Media
In death, pop singer Michael Jackson becomes all things to all people
The future king
The media circus over the death of Michael Jackson crept its way into every corner of the national consciousness this week, leaving no stone uncast and no angle uninvestigated (memorial services, suicidal fans, career retrospectives, sordid family history, legal battles, the curious response of the singer’s Dickensian father, pharmacological flim-flammery) and no media outlet untouched. Even the alt-weekly newspapers – bastions of unpopular interests – couldn’t avoid the gravitational pull of the death of the King of Pop.
They also couldn’t resist the common temptation to cast the death of such a famous public figure in the light of whatever impulse or fascination governs their own intellectual, psychological, or emotional lives. Writers are just like other people, and for whatever reason, when a person of such uncommon stature, of such absurd worldwide popularity, as Michael Jackson dies, that person’s death very quickly goes from being a story about them to being an outlet for us.
Take, for example, the eulogy piece written by essayist Greg Tate for this week’s Village Voice, “Michael Jackson: The Man in Our Mirror.” In it Tate, author of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, waxes philosophical, self-important, and heavily racial, more often at the expense of Jackson that in tribute to him. Say what you will about Jackson – that he was the leader of one of the great R&B groups of the sixties, that he was one of the best pop singers the world ever produced, that he broke sales records, that he ate breakfast, that he could dance better than any 10 professional dancers put together, that he was beloved the world over and then over again – but it strikes me as both delusional and completely outside the point to say he was “one of the great storytellers and soothsayers of the last 100 years.” You can love “Billie Jean” all you want, but the man who wrote it and sang it and danced around to it wasn’t a holy man; he was just a pop singer, which really should be enough. By all means, give thanks and praise for the man’s voice – which, at its best, could be as airy as Al Green’s and as rhythmically surgical as James Brown’s – but you lose me when you start talking about it as a “field-holler scream.”
Born to extrapolate, wrapped up in his own concerns, and happy to use the events of recent days as an excuse to talk about them, Tate bemoans the lack of “the unmistakable presence of some kind of spiritual genius” in Black American culture, “the sense that something other than or even more than human is speaking through whatever fragile mortal vessel is burdened with repping for the divine, the magical, the supernatural, the ancestral …” He hears this voice of the Orishas in the music of Aretha Franklin, Sonny Rollins, Cecil Taylor, and, ostensibly, Michael Jackson, but not anywhere in young black America, meaning, I guess, that Ghostface Killah, Li’l Wayne, Alicia Keys, TV on the Radio, and countless other more current African-American musical talents are just in it for the money.
Gripe all you want about the insubstantial music of today’s youth (older people have been doing so for generations’ now, and they were definitely doing it when Michael Jackson was at the peak of his fame), and swear up and down that Thriller and Off the Wall belong in the pantheon of great recorded music (though I don’t buy it; I always found Jackson to be more of a performer that a creator of great songs), but please try and refrain from talking about Michael Jackson as “the real missing link: the ‘bridge of sighs’ between the Way We Were and What We’ve Become in what Nelson George has astutely dubbed the “Post-Soul Era.” And maybe you shouldn’t speculate too much on whether the guy who invented the Moon Walk and sang “Say, Say, Say” with goofball Paul McCartney was “capable and culpable of having staged his own pedophilic race-war revival of” the role of “one of the most secretly angry Black race-men on the planet.”
I’m not even sure I know what that means, except that it has something to do with all the legal murmurings about male children at the Neverland Ranch and that it says a lot more about the concerns, worries, fears, passions, hopes, and interests of Greg Tate than it does about Michael Jackson.
Jackson was a lot of things; I’m not sure “race warrior” was one of them.
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