Glorification

If you haven't been thinking about Michael Jackson, you haven't been outside in the last week and a half. Without a television or regular newspaper subscription I've avoided a vast majority of the coverage, or what Jon Stewart calls "obitutainment" - the fine media art of obituaries as entertainment.

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And a large part of me wants to be above caring about the death of a celebrity. I didn't know him personally (though every reporter on CNN seems to), and perhaps more than any other star I'd like to keep Jackson's music separate from what I (think I) know about his personal life. It's disturbing to think that he could use the same voice both to entertain in dazzling ways and manipulate in a purely pernicious manner, and that I carry it around in my purse on my IPod.

There are two things I'm mulling over in my mind.

The mundane: In listening and relistening to his music over the last week I've become enthralled with just how mundane most of his lyrics really are. They aren't particularly poetic, and they seem to dwell on basic male anxieties about love, sexual prowess, violence, power and the intersections amongst them. He talks about the grind of the 9-5, like he ever actually knew what that was. For a very long time he didn't allow his songs to overlap with his celebrity. He was the biggest star in the world and yet he resisted releasing songs like Lindsay Lohan's treasure, Rumors, or Britney Spears's, Lucky. And when he did point out the troubles with the paparazzi it was usually an angry take, not an "oh-feel-sorry-for-me" whine. There was a tenuous fantasy that his talent existed apart from his life, though the latter would never have been possible without the former.

The glorification: In watching his videos on YouTube for the first time in years, I'm also really struck by his ability, as a skinny kid from the Midwest, to glorify gang culture in New York. This isn't a very well thought out thesis, but in at least two videos, Bad and Beat It, he plays to the old Hollywood conceit that New York street gangs were actually just groups of disgruntled yet very lithe Broadway dancers. Maybe he was trying to distance himself from his slightly disco-esque beginnings and make himself seem a little more testosterone producing, but he also tapped into a strong source of fear and made it look really cool. And no one gets shot nine times. There are definitely some ties to race and expectations of what a Black man would be doing with his evenings in the '80s, but he makes it so palpable. And, well, he seems fully aware of the exploitation.

I'm a little confused by the outright worship of MJ, but hope that our culture will eventually learn how to embrace ambiguities and account for flaws in its icons. Mostly though I'm having my first real case of nostalgia, remembering staying up late to see the premiere of Black or White on MTV and trying to do the Moonwalk until at least the fifth grade. And there was that short time ago in 2007 when I tried to learn the entire Thriller dance because it felt like a piece of bonafied American culture in under fifteen minutes. That's what escape is about and that seems to be what he was best at.