainly literally. He grew from unpretentious, loveable child star, almost too cute to bear, into a “thin white duke” as David Bowie once imagined himself, ensconced in the trappings of a reliquary or degenerate royal court: the pop star as Mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria (whose bankrupting Neuschwanstein Castle seems to spring straight from a fairy tale; in fact, it inspired the Disney castle and may be compared to Jackson’s “Never Land Ranch”).

Rather than change his image and approach to performance, as other artists have done, to accomodate the limitations of age, he continued to aspire to the great, eurhythmic spectacle of dazzling lights and finely choreographed dance numbers. These are more suited to the abilities of a young man, and at 50 he was reaching an age at which such undertakings must have come to seem daunting. He must have realized that he would have to relinquish his deeply cherished privacy and solitude soon or he would lose his final chance at one last comeback, one last effort to make it all right, to bring back the old days, restore his position. Icons like Jackson can’t really change. Even if they do, everyone wants the original back. They want what they first fell in love with when they themselves were young. Several generations have now grown up with Jackson’s kid-friendly (and parent-approved) music. Jackson had scheduled 50 concerts, all sold out, and perhaps the thought of exposing himself to the public again, putting himself on display, seemed too much for him. I’m not implying that he died by his own hand. It’s too soon to know what really happened. But the incredible strain that the coming concerts placed on him, the weight of knowing he had to go out and be “Michael Jackson” again, after years of quiet, hermetic existence, may have proved too much for his already strained body and mind.

Camille Paglia once observed that Elvis was the first Protestant saint. The innumerable relics that spun out from Presley’s long period of fame, the great ocean of kitsch he inspired, seem to attest to that. Michael Jackson aroused an equal degree of devotion and was commemorated in life by an incredible array of royally kitsch memorials which would seem to speak for him as nothing so much as the most recent Catholic saint. Jeff Koons, king of kitsch (of course he vehemently denies this in interviews) made much use of Jackson’s glitzy, almost perverse populist appeal in his ultra-tacky (or, post-ironic, childishly beautiful) sculptures. Whatever else may be said, I say let us remember the good times, the good years.

However, we now have a problem of succession. When Elvis fell from his porcelain throne, he relinquished his crown as “The King.” It fell to Jackson, who not long after was dubbed “King of Pop”. Who is the heir apparent?