this is going to be a completely unironic post about michael jackson. about a month or so ago, I watched this video featuring an indian version of thriller which made me want to watch the original thriller again, since I was actually not allowed to watch it when I was little. what I saw was not what I expected - it's camp, I realize that, but I think there is good camp and bad camp. this is extremely good camp. it celebrates and includes all the universal ideas that people have about death and the afterlife and puts them into a story. on top of this, though, michael jackson just blew me away with sheer presence. I was watching his face as he's dancing around that chick when they're walking down the street, and there's just this incredible sense of life pouring out of him. I had never picked up on this before, but I thought I might be on to something and proceeded to watch all the videos, some of which I'd seen, most of which I hadn't.
let me explain: I knew michael jackson's music from third grade, when dangerous was the first album I ever bought. I remember the store I bought it at, I remember getting it off the shelf (it was a cassette), and I remember forking over my own money for it. my best friend at the time listened to michael jackson, and she was actually allowed to watch the video for thriller. in high school, though, it was titanically uncool to like michael jackson; it wasn't even funny in an ironic way, he was just weird. at least this was my perception of other peoples' perceptions.
now that I was resuming my interest in him I was discovering all these weird and mindblowing things about his music; I listened to pretty much only michael jackson in the two months prior to his death. I know the cycles of my obsessions, and this one was going full-bore. I was, and am, really into his indignant songs - the ones whose message is "get the fuck off my back." e.g., why you wanna trip on me, billie jean, leave me alone. the latter of which has one of my favorite videos ever (a friend had to point it out to me, I'd never seen it before), for sheer, oh let me just use the grad-school speak, pathos. this sentiment pervades all of michael jackson's post-adolescent work, and it's so classically american - you want fame so bad and when you get it it ruins your life - that of course, it's a cliche. the amazing thing is that jackson didn't seem to know that it's a cliche. his was a mind free of irony and all its associated doubt. in interviews, it's clear that he expects that if he tells people to lay off, they'll do it. based on a few quick months of deep obsession, I really think jackson's naivete can't be overstated. which is what makes him the figure he was.
okay, so - no obsession lasts forever, and I was gently coasting past this one, when suddenly the one thing that could catapult this guy's myth into american lore and finally solidify public opinion on him happened. michael jackson died, and suddenly my little anachronistic obsession was the entire world's obsession. if you don't have deep and long-lasting obsessions, you might not be able to appreciate how surreal and galvanizing this was. suddenly everyone was participating in this process of trying desperately to figure out just what jackson's deal was. why the fuck was he so crazy? who was ultimately telling the truth about the changing appearance, the child molestation? we all started frantically building an image of a hero or a nutcase, depending on who you talked to.
I obviously don't think jackson was nuts. I feel a great deal of sympathy for him. from my vantage point about ten thousand miles from anyone who knew him, it seems to me that accusing him of all the manipulation he allegedly did - forcing people to call him the "king of pop," groping sick kids - is to overestimate his craftiness. jackson was smart in one way: musically. in all other ways, I really believe he never progressed past a child's worldview. this makes him some kind of savant, which is interesting enough, but add in the fact that he was a symbol and a hero-figure for a lot of people, and you've got one unbelievable, irresistible pop culture icon, so appealing it almost borders on religious.
in watching all his videos, I was struck by how many of them showed him playing the role of the trickster - in "do you remember the time" (it's so shitty, just ignore that fact for a second) he plays a magician who charms the whole court, and the thing's even structured like a fairytale, with a significance placed on the number three. (the first two guys trying to entertain the king can't hack it, but the third one is magic.) in billie jean, which I seriously can't stop watching, jackson lights up squares of light and turns beggars into kings. and in the video for leave me alone, jackson turns out to be a giant. all of these, obviously, intend to turn jackson into something super-human, which offstage he really seemed to be - none of us were convinced by his marriages or his attempts at normal family life. so there's that link between art and life.
jackson's role in the public consciousness, then, was roughly equivalent to the shaman, who has access to some power or knowledge that we don't - in this case, the power of music and really fucking crazy dancing. even I can't help thinking that something is possessing jackson when he's dancing; again there's that presence and immediacy that makes him move like a live wire. obviously, jackson was supposed to take us into this realm where everything was highly glamorous; he was the conduit.
