For All Of Us Old Enough To Remember “Thriller…” Update: Michael Jackson (1958-2009)

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Michael Jackson has apparently had a heart attack.

TMZ

LA Times

NPR

Allah Pundit

He wasn’t breathing when the paramedics got there and he’s in “really bad shape” in the hospital according to a family member. Apart from feeling instinctive human sympathy for his suffering, I’m not sure how to react. He’s super famous — yet mostly famous at this point for being a walking freak show. He’s had a tough life psychologically — but might very well also be a child molester. In a sense this is huge news, yet in another sense I’m not sure why anyone would much care these days. I’ve completely lost my news bearings!

Stand by for (hopefully happy) updates.

Update: A sentiment we can all hopefully agree upon: “Thriller” was a simply dynamite album.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

Jack and Jill Politics

UPDATE: TMZ reporting that Michael Jackson has died. He was 50. This is up right now at Huffington Post as well.

Newsday reporting he has died as well.

UPDATE #2: LA Times reporting that he is in a coma.

Sully’s got “I’ll Be There” up with a RIP

James Joyner pointing out TMZ is the only one saying he has died.

UPDATE #3: LA Times confirming MJ has died.

NBC News confirms

UPDATE #4: CBS, ABC, and AP confirming.

UPDATE #5: Ann Althouse

Rolling Stone

Rod Dreher:

Jackson was without question one of the most important figures in popular music history, and to my mind, absolutely one of the saddest

Joel Achenbach:

Not long ago I showed my kids a YouTube video of Michael Jackson demonstrating the moonwalk, circa 1983. Like that talent scout said of Fred Astaire: “Can dance a little.”

My kids never knew Jackson at his peak, when he was the most popular entertainer on the planet, and millions of copies of “Thriller” flew out of the record stores. It wasn’t as good an album as “Off the Wall,” which got heavy rotation at the dance parties at my college, but when “Thriller” came out, music videos were the rage, and everything came together to propel MJ to the highest level of the business — what you might call the Elvissphere.

What a rough life, though. He never knew a normal childhood. His personal travails, legal problems involving accusations of child molestation, plastic surgery obsessions and other eccentricities turned him into a punch line.

So maybe some people forgot over the years just how great he was. He was amazing at the age of 10, when he was singing “ABC.” But he was even better in his early 20s, when he had Quincy Jones producing him in “Off the Wall” and “Thriller.”

He lived to be 50 years old. But maybe he was always really 10. He never seemed to know how to live life as an adult. For now, we’ll put all that aside, and think of him at the height of his power — singing and dancing so well he seemed to defy the laws of physics. I’m pretty sure there’s never been anyone else like him.

UPDATE #6: Michelle Malkin:

His adult life was marred by lurid molestation charges, endless displays of bizarre behavior with his three children, plastic surgery horrors, and financial mayhem.

But he was a musical genius in his early days before he succumbed to Hollyweird and that’s what I’ll choose to remember. So sad — the corruption of innocence, the talent squandered, the celebrity gone wild.

Doug J.

Ta-Nehisi Coates has reposted a post from a few days ago on Michael Jackson:

Thriller came out at an interesting time. Bands were really losing out, as folks figured out they could do replace a horn section with a keyboard. There’s this sense now that anything that came out of the disco era, and the post-disco era is essentially awful. As a kid, I had some of that. We nominally hated R&B and thought of hip-hop as the harder, “truer” form. Later we came to see hip-hop as the child of funk and soul, and 80s R&B as a corrupted, corporate, step-child.This is obviously simplistic, and not only do I not subscribe to it now. (Marvin’s “Give It Up” is classic.) I don’t know how much I subscribed to it then. (Dig the Lisa-Lisa clip below.) But the question is where does Mike fit into all of that? It’s easy to dismiss  him, just on the basis of his success, and the qualitative decline of his later work. That second part is true of almost any musician, though.

Spencer Ackerman

UPDATE #7:  Digby:

I was traveling the world in the 1980s and it didn’t matter where I went, from Paris to Mayan jungles, Thriller was playing. It was inescapable, the soundtrack to the era.

Michael Jackson was a legend and a casualty, his life both charmed and tortured. I’m not sure how he could have ever grown old. RIP.

Ezra Klein

Michael Jackson’s “Bad” was the first album I ever cared about. I used to hear it coming from my older brother’s room. Here’s to you, Mike

Jesse Walker in Reason

Megan McArdle

Andrew Sullivan:

There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child. By abuse, I do not mean sexual abuse; I mean he was used brutally and callously for money, and clearly imprisoned by a tyrannical father. He had no real childhood and spent much of his later life struggling to get one. He was spiritually and psychologically raped at a very early age – and never recovered. Watching him change his race, his age, and almost his gender, you saw a tortured soul seeking what the rest of us take for granted: a normal life.

