Tell ‘em that it’s human nature
Am I weird? I don’t get Michael Jackson, any more than I get Britney Spears or the Jonas Brothers. I don’t quite get why he was such a big deal, and why the nation needs to mourn him collectively by playing his mostly mediocre music. (From his solo career, what is any good other than Off the Wall and “Billie Jean”?) I do get that he sold a zillion albums and was among the two or three most famous people on the planet, but what of it? Because of his fame—because, intentionally or not, he crossed some sort of line into a level of stardom that shouldn’t be reached—he had ceased to be a true object of human sympathy, because no one could know his experience. Bob Rossney (via Boing Boing) explains this well:
It strikes me that it never even occurred to me whether or not to forgive Michael Jackson. In my mind, he was so far away from normative that the question of forgiveness seems totally irrelevant. Not that his no longer really being human in any meaningful sense justified his actions, or mitigated the harm he did, but that it makes no more sense to judge the morality of his actions than it would to judge Henry Darger’s. Their creepiness, sure. But this was a man (it’s a mark of how profoundly damaged Michael Jackson was that it feels strange to call him “a man”, just as it feels strange to recognize that when he died he was older than the President of the United States) who spent every day of his life embedded in a matrix of perverse incentives. The terrain of his personal landscape was unrecognizable. I can understand the choices that my cat makes more deeply than I could understand the ones Jackson made.
It seems as though people are trying to resurrect the legend after the fact, as if to excuse the way our adulation destroyed him while he was alive. As Generation Bubble puts it:
To borrow the words of Z-Man, the villain of Russ Meyer’s immortal Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, pop superstardom was Michael Jackson’s happening, and it freaked him — as well as us — out.
Comments
I have several unrelated reactions to your blog the response to MJ’s passing.
1. People are not mourning the lost, sick man MJ had become. They are nostalgic for their own experiences that his music reminds them of.
2. While I find the collective mourning grotesque, I don’t see it as any worse than the reaction to the pope’s passing. Who hurt more children? Whose life work gave greater comfort or joy to more people? I personally don’t know and don’t think that it matters. It’s all devotion to cultural icons, as far as I’m concerned. If we’re going to give grieving the pope a pass, seems to me we have to given anyone that famous a pass since it all depends on how people feel, not an objective measurement of the person’s contribution to humanity.
3. Selective memory frequently accompanies a person’s death. When Nixon died, you’d think we lost a great humanitarian by the outpouring. I was astounded at how this racist, anti-semitic criminal was lauded in death. After that, no post mortem tributes surprise me.
Comment by TJ Bailey from washington, dc — August 5, 2009 @ 10:54 am