Michael Jackson, 1958 - 2009.

By David Hudson on 06/26/2009

[Updated through 6/30]

"Michael Jackson was fascinated by celebrity tragedy," write Geoff Boucher and Elaine Woo in the Los Angeles Times. "He had a statue of Marilyn Monroe in his home and studied the sad Hollywood exile of Charlie Chaplin. He married the daughter of Elvis Presley. Jackson met his own untimely death Thursday at age 50, and more than any of those past icons, he left a complicated legacy. As a child star, he was so talented he seemed lit from within; as a middle-aged man, he was viewed as something akin to a visiting alien who, like Tinkerbell, would cease to exist if the applause ever stopped."

"This is the fucking all-time black diamond of obits," blogs Rob Harvilla at the Voice. "How do you reconcile the unimpeachable genius of his artistic prime with the train-wreck horror of his public descent, especially given the fact that the former ended and the latter began at least two decades ago?... The truth is that 'Thriller' is/was ungodly huge in a way that doesn't exist anymore, period. In terms of sales + celebrity fascination + musical sublimity your competition there is basically Prince, which, well.... He was the biggest pop star in the world, and made at least one of the greatest records of all time, and though he spent decades hence doing everything in his power to make you forget that, a part of everyone still remembers, and still reveres him for it. I suspect that's the part of everyone we'll hear from for at least a little while. And if not, I'm staying the hell off the Internet."

"When he played the Scarecrow in 'The Wiz' (1978), I think that is how he felt, and Oz was where he wanted to live," writes Roger Ebert. "It was his most truly autobiographical role. He could understand a character who felt stuffed with straw, but could wonderfully sing and dance, and could cheer up the little girl Dorothy.... He named his ranch Neverland, after the magical land where Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, enacted his fantasies with the Lost Boys. I wonder if we ever really understood how central that vision was to Jackson, or how literally he tried to create it."

"For all his tragic flaws as a human being, Jackson could legitimately be seen as the greatest entertainer of his generation, the natural successor to Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley," argues Richard Williams in the Guardian, which has set up quite a special section collecting tributes, commentary, photos and video.

"I think it's fair to classify Kurt Cobain's death as one brought on by medical problems, specifically the roiling interaction of depression and addiction," writes Bill Wyman in Salon. "Jackson's death is in this sense more purely a suicide, just as Elvis Presley's was some three decades ago. Like Presley, Jackson at some point stepped through a door, closed it, and turned the key. What went on behind the door we'll never know." Also in Salon, a collection of videos.

Kimberly Lindbergs says goodbye to her childhood: "As I've mentioned before, 'Kung Fu' (1972 - 1975) was one of my favorite television shows when I was a kid, as was 'Charlie's Angels' (1976 - 1981) and the Rankin/Bass 'Jackson 5ive' (1971 - 1973) cartoon. I saw some of these shows in reruns, but that didn't lessen the impact they had on me. Like a lot of little girls who grew up in the 70s, I fondly remember that one of my first crushes was on a very young and incredibly cute Michael Jackson and for years I wanted to be a private detective thanks to the influence of 'Charlie's Angels.'... June has been a cruel month."

Updates: "Upon hearing of Michael Jackson's death yesterday, one of the first things that popped into my head was: 'Have you seen my childhood?' I say that as naïvely and as free from cynicism as I can." That's Eric Henderson; along with Sal Cinquemani, he presents at the Slant Magazine Blog "10 favorite Michael Jackson singles and videos (in chronological order)."

"Though the occasional huge hit collapses the distance between audiences, we will never again experience a moment like Jackson's 1980s apotheosis, when 'Thriller' seemed to shrink the world," writes Jody Rosen in Slate. "Weeping for Michael, we are also mourning the musical monoculture - the passing of a time when we could imagine that the whole country, the whole planet, was listening to the same song. 'Thriller' (1982) was Jackson's masterpiece; it was also his curse. It won him unprecedented adoration: No one - not Frank Sinatra, not Elvis Presley, not the Beatles - commanded as large a global audience. But it was also a commercial and artistic milestone that Jackson spent the rest of his life trying in vain to repeat."

"The commonly accepted idea of Michael is some kind of fallen angel - the idea of the alien as redemptive child has always been abroad in our culture," wrote Ian Penman in 1993:

But Michael in his shades and hat and awkward moves isn't ET - he's The Man Who Fell To Earth, right down to turning himself into a public corporation, but privately regressing into wombtime. He may be our new Elvis, except that he is more likely to waste away into thin air from lack of food, drugs, sex: in that sense, Michael obviously identifies a magnetic and fatal LACK in our culture, a vanishing point....