But he had no compass to find one; no real friends to support and advise him; and money and fame imprisoned him in the delusions of narcissism and self-indulgence. Of course, he bears responsibility for his bizarre life. But the damage done to him by his own family and then by all those motivated more by money and power than by faith and love was irreparable in the end. He died a while ago. He remained for so long a walking human shell.

I loved his music. His young voice was almost a miracle, his poise in retrospect eery, his joy, tempered by pain, often unbearably uplifting. He made the greatest music video of all time; and he made some of the greatest records of all time. He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.

UPDATE #8: Ta-Nehisi

Peter Suderman at TAS:

There isn’t a lot to say about Michael Jackson. His life was a multi-billion dollar pop-culture freakshow — sad and entertaining and amazing and frightening all at the same time. He revolutionized pop music. Then he revolutionized celebrity weirdness. I like to think his contribution to the former was greater than his contribution to the latter, but I’m not quite enough of an aficionado to say for sure.

Dennis Dale in TAC:

Michael Jackson was not the first superstar, but he may be the first to publicly renounce personhood itself in favor of renown. Michael Jackson didn’t lose his individuality, he discarded it as a hindrance to celebrity. What was always unnerving about him was the absence behind the mystique. He did not start out as a “personality”, real or fabricated; there was never anything there to begin with beyond the remarkable talent. Through the years I’ve become convinced that the absence of personality, and eventually the grotesquerie that was offered in its place, amplified that talent. We never got to know him, even as we watched him grow up. It wasn’t just that he was private–lots of celebrities are “private”–it’s that he deliberately crafted a persona without personhood. He cobbled together a few cliches he found romantic–the eternal child as a result of being robbed of childhood, the lonely genius, the besieged eccentric–all bathetic in their self-pitying grandiosity. Michael Jackson made himself into a comic caricature of egomania.

He refused even to accept the limits of nature, treating his physical body as if it were as malleable as his public persona. Had he been less delusional, and perhaps more ably befriended by those around him, he might have been made to see that neither of these things were very much within his control. Michael Jackson, in his repeated disfigurement under the knife, took on the vanity of the nation. In this, his most ridiculed aspect, that which is considered most “abnormal” about him, he is in fact most like us. He was, if anything, a pioneer in the realm of plastic surgery. When he started out on his gruesome way, the practice was far less common than it is now. Michael took on our vanity the way Christ takes on our sins.

Jonah Goldberg:

I know that Michael Jackson wasn’t convicted of the despicable crimes he was accused of. And that’s why he never went to jail. Three cheers for the majesty of the American legal system. But in my own personal view, he wasn’t exonerated either. Nor was he absolved of his crimes because he could sing, moonwalk, or sell 10 million records. (Though many of us suspect the money and fame he made from those things is precisely what kept him out of jail).

And, while I merely think he was a pedophile, I know he was not someone responsible parents should applaud, healthy children emulate, nor society celebrate.

And while we’re at it, his relatively early death wasn’t “tragic.” He was one of the richest people in the world. He spent his money on perpetual childhood and he was perpetually with children not his own.

Meanwhile, in the last ten days, we’ve seen or heard of remarkable people who’ve given their lives for freedom in Iran. We’ve heard of innocents killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the last decade, America has lost thousands of heroes in noble causes and thousands of innocent bystanders who were denied the simple joys of life through no fault of their own. Those deaths are tragic, and we’re hard pressed to think of more than a handful of names to put with the long line of the dead. If anything, Michael Jackson’s life, not his death, was tragic.

Sullivan has a round-up:

Hua Hsu in The Altantic:

Different versions of Michael Jackson had already died years ago. Sometimes he had reinvented himself and found his way back toward his fan’s good graces, sometimes he had only grown more illusive and erratic-seeming. It’s trite and predictable to say all this, sure, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Jackson was one of the last figures of our time who could, in his very presence, describe the possibilities of pop. He wasn’t just the King–he was the entire domain, the rules and regulations, the dream-horizon of the citizenry, the place where the land met the heavens. Jackson was one of the first (and last) artists whose new videos, tours and albums were actual, global events, as when he debuted his “Black or White” video in 1991 after an episode of The Simpsons. This was the cultural history of the pre-digital age: simultaneity, mass worship, millions sitting in front of their TVs at the exact same moment. (The closest analogue now: millions around the world, sitting in front of their computers, carefully recomposing Michael’s Wikipedia entry the moments after his death was made official.)

