The King is Dead. Long Live The King: An Irresponsible Tribute

Michael Jackson, “Billie Jean” — 1981 Home Demo Version
(Thriller: Special Edition, 2001)

Today’s post was supposed to be a personal history in music: 25 formative songs in honor of my 25th birthday, which I celebrated last week. As it happened, though, my birthday was scooped by another, more sensational news item. I think you can guess where this is going.

I’m avoiding the Michael Jackson media blitz as best I can. I’m not watching TV and I’m not reading the news and I’m certainly not listening to the radio—I already got spooked bad enough on Thursday afternoon, when I hadn’t yet learned he’d died and couldn’t figure out why every store I walked into was blasting “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” I’ve got a sensitive constitution for this stuff. For what it’s worth, I do believe that celebrity worship in this country is a destructive force, one that sidelines real news and turns fallen stars into gleaming idols, scrubbed clean of whatever unsavory details might mar their legacies. I recognize that it’s wrong to whitewash history like this. But it’s exactly what I intend to do.

The thing is, it isn’t MJ’s death that’s really upsetting me, it’s his life. Not all of it, of course—not that exuberant child singing his heart out on The Ed Sullivan Show, and definitely not the confident young man who took the stage at Motown’s 25th anniversary concert and produced a shriek from the crowd by sliding backwards on his toes for all of two seconds. What’s got me down is the other Michael—the middle-aged man-child with the bleached skin, the sloped nose, the cleft chin he wasn’t born with, and all the attendant scandal and scorn. To witness, via a rapid-fire succession of press clips, his transformation into this state is more than I can stand to watch right now.

As a performer, Michael was astonishingly calculated and precise, and yet in his private life, he seemed ever more unbalanced and confused. His videos rendered him an enchanted sylph, whose powers of invisibility and shapeshifting could get him out of any scrape; in reality, he saw his public image reduced to a crude punchline he could never shake. He spent the latter half of his career in a curious dual existence as both undisputed king and villainous jester, at once a source of inspiration and ridicule.

Michael was 25 when I was born. Now I’m 25 and he’s dead. And as irresponsible as it may be, I prefer to memorialize him as I first saw him: on the cover of the tattered copy of Thriller that I discovered at the Roosevelt Island Thrift Store, and ran on stubby five-year-old legs to ask my mother if she’d buy it for me. That’s the Michael who changed my life, and that’s the Michael I want to remember: halfway through life, at the peak of his career, his beautiful face still mostly intact, still just a kid figuring his life out.