American figures often disappear into notoriety: Howard Hughes adrift, aliens unseen, Elvis undead, Nixon reborn. Reclusivity sets up a whirlpool effect on our attention: we need to know what is going on behind the screen door. Michael is an autopsic figure: just as in Greek mythology the body of the fallen idol would be disseminated over the hills, we too have need of illustrious corpses. Michael is like a character out of Poe, a figure suspended between life and death: Peter Pan crossed with Freddie Kruger.

"When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we're looking at the future of our species," wrote Momus in 2005.

The Hollywood Reporter's Steven Zeitchik and Matthew Belloni: "The sudden death of Michael Jackson on Thursday prompted a series of discussions at Universal Pictures that resulted in the studio cutting a Jackson-related sketch from 'Brüno' only hours before its Los Angeles premiere."

Amos Barshad has a very fine roundup at Vulture, starting off with a fun story from Drew McWeeney at Hitfix.

Online viewing. Jamie Stuart illustrates flippancy.

In the Telegraph, Marc Lee talks with John Landis about shooting the "Thriller" video.

A few publications are rifling through their archives. The Village Voice: Vince Aletti (1982) and: "Here's Stanley Crouch, writing in response to twin hit pieces on Jackson (by Greg Tate and Guy Trebay) published in the Voice two months prior." That would be 1987. Then, Simon Frith (1988).

The London Review of Books: Andrew O'Hagan (2006) and Thomas Jones (2005).

Avi Zenilman collects a few pieces that've run in the New Yorker.

When LACMA's Scott Tennent heard the news, "I left my office, ascended the BCAM escalator, and went to Jeff Koons's 'Michael Jackson and Bubbles.' Suddenly the sculpture took on a whole new meaning. I felt like I was standing before a gravestone.... What king doesn't have his monument in gold?"

At the SpoutBlog, Christopher Campbell rates the collaborations with filmmakers.

"To be honest, my first reaction to the news of Michael Jackson's death was a feeling of relief." Phil Nugent explains.

Jim Emerson: "Jackson said he only felt alive when he was performing. One way or another, he always was."

At Bright Lights After Dark, a tribute from Stephane Dunn.

Another from Peter Lucas at Hot Splice.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: "[E]ven if he were as important to the history of music and art as Charlie Parker or Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra or Igor Stravinsky, I'd still find the sudden cable news blackout of everything currently happening in the world apart from his death a bit excessive and disturbing, and more than just a little infantile."

Don't stop til you get enough: Pitchfork's roundup(s).

More from the Voice archives: Nelson George and Robert Christgau (1984); and Chuck Eddy (1991).

Updates, 6/27: Over the course of 12 years, Maureen Orth has been reporting on Michael Jackson's "bizarre behavior" for Vanity Fair, which has now collected the five pieces that ran between 1994 and 2005: "I spoke to hundreds of people who knew Jackson and, in the course of my reporting, found families who had given their sons up to him and paid dearly for it. I found people who had been asked to supply him with drugs. I even found the business manager who told me on-the-record how he had had to wire $150,000 to a voodoo chief in Mali who had 42 cows ritually sacrificed in order to put a curse on David Geffen, Steven Spielberg, and 23 others on Jackson's enemies list.... Understandably, in the wake of his death, there are those who do not want to hear these sad facts. Yet nothing that Vanity Fair printed was ever challenged legally by Jackson or his associates."

Rolling Stone gathers its coverage.

From the Voice archives: all on one page now.

The New York Times collection.

Andrew Chan: "MJ had an otherworldly gift as a dancer, performer, pop craftsman, and video personality ('Black or White' and 'Scream' are extraordinary pieces of filmmaking - and far greater than the overrated, cheap camp of the 'Thriller' opus), but I think of him first and foremost as a truly masterful singer. Who else has a voice like that? Who else in the past thirty years has invented such a unique vocal style? People talk about how much his singing has influenced Usher, Ne-Yo and Justin Timberlake, but to be honest I don't really hear the similarities, because MJ's natural gift was such a singular and, frankly, a deeply weird instrument."

More thoughts from film critics: Ty Burr (Boston Globe) and Richard Corliss (Time).

A photo special from LIFE: "Michael Jackson: Life and Times."

Online listening tip #1. An On Point special.

Online listening tip #2. Spike Lee talks about working with Jackson on NPR. Tim Morrison talks with Lee, too, for Time.

Online viewing tip #1. Steve Martin introduces his Michael Jackson impersonation.

Online viewing tip #2. From Eclectic Method: "Long Live the King (Michael Jackson Mix)."

