I am one of those people who is taking MJ's death very hard. There are many reasons; I grew up singing his songs, breathlessly attended every one of his video releases as cultural touchstones of my age, sat through dozens of viewings of
Captain EO at EPCOT with the same excitement and delight every time, and, yes, wore a little red coat and sparkling glove for Halloween more than once. His presence as the major music icon of my childhood had faded in the past decade, but I've been reliving it the past week. I find it shocking and tragic to think of this brilliant and gifted man being gone, particularly in the way it now appears to have happened. I've been playing my MJ albums non-stop, sometimes uplifted, sometimes even crying, but mostly just mourning for someone who defined my exodus into music.
I've also been thinking quite a lot about Michael's impact as a person. Watching his videos, newsfeed, interviews, I'm struck by how frail he always seemed despite a tall, sturdy frame. Part of it was the soft light voice, the shy eyes and nervous laugh. A lot of it is the feeling I get from watching him that he much preferred the reality of imagination to the cold light of day, and that his imagination was much stronger for him than the rest of the world we had to live in. But he wasn't the crazy dreamer he was painted by the tabloids. Certainly he loved and loved to create spectacle, and he worked hard to make the illusory seem just possible enough to be grasped. But he was also reaching out to draw us in. Sometimes I think he was really trying to do what his songs more playfully suggested-- 'heal the world' with music, as when he seals the rift between rival gangs by bringing them together in rhythm, and doing the same with the viewing audience by having all of us watching the same screen, hearing the same song, all over the world at once. Maybe that kind of dream could only have happened in the comparatively less cynical 1980s and early 1990s, when we still talked about global community as a good thing. Critics could point to the simplistic depiction of non-American cultures, the Christ-like egotism of MJ as peace-bringer, the reduction of complex issues to broad brush-stroke themes. I think that view both punishes and reduces an artist's humanity; we like our celebrities fine when all they do is entertain us, but we find them uppity when they encourage us to be better and deeper people. Michael was an entertainer, and he defined the first class for decades, but that he believed and wanted us to believe we could affect the world for the better is part of what made him so much more than just a stageman. MJ was writing 'issues' songs when World Aid concerts were a thing of the past, before 'green' became a Hollywood obsession, and well before anyone was talking about 'post-racial' nationhood.
And it's this last point that has me the saddest. It's inevitable in any talk about Michael that someone brings up the skin bleaching. Whether or not MJ suffered from vitiglio and lupus, whether or not he had body dysmorphic disorder, whether, as Bill O'Reilly has crudely alleged, he 'had no interest' in being a black man, you can't argue that Michael had a lifelong battle with identity. He always seemed happiest, strongest, as a character in his own music. The sexual slink of Billie Jean and Dirty Diana, the grinning playboy of The Way You Make Me Feel, the rebel leader of Bad, they were all men he couldn't seem to be in drab life outside the studio. But consider that he wrote Black or White at a time when he had to be looking in the mirror every morning and wondering who exactly he was, not who he wasn't. And this is what made Michael my icon-- the fact that he wasn't an icon. He was always so painfully human, every flaw on display, every hesitation and self-doubt playing out in what ultimately became a kind of self-mutilation in search of identity.
Any kid growing up in the '80s, as I did, couldn't escape the rise of pop psychology and the endless navel-gazing that has resulted in my generation being called the most needy and self-confused adults of the century. Suddenly everyone had low self-esteem, high-stress, transgressive behaviour, and bitterly unsolvable angst wailing for an anchor. Old labels were melting all around us. We were racially integrated, coming out of the closet, moving into the middle class in droves, passionate about the environment, cultural tolerance, politically jaded, and we were tearing down borders wherever we found them. Michael Jackson embodied that, and he did it fearlessly, because he believed in the necessity of expression. He could have written a dozen Thrillers instead of Earth Song, Man in the Mirror, They Don't Care About Us. He wrote all of those songs at a time when he'd physically stopped looking like a black man, but, however pale, hadn't become a white man; when his slightness and softness turned toward androgyny and he seemed neither male nor yet female. There was something powerful and deliberate about this ultimate and frightening blurring of the most basic division of humanity. By fate or choice, Michael stopped being a collection of adjectives and became just a person. I think that was the freedom he was reaching for. I think that was the identity he wanted, and I know it resonated with me because it had a pristine purity to it that haunts every uncertainty about the colour of my own skin, the rightness of my sex, my eternal dissatisfaction with my hair, my weight, my hips, my voice, my braininess, my fears, and my dreams for a place where I would never be judged by anyone for any of that, even by myself.
So when I listen to Michael's music this week, that's what I'm thinking of. The Michael who took that steep uphill journey toward empowered and compassionate and advocative personhood is the Michael who inspired me, and will continue to inspire me, to look into the mirror. I won't look for the flaws. I'll look for the improvements. And I won't be afraid to express my fantasy in my reality, even when it comes with some ridicule and some confusion, because you can't achieve anything without the risk of putting yourself out there.
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