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As a singer-dancer, he clearly belongs not just in the tradition of Jackie Wilson, James Brown, and the Temptations-who seem to have been among his immediate inspirations-but also in the tradition of such dancing entertainers as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, who, in turn, drew from such black performers as Bill (Bojangles) Robinson.
Al Sharpton, he was a transracial icon, a black person whom white Americans took to their hearts and whose blackness came to seem incidental-along with Nat (King) Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Sam Cooke, Jimi Hendrix, Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and, inevitably, Barack Obama. He was, quintessentially, one of those "pure products of America," who, as William Carlos Williams wrote in 1923, "go crazy." To take the uplifting view, enunciated after his death by the likes of the Rev.
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When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.īut whatever strictly personal traumas Jackson may have reenacted and transcended-and then re-reenacted-he performed his dance of death as a central figure in America's long racial horror show. That is, like the skeletal, pale-faced zombies he danced with in Jon Landis's 14-minute "Thriller" video.
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And eventually his several facial surgeries, a skin ailment, serious weight loss, and God knows what else made him look like both a vampire and a mummy-Peter Pan's undead evil twins. Blanket) over a balcony in Berlin, above horrified, fascinated fans, seemed like a ritualized attempt to dispose of his own younger self. (One shrink concluded at the time that he was not a pedophile, but merely a case of arrested development.) The 2002 episode in which he briefly dangled his son Prince Michael II (a.k.a.
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He morphed relentlessly from the most adorable of kiddie performers (his 1972 movie-soundtrack hit, "Ben," was a love song to a pet rat) to the most sinister of superstars: not by adopting a campy persona, like those of his older contemporaries Alice Cooper or Ozzy Osbourne, but in real life, dodging accusations of child molestation, one of which led to a trial and acquittal in 2005. (Of course, Elvis and the Beatles had come out of obscurity, too, but that was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away.) He made trademarks of the very emblems of his remoteness: his moonwalk and robot dances and his jeweled glove- noli me tangere, and vice versa. This was the black kid from Gary, Ind., who ended up marrying Elvis's daughter, setting up Neverland in place of Graceland, and buying the Beatles' song catalog-bold acts of appropriation and mastery, if not outright aggression. In retrospect, so much of what Jackson achieved seems baldly symbolic. Which was the more imaginative creation: his music or his persona? (No one-least of all Jackson himself-would have wanted to see the Dorian Gray portrait in his attic.) He did his best to construct an alternate reality on top of what must have been an initially miserable life: imagine Gypsy with-as Jackson claimed in interviews-a physically abusive father in place of Mama Rose, set among Jehovah's Witnesses. In middle age, he consciously took on the role of Peter Pan, with his Neverland Ranch and its amusement-park rides, with his lost-boy "friends" and with what he seemed to believe was an ageless, androgynous physical appearance-let's hope he believed it-thanks to straightened hair and plastic surgery. As a young man, however accomplished and even impassioned his singing was, he never had the sexual credibility of a James Brown or a Wilson Pickett, in part because of his still-high-pitched voice, in part because he seemed never to fully inhabit himself-whoever that self was. As the prepubescent frontboy of the Jackson 5, he sang in a cherubic mezzo-soprano of sexual longing he could not yet have fully felt. But starting long before and continuing long after he lorded over the world of entertainment in the 1980s-his 1982 Thriller remains the bestselling album of all time-Jackson was the Prince of Artifice. When the news of his death broke, the traffic on Twitter caused the site to crash, even though he hadn't had a hit song for years. Not Kurt Cobain, not Puffy, not Mariah Carey, not Céline Dion, not Beyoncé, not Radiohead-not even Madonna, his closest competitor. Before Michael Jackson came Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles after him has come absolutely no one, however brilliant or however popular, who couldn't be ignored by vast segments of an ever-more -fragmented audience. True, for a while he was the king of pop-a term apparently originated by his friend Elizabeth Taylor-and he's the last we're ever likely to have.
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