John McWhorter:

This quality of his was such that his career was likely over long ago. Thriller was perhaps the last moment when hit pop music for people beyond tween-age could be so basically innocent and unprobing of the individual soul. Even back then, part of the charm was the arrangement – his vocal skills acknowledged, Jackson didn’t write or orchestrate that opening vamp to “Billie Jean” nor did he create the dense festival of sonic joys under “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),”which are certainly part of the reason I have now purchased Thriller three times.

But even by Bad in 1987, Michael’s crotch-grabbing in the video of the title song was a “bad” move indeed. It was fake – looking more like Diana Ross every year, he looked about as plausible taking a page from increasingly popular rappers as Bonnie Raitt would have. It wasn’t him – at a time when pop was more and more about exploring the self. As time went by the hit singles were fewer and farther between. “Scream” from the HIStory album in 1995 was the last song of his that got around in any real way.

Six years later when Invincible never really rang the bell in the old way, Jackson interestingly cried racism (against Tommy Mottola). But if anything, the problem was that by then the question as to his own blackness was decidedly abstract. Or at least, he wasn’t “real” as it was put by then. By 2001 black rappers were all over the pop charts with cuts about themselves, in da club, in da car, in da hood, in da honeez, all up in dat bizness, whatever – rap is all about the “I” as some more literary-minded aficionados have it.

UPDATE #9: Robert Stein

Now, amid all the outpouring of grief over a figure who meant so much to millions, there is the reality that Michael Jackson, emaciated and worn out, was dreading a comeback tour of his own and reportedly told fans after a recent rehearsal, “I don’t know how I’m going to do 50 shows…I need to put some weight on. I’m really angry with them booking me up to do 50 shows. I only wanted to do ten.”

Now, celebrity vultures like Jesse Jackson and Deepak Chopra are stirring the publicity pot for new autopsies and investigations of doctors who were prescribing the multiple pills that Michael Jackson, like Elvis, was using to try to sustain a life that had spun out of control.

Those who remember the joy he brought into their lives will not be consoled by the search for someone to blame for losing him. The cynic may have been right after all. When the book closes on such lives, the careers remain, complete and intact.

Hua Hsu in Foreign Policy

For Americans, Michael’s death has become a referendum on how culture used to be, on a time when you either watched it live or heard about it thirdhand the next morning. Older generations came home from wars, buried Kennedy and King, heard the Sex Pistols for the first time, lived through 1968 and 1979. We gasped when Michael got torched during that Pepsi commercial. We carefully studied the moonwalk. The Internet is flooded with stories of 30-somethings who watched “Black or White” after The Simpsons nearly 20 years ago.

But Americans also gave up on Michael many versions ago, jettisoning him sometime in the 1990s. The absorption of Nirvana and Dr. Dre into American pop instilled a chauvinism against anything that seemed overproduced or choreographed. As Michael’s own scandals ensnared him, he began to seem like a castoff, a former icon best remembered as part of the past. This is when he became the property of the rest of the world, where the winds of fashion weren’t quite so finicky, where he was everywhere yet nowhere, a ubiquitous cipher. “You are not alone,” he told everyone, at the same time.

The reason Michael mattered — continues to matter — is because he was one of the first truly international stars. Not just transatlantic, not just big in Japan: He was global. The obvious effect was economic. Michael opened markets around the world; he made the world safe for MTV (after first making MTV safe for nonwhite performers, it should be said). He sold records and sold-out tours everywhere. He was, by most accounts, a gracious guest and a kind ambassador.

Rod Dreher:

Here’s a pretty jaw-dropping insider’s account of Michael Jackson’s last months and years. He comes off as a kind of Howard Hughes figure, a drugged-out skeleton being controlled by vampires. Except he was a gay drugged-out skeleton being controlled by vampires, according to this account. Interestingly, the journalist who wrote the piece, a guy who spent years within the Jackson world, said he started out believing Michael had molested those boys, but ended up thinking that he had been falsely accused, and that he (MJ) had idiotically made it very easy for his accusers by failing to see why it was creepy to share his bed with somebody else’s children.

E.D. Kain at The League:

Watch as the pop-beatification process begins.  I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic.  I just haven’t had a change of heart now that he’s dead.  I don’t know if he was guilty or not, but my gut, for what it’s worth, certainly tells me that he was.  That’s not fair, I know, but I can’t help it.  And beyond that, I’m also pretty certain he was a miserable person, whose sadness had withered him from within.

In some cases death is a mercy.

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