I was pretty much in Michael's marketing sweet-spot circa Thriller--an 8th grade music (video) enthusiast. Granted, my copy of this album was in fact one side of a Maxell D90 cassette recorded from Tony Wilson (the other side had a Pat Benetar live set, if I'm not mistaken), and I was never a "fan" the way I was about new wave artists like Mr Numan (or even Prince, for that matter)... But Michael Jackson was someone who really transcended culture cliques--or perhaps better to say, race-based entertainment boundaries of the 1980s...
Favorite musical moments from Jackson's songs returned in force this weekend: the squeal of delight as "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" kicks, the bubblegum fizz of "ABC," afro-beat echos in "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'"... Video moments I'd forgotten, like the nod to Do the Right Thing as MJ goes postal at the end of "Black or White," Steve Stevens giving it the ol' college try in "Dirty Diana," Cher trying her best to keep up with a choreographed Jackson 5 (good luck with that)...
Back in the day, I taught a class at BSC called "Mass Communication Theory & Research," and one year we read a solid book by Jason Mittell called Television and Genre, which had a chapter on Michael Jackson and music videos. MJ is so intertwined with '80s-era MTV that it's hard to imagine one without the other. So it was eye-opening read for the whole class (myself included) to find that in fact MTV had refused to air Jackson's first single off Thriller. It took the entire corporate weight of Columbia/Sony to get MTV to ease up on it's lillywhite playlist policy. (For media studies folks who might be reading this, seek out this chapter--it's an enlightening window into race and pop culture in Reagan's first term.) This helps to explain why even now I am still sorting out all the solid music made by African American artists in the 1980s that I never really sorted out at the time--to say nothing of whole histories of blues and jazz...
The 24/7 news cycle lumbers on that Friday, with Larry King interviewing Céline Dion & Cher.The most surreal moment of the evening comes with Randy Jackson ("No relation!" King dutifully notes) on the line. We see a decontextualized image of a helicopter--King, only mildly flummoxed, learns through his ear that the copter appears to be carrying (Michael) Jackson's body, prompting him to ask (Randy) Jackson if maybe he knows where the flight is headed? Randy does not...
I've read some pretty nasty stuff on facebook and elsewhere on MJ's passing--and I guess I can understand it, if you believe he was guilty as charged in the various molestation charges. But it seemed oddly dissonant to me--something even now I'm not terribly excited to engage. I think of Jackson's struggles these days (or my mediated understanding of them, of course) in terms of Herman Gray's book Watching Race, which is about television, race, and cultural politics in the era of Reaganism (coming this fall to a COMM 300 virtual classroom near you). MJ's too-overt wrestling with his own racial identity is starting to become a means for to talk about race in the USA in the 1980s (and beyond)...
We flip to MSNBC, where the helicopter has landed--Jackson's body has been moved from UCLA Medical Center to a helipad at USC, which is close to the LAPD Coroner's Office (where by now two autopsies have been carried out and reported upon) and Keith Olbermann narrates the transfer of the body into a waiting van. Ambulance chasers, all of us--we watch (and watch again) as the nearly-formless, sheet-covered body is slipped into the van, which drives uneventfully to the Coroner.
He is gone.
I turn to my wife and say something inane about the universality of death. However wrongfully, I can't just not say anything...
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