Updates, 6/28: "Greil Marcus's writing on Jackson - or rather 'Jacksonism' - is some of his most astute commentary on pop and political economy," writes k-punk in a must-read entry. "'Lipstick Traces' was as much about Restoration, about the Spectacular covering over of the punk event of 76-78 as it was about the event itself, and Marcus very quickly understood the massive role that Jacksonism played in this erasure. A new form of control emerged when shopping malls, VHS videos, charity records and TV commercials became interchangable aspects of the same commodity-media landscape: consensual sentimentality as videodrome. Well, it was new then, all that, but it's very old now, and scarcely visible to us any more now that we have grown habituated to living inside it. It was capitalist realism as entertainment, and we all bought to it, whether we liked it or not."

Robert Hilburn, pop critic for the LAT from 1970 to 2005, traces his memories of covering the child star and global phenomenon and the young man in between: "Michael vowed to do whatever it took to make people 'love me again.' The rejection fueled his ambition to be the biggest pop star in the world and to try to make his face beautiful. Unfortunately, Michael's need was so great that no amount of love seemed to be enough."

"Could Michael Jackson have reasonably expected, given this personage and look he had cultivated, to not be noticed? Or was he actually trolling for attention, some way of reconnecting to an everyday world that had no more place for him?" Dennis Cozzalio raises these questions after telling a story, a brush-with-fame sort of story, all the more remarkable for how unremarkable it is. Then, "it seems there must be a way to acknowledge Jackson's contributions to the shape and sound of pop music without also ignoring the paranoia, megalomania, fear and other disturbing aspects of the man's personality (insofar as we knew it) that totally subsumed his image in the latter part of his life. It is, it seems to me, a disservice to what he may have meant to any of us to pretend, in the overemotional, sanctimonious terms of TV news, that his impact on us was limited only to his ability to transport us through song and dance, as much a disservice as it is for TMZ and the rest of the tabloid universe to relentlessly shovel his eccentricities at us by the minute as a form of 'tribute.' Somewhere there must be some middle ground, a way to acknowledge the things that thrilled us as well as the things that we found disturbing about Michael Jackson, to acknowledge the complexity without further stripping away at his corpse or deifying him beyond recognition."

Time publishes a "Special Commemorative Edition."

Owen Hatherley has a typically fantastic entry in which he recalls MJ being referred to as the "Stalin of Pop" as two- or three-story tall statues he'd had cast of himself floated up the Thames and appeared in other conspicuous locations around the world. The focus then turns to "Stranger in Moscow": "[W]hat seems to be happening here is a dream of an outside to the Konsumterror Jackson epitomised - the world of 'actually existing socialism', a cold and severe world without Pop which is also the only imaginable society where nobody would know who he is, where he could actually be a stranger rather than the creature that was, for us born in the 80s, as real a person as Jesus, ET or Santa Claus.... Fittingly at the end, just like Stalin, there seems to have been a Doctor's Plot. In terms of lifelong fame, limitless but profoundly unsatisfying power and presumably endless guilt, the only man who probably knows how Michael Jackson felt near the end is Kim Jong-Il."

IndieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez is "Remembering Michael Jackson, On Screen."

Online viewing tip. Via Fimoculous, this: MJ, James Brown and Prince on the same stage.

Updates, 6/29: Steven Shaviro comes down hard and heavy on Greil Marcus, accusing him pretty much outright of racism. That point aside, along with considerations of MJ's confusing sexuality and "the dawn of the neoliberal (counter)revolution" to boot, another avenue explored is this one: "The point of a successful aesthetic singularity is that it crosses over directly into the form of the universal, without all those mediations that usually come between. Something is so absolutely unique (even when we can trace all the sources from which it arose) and so absolutely, achingly, joyously or heart-wrenchingly right, or just itself, that it becomes a kind of universal value.... There was a kind of crack or a rupture, something absolutely inimitable in the way it was inscribed in Michael Jackson's own body, and proliferated throughout that body's performance. But balanced on the edge in this way, always just short of collapse, it was something that resonated with 'everybody' (and in Michael Jackson's case, the empirical extent of this 'everybody' was larger than it had ever been before, and larger, probably, than it will ever be again, at least in any future continuous with our present)."

Ron Tannenbaum, writing for Vulture, is reminded of "artists Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, who in the mid-90s hired pollsters to determine the qualities people most liked to see in a painting and used the research to determine color, theme, and other elements in their canvasses."

Ooof. No wonder everyone's pointing to yesterday's Achewood.

Typically straight-ahead post from the great Jane Fonda.

Update, 6/30: "[T]his 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," writes Bob Rossney. "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." Via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Tags: Michael Jackson