I get the feeling that most people would think I was overanalyzing this whole deal, and these are the people who generally use epithets like "crazy" to describe both jackson and his fans. I would say to those people that they are ignoring an extremely basic function of the human brain and body: we need to worship, and we need evidence of the supernatural in our daily lives. as corny and ridiculous as a lot of jackson's music and videos were, they had this essential mythical quality. the public needs figures like jackson. you can make connections to christianity pretty easily, here.
it's sort of beside the point, if you're looking at everything as myth, to try to psychologize jackson and why he didn't want to be black, couldn't be normal if he tried. that's his whole persona, which fits into our need for such a figure like a hand in a glove: he's the one that's somehow above the crowd, has some special power over them. those figures are never meant for normal lives. the more we find out celebrities are just like us, the more decayed that mythic quality is.
now, I have no idea how much of this jackson was aware of and cultivating consciously; I don't think it matters, but my suspicion is that he was not really thinking about this stuff. I really think that jackson's consciousness was like that of a child, as I said, and as evidence I can show you the video for earth song, which I just watched the other day and fucking couldn't believe how nakedly corny it is. in jackson's mind, the whole environmental battle is so simply whittled down to a good-vs-evil thing that he seems to believe that if you just want things to get better in the world, they will. this reminds me of the way I used to think when I was ten: "why can't people just stop being bad?" the naivete of this video and of songs like "heal the world" blow me the fuck away. they're also why jackson connected with people - he wasn't troubled with pesky things like sophisticated irony or doubt (at least not over his principles of good and bad). his whole musical career can be characterized by two things: 1) talent, and 2) immediacy, a lack of a gap between himself and his music, which I think was greatly aided by his innocent conception of the world.
then there's this other element that makes this narrative so fucking compelling: the public's expectations. more than any other celebrity, we demanded accountability for jackson's eccentricities. the 2005 trial (which happened about an hour away from me, although I wasn't interested at the time) for molestation was the result of an accumulation - jackson's entire life was a trial, with the public as the prosecution. in that way it's almost kafkaesque, what this guy had to face on a daily basis. which makes me think, no wonder he was so crazy. and because jackson was so naive in his conceptions of other people (this is, uh, speculation), he could never understand why they were always after him. again with the ten-year-old reasoning: "why can't you just leave me alone and stop being mean?" if he thought on a level higher than this, I haven't seen evidence of it.
yesterday I read somewhere that a few people had killed themselves because of jackson's death, which is just proof that people don't take this level of fame and hero-worship seriously enough, don't acknowledge just how deeply buried in our psyche this need for worship is. it's more complex than just wanting glamour; it's wanting something beyond life itself. instead people laugh it off, say "now there's less idiots in the world, good riddance" and are still calling jackson "jacko." I'm not arguing that jackson wasn't really weird, I'm just saying that it makes perfect sense that he was, and that his difference from regular people and even most celebrities has something to do with his fitting into some archetype that the human mind is drawn to.
not only that, but there are all these fascinating tendencies we have concerning a person who's died. it seems that we instantly turn a dead person into a hero, even if we all thought he was insane when he was alive - now it seems right that he was already in touch with strangeness, since now he's in the totally unknowable realm of death. again, I would connect this to christianity, and point out that the oustanding feature of christ is that he died. there is just something in the human brain that draws our thoughts along this line. a hero must have some connection with death, because death is the ultimate mythical space.
I'm not trying to say that celebrity-worship is just another manifestation of christianity, because they're not completely similar. but it is a variation, and especially at jackson's level, where fame is so extreme that exaggeration seems impossible. those who pass off jackson's fame as some kind of insanity are misunderstanding a great deal of the way our entire species lives.
1 comments:
yes!
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