My first reaction to Michael Jackson’s death was a kind of ironic detachment. I called my friend Gary, and we immediately went into deconstruct-mode, trying to predict how the media narrative would play out. He foresaw the outpouring of mass grief for one of the most beloved pop stars ever, on the level of what happened after Princess Diana’s death; I anticipated a “Behind the Music” tabloid treatment: the King of Pop falls from the heights, becomes an inscrutable, unfathomable recluse hounded by lawsuits, permanently tainted by charges of child molestation, entirely irrelevant as a music maker. Pure tragedy: he’d gone from being a celebrity artist who touched everybody to being a public leper, gruesome, isolated, untouchable.
But soon I was combing the internet for his music videos and footage of his live performances, wanting to push aside the Michael of the last twenty years in favor of the Michael who ruled the twenty years before that. My initial detachment revealed itself to be a kind of shock and I realized that I was, against my own sense of rationality, deeply affected by the end of his life. Suddenly I was weeping over his astonishing performance of "Billie Jean" at the 25th Anniversary of Motown -- the event that introduced the world to the moonwalk. I was posting links to articles and texting friends for their reactions. Turned out my behavior was like a lot of other people’s, so much so that within hours more than one friend was complaining on Facebook about the flood of posts concerning Jackson’s death; some were using the crisis in Iran as a point of comparison: why is Michael Jackson’s death more important that what’s going on in the world?
But of course it wasn’t more important, just different.
For two weeks, I’d watched in outraged horror the government assaults upon civilians in Iran, including the footage of one young woman, an innocent bystander named Neda, dying on camera after being slain by a police bullet. In comparison, grieving the death of a wealthy, famous person is a kind of indulgence, somewhat unseemly, and probably an example of herd mentality.
Intellectually, I understand such complaints, but they do nothing to explain the way we actually go through life, attaching emotional significance to the music that accompanies our memories. We are all part of the herd, and we don’t always know what connects us until we realize it is gone. Put another way: Neda’s death in Iran is a shocking outrage against humanity; Michael’s death is a loss felt personally.
It’s not that much of a stretch to say that I came into consciousness as a 5-year old listening to The Jackson 5 on the radio singing "A-B-C, easy as 1-2-3" -- it’s a song that’s always been with me. It’s not a stretch to say that puberty was firmly anchored by MJ’s Off The Wall album, released the summer between middle school and high school, which I played on vinyl repeatedly with the girls in my neighborhood, practicing our dance moves to "Rock With You" and turning ourselves into teenagers. Or that Thriller was the soundtrack to my entire senior year of high school, and how even then we knew it was a big deal to be eighteen and alive and dancing to this music, which everybody seemed to love.
Nor is it a stretch to say that what happened to Michael Jackson in the eighties was a kind of horror show that felt like a betrayal. How was the boy who recorded the happy soundtrack to my generation's childhood replaced by the scary, ghostly figure whose music seemed to get sappier even as he became more frightening to behold? (I think the first time I ever heard the expression “a parody of himself” was in reference to Michael Jackson.) How did the yearning in his voice and the astonishing self-possession of his dance moves become the primal scream and bloated spectacle of his world tour concerts? More to the point: Why would this beautiful young man slice his nose off his face and bleach his skin? Did he want us to look away?
There were plenty of ways to try to pop-psychologize — his lost childhood, the likely abuse, the way our adoration pushed him into the very void we now saw so abhorrently, to say nothing of the complexity of race and skin color, which I couldn’t even pretend to truly understand.
Like many people of my age, in adulthood I stopped paying attention, letting the so-called King of Pop do whatever it was he was going to do, like buy a ridiculously oversized, child’s fantasy mansion and hide away in it. Like marry a woman who was the daughter of the previous King of Pop, a union that seemed both preposterous and sad, a blatant bearding for Michael’s unmistakably queer energy -- his sensitive feminine voice held in balance with masculine fury and powers of seduction. By the time he was dangling his baby out a hotel window in front of reporters and parading his children around in public wearing what looked like burqas, he seemed just too fucking crazy to waste any thought on. Unreachable.
Now he’s dead, probably from too much prescription medication administered in his elite isolation, and we’re all fixated on him again. We can look again, not just at the nightmare Michael but at the life as a whole. Part of what makes this very public death feel like a private loss is that what seemed like a betrayal all those years ago was really just someone else's sad story, but there was no way to grieve. His death contains the recognition of that past loss -- of the talented kid who shepherded me and my friends through the '70s and early '80s, who fell apart before our eyes.
But mixed in with this is the unexpected joy of returning to the music, which never really went away. Last night, spontaneous MJ dance parties broke out all over the world. I experienced that communal outpouring at a gay bar in the Tenderloin, when the DJ slipped into Rock With You, and the dance floor immediately filled up, and we all busted out our best moves again, still carrying inside of us our younger selves, who learned to dance to that song all those years ago, before we grew up and forgot who taught us how it was done.
