ON JUNE 24, if someone had asked you what images and phrases you associated with Michael Jackson, chances are you would have said “Wacko Jacko”, “is slowly turning white”, “had a string of hits back in the 1980s”, “wears a single white glove”, “dangled a baby from a balcony”, “speaks in a fey, lispy falsetto”, “his face has a love affair with plastic surgeons” and, if you liked his music and were familiar with the videos, “had a hit with a truly awful song about a rat”, “was a Moon dancer” and “Thriller is the biggest-selling album of all time.”
Jackson was a celebrity icon for our times – a cornucopia of neuroses, talent, success and very, very weird headline-grabbing behaviour.
Born again ... within days of his death, Wacko Jacko had turned into Saint Michael. Inset, live fast, die young ... Kurt Cobain and Princess Diana.
Any discussion of Jackson's musical contribution on June 24 would have been in the past tense. His plans for a string of concerts in London would have been discussed in terms of a nostalgia jukebox for those who grew up in the 1980s and wanted to hear all the old hits once again.
Two days later, after a drug-saturated Jackson had shuffled rather ingloriously off this mortal coil, the world went mad. Collective global amnesia and revisionism set in.
Overnight, Wacko Jacko became Saint Michael, the King of Pop, the greatest musician ever, the writer and performer of endless brilliant songs, a genius, a Renaissance man, the greatest dancer since Fred Astaire. The internet was soggy with eulogies from fans so distraught you would have thought this distant, strange and ultimately unknowable pop star had been a close family member.
Objectively, Jackson was a talented and hugely successful pop artist – nothing more, nothing less – who never wrote an insightful lyric in his life (unless you consider the tortured rhyme and banality of “Beat it, beat it, beat it, beat it/No one wants to be defeated” inspirational) but caught the 1980s disco-dance zeitgeist. And at a time when MTV was changing the nature of pop music marketing, he spent oodles on flashy video clips. Perhaps most importantly, he was part of the soundtrack for a generation of pop lovers that stretched across 25 years.
As Gore Vidal once famously quipped of the death of Truman Capote, “Good career move.” Jackson, by the time of his death on June 25, was essentially a has-been nostalgia act. By dying, he gave his faltering career the kind of rocket-fuelled impetus that every trashy magazine, tabloid newspaper and junky commercial TV station dreams of. They had covered his every foible; now they could produce special editions “celebrating” his life and death.
At his record company, everyone from top executives to PR flunkeys must have rubbed their hands with macabre glee as their crocodile tears fell on plans to slowly re-release every scrap of his very substantial catalogue.
Within weeks there were three new biographies on the shelves. And now, as the endless daisy chain of memorabilia begins, there is Sony Music – like a vulture poised on a branch, ready to remove every last scrap of meat from the carcass – releasing a new single, album and movie, This Is It. The associated publicity gives hyperbole a whole new meaning.
“This song only defines, once again, what the world already knows – that Michael is one of God's greatest gifts,” gushes John McClain, co-producer of the album, in the Sony press release. What outrageous baloney! Is this “God's greatest gift” the same man who dangled his baby from the fifth-floor balcony of a Berlin hotel?
Then there's: “Audiences will be given a chance to discover the man they never knew through this privileged and private look at Jackson. In raw and candid detail, Michael Jackson's This Is It captures the singer, dancer, filmmaker, architect, creative genius and great artist at work as he creates and perfects his final show.” Whatever happened to Wacko Jacko?
What is it about death and celebrity? Why is this unholy marriage – necromancy for the entertainment industry – such an integral part of modern popular culture? What is the role of “lucky accident” and why do some people become idolised in death while others are simply forgotten?
Why are we still obsessed with Jackson and not Farrah Fawcett or Mollie Sugden, both of whom died within days of Jackson? And what about poor Mother Teresa, who had the misfortune to die five days after Princess Diana? Or Groucho Marx, who died three days after Elvis Presley?
There are, inevitably, very different public responses to the deaths of famous people. There are legitimate outpourings of grief. They only really happen when a person of widely accepted talent and potential – think James Dean, Jeff Buckley, Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly – dies in their “salad days” leaving everyone wondering what they might have achieved had they lived into their “soup through a straw” days.
Interestingly, the method of death – driving too fast, going for a swim and accidentally drowning, suicide, too many bad drugs, flying in appalling weather – seems to have little to do with subsequent public admiration. No one seemed to mind that Diana died in a car driven by a drunk who was being chased by greedy paparazzi.
In the 1950s, this phenomenon became known as “Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse”, a phrase popularised by a character named Nick Romano in the 1949 Humphrey Bogart movie Knock on Any Door. It subsequently became a country music chart topper, Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young, in 1955 for Faron Young and was given a potent 1960s twist when the Who declared: “Hope I die before I get old.”
