Oh Michael, Ye Hardly Knew Ye

I recall seeing the Jackson 5 on TV when they were just starting out. I thought they were cool. They were singing "I Want You Back", and that kid Michael was just going crazy on the dance floor. I loved the song. And I loved the dancing.

And I couldn't tell my friends. At least my white friends. We'd moved about 3 years before from a west Texas military and university community where people were just people, to a small town in the south where (at the time) white people were people, colored folk were generally something else, and there wasn't too much mixing, and then only under controlled conditions. Unless you liked getting beat up. A lot.

I had a couple of black friends, anyway; they'd somehow managed to cross the color line and not cause riots (no, I am not exaggerating). They and the local rock station turned me on to Diana Ross, James Brown, and many others, including the Jackson 5. My parents had worked hard (and rather successfully) to raise us to notice skin color about like we noticed hair color or eye color, and they were fine with us listening to this music. (We were the Outsiders, for sure.)

That radio station (and the black station that proper white folk weren't supposed to listen to) kept playing the Jackson 5, even playing their older songs over the next few years. At one point in 1972, I recall hearing five or six Jackson 5 songs in the same afternoon on one station, including "I Want You Back".

Some of my friends-- who'd been brought up in that culture of racism-- stared listening to these cats as well. They all claimed not to watch Soul Train, but if you watched them dance it was clear they weren't learning these moves from American Bandstand. By now, of course, black music in the white world was maturing (as well as sometimes getting rawer and / or angrier), but the Jackson 5 were still drawing people better than all but a few black acts.

For a few years after this the Jackson 5 (morphing into The Jacksons in a name dispute between labels) and Michael kind of flew under the radar for a while until Michael appeared in The Wiz. Things started moving for Michael again, though predominately still in the black community. But now his weirdness was center stage; black friends who bought The Jacksons' records and Michael's records were as likely to talk about his surgery and idiosyncratic behavior as they were his music. Until Thriller. Now everyone listened to (and watched, via MTV) Michael. Subsequent tours (no tour for Thriller) saw ticket prices that, for the time, were insanely high. The Machine was in full gear, and Michael was the hamster keeping the golden wheel spinning.

The Music Industry, the Pop Fans, and Greed Running Amok in every one around him (and probably in him; Real Money and Adoration of the Masses will tempt nearly anyone) had caught Michael at a young age and locked him in that hamster wheel. I've often wondered whether his bizarre lifestyle was primarily because of substance abuse or just a reaction to the cage, trying to carve out an identity because he really didn't know who he was. In either case (or perhaps both) the man sure seemed lost inside that ever changing body and the growing metropolis of the Michael Jackson Mystique. This is the end, to greater or lesser degrees, for far too many of our kings and queens of popular culture.

I never met the man, and I certainly can't judge him. But despite the glamor, the money, the accolades, I don't really see Michael Jackson as all that successful. Sure, he had money, fame, and millions of rabid fans. But I see a sad case, a man possessed from a young age by people riding his gravy train, molding Michael Jackson into the image of the god they wanted serving them.

I've made my share of jokes about his bizarre lifestyle but I really do appreciate the contributions he made to the music industry (especially to helping black music go mainstream in the 1969-1973 era) as well as to music itself and ultimately to racial harmony. He was a great pop singer, a great dancer, a brilliant showman / entertainer. He made some pretty cool, significant contributions to charity. But in the end, I wonder how happy he really was, if he really knew who he was, who he was created to be, and where he was ultimately headed. I don't know that he did. For his sake, I hope he did. Eternity's a long time by yourself.

What about the Machine? The Music Industry; society with stars in its eyes, worshipping its idols and driving them to hide, to despair of the public; the Greed Machine? While I detest them as collectives, I feel the same way toward the people in them as I do Michael and everyone else. Far too many of us look at Michael Jackson (or Elvis or Farrah or whomever) and try so desperately to be one of them, someone we are not, that we in turn lose sight of who we are and were made to be (if, indeed, we ever knew), and wander, like Michael, in an inner city of confusion and desperation. May God have mercy on us all and deliver us from ourselves.

Thanks especially to Kayla Marie and to John VanPelt, whose responses to Michael's death got me thinking more about these issues.