The Sadness of Michael Jackson

Well, what more is there to say? One of the genuine icons of our time, which says a lot about our time (more for bad than for good, I would argue), has died at the age of 50.

Like him or not, there is no denying Michael Jackson’s significance in global popular culture. He was a star above stars, as outsized a celebrity as we have ever seen. He was an artist, I’ll give him that, but he was so much more, and over the past twenty years or so his art, his music, receded further and further into the background, eclipsed by a life descending into sordid decay and the media frenzy that covered his salacious demise.

In this sense, he was one of the truly towering figures of our time — and, speaking personally, one of the towering figures of my life. I was almost ten when Thriller came out — and it was an event. I remember it well. It was right as I was growing up and into popular culture, as I was first listening to popular music in a serious way. The album was that touchstone that everyone needed to own, and I had my copy, and I listened to it, and loved it. “Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” “The Girl is Mine,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” — these were the soundtrack of my life for a time.

The love soon faded. In my Grade 6 class, a year later, everyone seemed to adore him but me. I had moved on, notably to The Police. For some reason, in my mind, you were either a fan of one or the other, and I preferred a far greater album, Synchronicity, to Thriller — even now, Synchronicity holds up as some of the best music of the ’80s, as music that transcends that musically appalling decade and continues to be relevant, whereas Thriller remains very much of that time, a remnant of a time that evokes embarrassing nostalgia, the ’80s version of what the Bee Gees and Saturday Night Fever meant to the ’70s.

Of course, Michael Jackson was far superior to the Bee Gees, and much of what he did was quite good — even if I now find almost all of it to be awful. Thriller was solid, Bad had its moments (like “Man in the Mirror,” “Dirty Diana,” and “Smooth Criminal”), and there were what I thought were good songs elsewhere (like “Say Say Say,” a duet with Paul McCartney that was once, I am almost ashamed to admit, one of my favourites.

Bad came out in 1987. By the time the terrible Dangerous came out — and it was already his eighth solo album — it was 1991, and he was already something of a joke, if not yet quite the freakshow that he would become. The rest, of course, is history, and it didn’t go well. The music was nothing memorable, and it was Jackson’s personal life, and alleged criminality, that took over. He was still an icon, bigger than ever, the mystery only heightening the appeal (to many, if certainly not to me), but he was an icon to be gawked at, sensationalist tabloid fodder, not to be admired.

I don’t know what he did or didn’t do, but what is clear, I think, is that he was, through it all, a child, a developmentally stunted human being. There was something he had lost as a child — his innocence, perhaps, or even the entirety of a normal childhood — and he was looking for it. It is easy to conclude that what he may have done was despicable — and, again, who knows? — and that he was a pathetic monster hiding behind a plastic mask and a life of abject weirdness, but, in the end, I think it just comes down to this: The life of Michael Jackson was a life of sadness, a life that evokes sadness (in me, at least, looking back, thinking about his decline and fall, and about the culture that enabled the arc of his star, from childhood stardom to global megastardom to final implosion).

And now it’s over.

(Cross-posted from The Reaction.)