The Ascension of Michael Jackson

 

 

I was in the bank last Thursday close around 4:45. I went to fill out a deposit slip and a woman next to me, a black woman of about 50, looked me right in the eyes as if we'd always known each other and said, in a voice that was calm and slow, "My friend just texted me that Michael Jackson died."

I drew in a sharp breath and grabbed her arm.

I said, "Sorry. I didn't mean to grab you." But I didn't let go.

"That's okay baby," she said.

We stood there for a few moments saying oh my God.

“But they killed him,” I said. “Years ago, I mean.”

“Uh huh.”

The bank was almost empty. Everybody was motionless, and most people were holding on to somebody else. I went over and made my deposit. 

"I can't believe it," the woman behind the counter said, tapping the keys.

“Is this your pen?”

“I don’t know.”

Out on Broadway, every single person was on his cell phone, which has become the new way of signaling mass awareness. Everybody feels compelled to spread the shock, to one other person, as soon as they can, in such moments.

I called my son and told him. "What?" he said. Then he told Willy, who was next to him. And Willy said, "What?"

I put my headphones on and tuned in to the radio. I carry a small radio with me at all times. Michael Jackson songs were streaming, at that moment, on every single station, or so it seemed. This was instantaneous, when the news broke. 

If you think that this is only about a pop star's death I submit you have a limited imagination.

Google had to block its search engines because they were crashing from the surge of hits. When has that happened, ever?

Radio stations abandoned their programming and surrendered to the mob, to his fans, begging and pleading, and they quickly started promising not to stop playing Michael Jackson at all, any time soon, as least through the weekend, and maybe longer. And the fans dictated which songs they wanted. Take that, Clear Channel.

For a brief moment, power was returned to the street.

All of New York was awash in MJ, and the Jackson Five, from every car stereo, every radio in every store, as if it were another time, another decade, maybe even the 1970s. Radio was king again, and not Internet Satellite or any other kind of rubbish radio, but actual RADIO, that audio-splashes the streets and releases us from our solitary confinement, and permits us a street culture once again. New York was New York again, and not, as Strausbaugh likes to call it, "Cleveland by the Sea" — a city scrubbed white by our boring white mayor who never wants us to have any fun and who resembles a human file cabinet.

We finally coordinated our trip to the Apollo Saturday night.

125th Street was packed still, at midnight. Michael Jackson Street you may as well have called it. Different songs booming from different audio outlets mingled in the air, from cars, boom boxes, and small radios. Vendors peddled t-shirts, CDs, posters, earrings...There was a vast wall of brown paper that was covered, every millimeter of it, in scrawled homages, and then another layer of brown paper over that one, also filled. A shrine had been erected in the entrance to the Apollo, which was closed. People of all ages were dancing, swaying, singing, trading goods, talking, laughing. The cops had shut down the big boom boxes and so people were dancing to small radios and iPods with handheld speakers. Under the marquee an elderly Asian woman with an almost otherworldly, radiant smile, dressed as a sunflower and wearing a white glove, was dancing with a black man as people shouted, "Sunflower! Sunflower!" Her smile was the most intoxicating thing I have seen in years and I could not take my eyes off her; I too was smiling from head to toe. "I'm Sunflower!" she shouted to me, pulling me into the dance. A white couple danced next to her, wearing shimmery clothes and a white glove on one hand. "They're from Virginia!" Sunflower shouted.

"Hi!" I shouted. 

The last time I felt this powerfully that I was welcome, truly welcome, and  loved for no reason, was in Wenceslaus Square the night the Velvet Revolution broke out, in late November of 1989. Everybody having the same feeling at the same time — that’s rare. When for once you don’t have to say, prove, defend, or be anything.

"These people need a boom box," I said, to various people standing around. They explained that the cops has ordered them shut down.

My son went off to buy a t-shirt, decently priced at $10, took off his AC/DC t-shirt and put on his MJ t-shirt. I was elected to go borrow a boom box and try to persuade the cops to let us use it. (I failed.)

The green bands that represented democracy in Iran became a white glove or sparkling socks here.

What do you think all this means?

A message of dazzle and dreamology for the masses.

What masses? Rather, whose masses?

Well, if you judge from the motley crowd dancing outside the Apollo, they're oddballs. They're not hip. They're not the in crowd. They're in wheelchairs, they're old, young, fat, skinny, and whatever. But their faces are awash in joy. The mood here is the most remarkable thing. It's mild and loving and colorless and innocent. People dancing, paradoxically, like nobody's looking, to the music of a man who was possibly, among other things, the greatest dancer who ever lived. Everybody is clear about the quality of the love they felt for him, and how it was rooted in his capacity to connect to the broken part of every human being, every person who has ever been mocked for anything.

The disapproving commentariat that never got enough of flogging his differentness was now forced to sit like blocks of wood at their broadcast desks while half the world donned pieces of costume that brought them as close as possible to the man they called a freak.

Those who mock are always, without exception, advertising their impotence. Great people never mock. They may apply sarcastic humor here or there but never mocking, superior cruelty. That’s strictly for the bottom rung.

It’s funny.

If you really want to rule the world — and many men do — sit down and try to write a bass line as iconic as the opening bars of "Billie Jean." You'll transcend time, space, nationality, values, and hold the world in a single spell.  

Michael Jackson, in his infinite splendor and kitsch, was communicating vast concepts. Milan Kundera may be wrong that kitsch can't be art. What he communicated, to my ear, was more subversive by light years than the raw gloom of, say, Nirvana, or even the sophisticated laments of late-era Beatles, or the relative message-lessness of everything the Stones ever recorded. He was communicating FLIGHT.

He had no interest in reality. His materials were fantasy and magic.

A dictatorship would have had to imprison Michael Jackson for his moon walk, for all it implies about obedience, flight, hope, and the power of the individual.

He altered reality as much as it was possible to as a pop culture magician. But there was a wall erected that he could not walk through. When he did pass through it, only half the man was left. We don't know what he did or did not do to those boys. Was he giving them magic, hope, fun, joy, flying lessons, or was he violating their innocence?

No idea.

But here is a remarkable concession from Chris Ayres, who sat through every moment of testimony at the Jackson trial, writing in The Times of London: "The charges against him were overblown and should never have reached court. The accusers were hucksters with zero credibility — something that should have been obvious from t he beginning to Tom Sneddon, the red-faced Santa Barbara County district attorney, who seemed to have made a personal crusade out of putting Michael Jackson in prison."

Now you tell us, Chris. Now that he died with nothing but pills in his stomach.

It was very easy to mock him, and everybody did. It seemed they hoped their mockery might lessen his magical powers, but he was only shackled in their prison for a time. They forgot that. His death unleashed all the trapped and thwarted energies — love blocked, and then released, can blow out the side of a mountain. After a few days of hanging back and reporting the flood story, the Hangmen in the Media went back to their dark ways, trying to humiliate his corpse.

“Bald,” “emaciated,” “scarred,” “skeletal,” etc.

Don’t they understand: We don’t care. We’ll take him bald, emaciated, scarred, skeletal, and dead. We understand this to be the price he paid for the velocity of what he had to deliver. An artist’s body is like a house after a storm. You can’t be incoherent about the uses of pain-killers in an artist like that. When the press now ogles Michael Jackson’s bald, emaciated, skeletal, scarred corpse, they’re looking at their best work and their only work: Destruction.

His work on the other hand, is done once and done forever: Creation.

Comments (12)

Write comment