On Sunday evening Madonna opened the MTV Video Music Awards with a speech honoring the late Michael Jackson. It was altogether fitting that she do this.
If Michael Jackson was the King of Pop, Madonna is the Queen. Where Jackson created pop’s most successful album, Madonna created its most successful career (post Beatles). Perhaps she alone was qualified to summarize Jackson’s life and legacy, not because she knew him particularly well, but because no one else on the MTV stage commands her level of respect.
Plus, her mother died. In the world of MTV Logic, it is impossible for any person to utter false or illogical statements in the same speech in which she mentions her mother’s death.
Madonna observed that Jackson’s childhood was sacrificed for the sake of his career. To one degree or another, we all participated in this. Then we left him behind. How shameful. For his part, his adult life was a struggle to recapture what, according to Madonna, he never experienced. He wanted his childhood. He wanted friendship. He wanted to be vulnerable.
Through it all, he was a legend, indeed The Legend. The King of Pop.
But according to a massive amount of evidence, Jackson’s relationship with young boys was bizarre and unhealthy at best, and criminal at worst. Madonna’s analysis might explain why Jackson built an amusement park to live in, and why he was apparently obsessed with all things childhood, but it doesn’t fully account for his weird behavior.
For those of us who remember when Thriller was at the top of the Billboard Charts, who bought the album on cassette tape and vinyl, Jackson had long-since morphed into an unrecognizable oddity, far removed from the ultra suave cat who denied Billy Jean’s child was his own.
The Michael Jackson of the early 80s was other-worldly. The vocals, hooks, dance moves, and sophisticated charm set the bar so high no one could hope to reach it. You might imitate Eddie Van Halen, or Freddy Mercury, or Ozzie, but few even made the effort to copy MJ. We had too much respect for him.
In the world of pop, in 1982, Jackson was God, and Thriller was his Bible. When my class entered Junior High School, Thriller was the #1 album in the nation. When we left Junior High School three years later, it was still #1. That was ridiculous.
But later, Jackson became ridiculous, in the wrong kind of way.
Madonna’s apologetic should perhaps be read in the limited context of Jackson’s artistic contributions. In the areas of singing, dancing, live performance, writing, and producing, Jackson had few equals, and in the union of them, he had none. Many an artist has suffered under the crushing weight of an ultra-successful album. Look at Axl Rose. But while Jackson never duplicated Thriller (who could?), he continued to make good music, and when viewed through the MTV cultural lens, was at worst a misunderstood eccentric.
Did Jackson have sex with underage boys? I don’t know. It’s disturbing and disappointing that a “yes” answer would be consistent with everything else we know about him. It’s also disturbing that he turned into such a freakish character. But it’s difficult to swim against the powerful tradition in our culture of forgetting everything negative about a person when he dies. We want to carry away from the funeral only the good things, the things that inspired and moved us, the things that can make us happier and better. Jackson gave enough good things to last the rest of our lives.
I have a copy of Thriller on my Ipod, and several other Jackson hits. I still enjoy them. The dude who made those songs left the world about twenty years ago. I don’t know where he went. The oddball that replaced him, and died recently, I don’t understand and can’t defend. But I hope he has some peace.
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