The phrase summed up the classic “what if?” scenario that allowed enthusiasts, who admired the talent more than the celebrity, to contemplate what a career might have produced. After only three movies, all of which he excelled in, James Dean left people wondering what he might have achieved. Dead at 24 he was, and remains, the quintessence of “live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse”.
Then there are those who are at the fag-end of a brilliant career – think of a fat and sweaty Las Vegas crooner named Elvis Presley, a hermit-like John Lennon living in virtual isolation in the Dakota in New York, a Michael Jackson who was simply weird and who had released only one album of new material in the past 15 years – but who, through the prism of time, sentimentality and nostalgia, come to symbolise an era simply because they dominated it so comprehensively.
What about those who, in spite of talent, just don't have the power to project themselves into cult heaven? The most obvious candidate in this category has to be George Harrison. The world wept when John Lennon died and Double Fantasy, a fairly ordinary album, shot to the top of the charts and went on to sell 3 million copies. But then Lennon died young, his death was violent and a naive generation believed in his wonderfully warped idealism. They had even tolerated the sheer awfulness of Yoko Ono. With Harrison, cancer at the age of 58 just wasn't potent enough to turn one of the most influential pop musicians of the 20th century into a celebrity icon.
Like most things in life, the celebrity-death equation seems to have no rules apart from “luck” – if any death can ever be described as luck. Dean is remembered while Sir Laurence Olivier will quietly slip into acting history. Che Guevara becomes iconic while Iran's great Mohammed Mosaddeq – who was also destroyed by the machinations of the CIA – is all but forgotten. Joy Division's Ian Curtis was idolised after his suicide in 1980 but is slowly sinking into obscurity.
Since World War II there has been an ever-growing tendency, particularly in Europe and English-speaking countries, to measure and define ordinary lives in terms of pop culture – particularly film, television and music.
A life is no longer measured as a collection of personal achievements and sweet, remembered moments. Rather, it is a timeline of events linked by resonant memories attached to transient mass-media icons. The first kiss is associated with Elvis or the Beatles or Michael or Elton. That unforgettable teenage party is remembered because we all danced to Buddy Holly or the Smiths or the Sex Pistols or the Bee Gees. Who can ever forget those times when we all sat on the beach or in the local park and laughed at The Brady Bunch or M.A.S.H. or The Simpsons or South Park? Even our language is influenced all the way from “daddy-o” to “D'oh!” and from “hip” to “sick”. The sweet bird of youth may have flown but it can return with just a phrase or a few bars of music or a shared memory.
There has been a tendency by some critics to see this as simply an outpouring of collective sentimentality and to argue that sentimentality per se is bad. This is untenable because all death, from the vantage point of those who care, elicits a wave of complex, often confusing, emotions including nostalgic sentimentality.
Pop stars become hugely important because in the global village they often define who we are. So losing Elvis is like losing a part of yourself. For that vast generation that listened to pop music from 1970, when ABC became a hit for the Jackson Five, for a quarter of a century up to when tracks from Thriller were still a staple of FM radio pop, Michael Jackson was the soundtrack to their lives. They wept because they felt, rightly or wrongly, that with the death of Jackson, a little part of them had died. Jackson may well be the first traumatic, premature superstar death for Generation X and Generation Y.
Pop culture defines our lives and provides a shared folk memory. Each mica-thin generation has its moments when it feels the world change. I find it disconcerting that I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of Buddy Holly's death but I have no memory of the first moon landing. What sort of historical priorities does my mind have?
In the modern electronic world – the world of YouTube, Twitter, text messaging, endless emails and downloads – we are adrift from our primeval sense of community and belonging. We have substituted two-dimensional humanity (Jackson was, to most of his fans, only ever an image on a TV screen or a sound emanating from a set of speakers) for real, human interaction. Once we admired and lionised people for their achievements. Now we weep at the death of an image that is nothing more than millions of dissolving pixels.
In ancient times, entire villages expressed their collective grief when an old man or woman – a person who had been a vital part of the fabric of village life – died. In some dimly recalled collective memory of village life, we weep at the departure of those global villagers who have been a vital part of our electronic lives. That's why Wacko Jacko, the village weird boy, became Saint Michael overnight and that loveable fatty with a penchant for peanut butter and banana sandwiches is still so fondly remembered in our collective hearts.
And instead of a troubadour wandering into town and singing a sad lay about the death of Young Michael or Young Elvis, and the old women sitting around the village square gossiping about his life and its worth, we have the raucous voice of the mass media shouting eulogies, blogging and twittering like a tree full of screeching galahs and dissecting every moment of their pixellated lives by endlessly revisiting the highlights on YouTube.
In the absence of intimate and personal conversations about death with neighbours, we are left to show we are part of a community by participating in some strangely unnatural abstract expression of global grief.
What is better? A quiet village celebration of a life well lived or a day-long barrage on MTV of every video Jackson ever made?
This Is It