Random Acts of Mind by Dones

Michael Jackson died today. With him, a significant aspect of my childhood has died, too. There are going to some people, like my infant son, who won’t quite get that, just as I don’t fully understand how Elvis’ death might have impacted my parents’ generation. Others are going to look at the controversy and scandal surrounding his personal life, and say, unforgivingly, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” That’s their choice. I choose to remember the good things about Michael Jackson’s legacy, and consider the bad things as equivalent to his death. Let me explain:

As a child of the late 70′s/early 80′s, I first really noticed Michael Jackson when Thriller came out. Oh, sure, I think I probably heard “Rock With You” (still my favorite) and Jackson Five songs before then, but Thriller was a big enough pop-culture earthquake to reach me in small-town Kansas. And my, what an earthquake!

The Thriller album, video, etc. was all encompassed by this hoopla that changed our culture. We had the behind the scenes on HBO of the Making of Thriller, the music video that was more like a film, that gave us insight into the way all subsequent music videos would be created. Thriller is the Citizen Kane of music videos, and despite what Nirvana has to say about it, it will always be the #1 music video of all time. The album itself was really good, including more hits than I can count–and the rest are pretty much ingrained into my psyche, as well, as a function of how good they are. If Michael’d swapped out “The Girl Is Mine” for his other duet with Paul McCartney, “Say, Say, Say”, the album would have been freakin’ perfect. Then there was the jacket, the glove, Billy Jean, Beat It, the Moonwalk, the Pepsi commercial…all resonating in pop culture through movies like Beverly Hills Cop, to Corey Feldman dressing up like Michael, and so on.

I was in 2nd grade and had never heard of the Moonwalk until one morning I walk into my classroom early and some kid asks me if I know how to moonwalk. Caught off guard, I say, “Yeah,” and start doing my best Neal Armstrong impression. This was the first time that I can remember that Michael Jackson was known as ‘cool’ (this event also confirmed that I am a dork). It was all downhill from there, and my younger brother was even more into Michael than I was. This was one of two Michael Jackson posters he had on the wall of his room:

When Captain Eo came out, I was as pumped as I could be. Michael Jackson in a musical scifi fantasy, in 3d? We had the “making-of” for this movie, taped off the Disney Channel, and watched it repeatedly for years, such that when we finally went to Disneyland in ’89 we already knew 80% of the film and all of the music, but it was the fulfillment of the promise that the behind-the-scenes special had made years before.

Don’t forget ”We Are The World”. How many people who lived through the 80′s can’t sing that song all the way through, even imitating each artist’s unique singing style, and naming off each person in order (more or less). We liked it so much, we bought both versions of the album. Hey, it was for starving kids in Africa, and we did our part.  

I don’t know if it would have been obvious from the outside how much I respected this guy. Here he did charity work, and would hang out with kids, and he always had a big smile on his face, and his music and dance moves were SO COOL! He was wholesome, heroic and virtuous. People called him the King of Pop, and we all hailed him as royalty, devoting our time and treasure and heart to the king.

But this King’s hero journey had not yet ended. Things went Bad from here… Bad was kind of the beginning of the end of the honeymoon for me. The music was great, but some of it was darker and weirder: gone was this innocent 1950′s movie-house faux-horror of the song Thriller, and in was the nearly unintelligible but somehow threatening Smooth Criminal; out was the completely unbelievable fight song Beat It (unbelievable because Michael Jackson wasn’t a physical threat, just a coolness threat. He wasn’t going to kick your butt, but he could win hands-down in a dance-off), and in was the more deadly threat of Bad. No more We Are The World; now it was Man In The Mirror, which was less sympathy for others and more of a guilt trip.

At the same time, we started to hear about Michael hanging out with Bubbles the chimp, and buying the elephant man’s bones, and just doing wiggy-ass stuff. Not to mention the plastic surgery: he wasn’t the cute little black boy from the Jackson Five (probably wouldn’t even qualify to be in The Wiz without makeup, sorry to say), and he wasn’t even this cool black guy with the million-dollar smile from the Thriller album. He was bad, and white, and unrecognizable, and he grabbed his crotch for no reason. The music was great, but the King was a shadow of his former self, at least in my eyes.

I bought the Dangerous album on CD when I was in high school, and it was okay. About 50% good-to-great songs, but the rest were just so-so. MTV just kept on selling him as if nothing had changed, but just about everything about Michael had changed by then. Didn’t he marry Lisa Marie around that time? He had officially gone off the deep end by then, even though it wasn’t fully evident. In hindsight, maybe it was seeing him with Macaulay Culkin that started getting us wondering, but enough of the music was still outstanding, and the music videos continued to be innovative, so we didn’t worry about it.

Until he got in trouble. Officially. Some believe Michael that it was some celebrity witchhunt, but I think most of us could tell there was truth to the accusations. It was around this time that Michael started wearing masks, and I think he lost part of his nose for a while to plastic surgery. It was at this point that I really started mourning the loss of my hero, of my king. This is what I meant in the first paragraph above: the Michael Jackson I knew, loved, and respected in the 80′s had already died in the 90′s, so today I did not shed a tear.

Lately, I have been itching to finally get my collection caught up and buy his music on CD for ripping to my iPod, but I didn’t want any of my money going to that Thing that my boyhood idol had transformed into. Now I don’t have to shop the used CD racks for his music (unless I just want a deal), because now I know my money won’t go to feeding his shell of a corpse that still went by the name Michael Jackson.

That sounds very bitter, but I think it portrays quite accurately how my childhood hero has fallen in my estimation. I do not weep for the overly wealthy yet still hopelessly in debt, insanely weird and self-disfiguring pedophile who died this afternoon. Today, on the day of his passing, I remember and earnestly mourn the man who created iconic music, dance, and imagery that had such a major influence in the shaping of my own artistic and aesthetic tastes, as well as those of my generation. That is the one I remember, the one I mourned for when he fell from grace, and the one I mourn for today, in his own words:

He’s out of my life
He’s out of my life
And I don’t know whether to laugh or cry
I don’t know whether to live or die
And it cuts like a knife
He’s out of my life

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Current Events, Movies, 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.