Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Never Can Stop Saying Goodbye
Perhaps the Jewish people have it right: When a person dies, they are dead -- and gone. Above ground is for the living. Thus, burial is within 24 hours if possible. The dead are returned to earth. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.
The alternative seems better, considering that it took 12 days to finally lay Michael Jackson to rest. While Jackson is something of a unique case, he does prove a point: The longer the dead remain among us, the easier it is for unseemly debate to break out on the "truth" the deceased represented. Mark Anthony's assertion that, "The evil men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones," can barely sustain the scrutiny of the modern-day spin cycle.
Had Jackson been buried a week ago, perhaps Rep. Peter King's weekend rant on Jackson being a "pervert, child molester and pedophile" wouldn't have been quite so off-putting. For that matter, perhaps King wouldn't have even said it, as it seemed to have come from a place of frustration over the the amount of time that Jackson was consuming the news cycles. Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty had a point in saying that it had gone on too long. And this is hardly a partisan issue: Many congressional Democrats are squirming with the idea of overly praising Jackson's lifestyle.)
Conversely, with the dead still "with" us, the temptation exists also for the living admirers to find still more superlatives with which to praise them.
It wasn't enough that Michael Jackson managed to bring black and white musical styles together. No, in his eulogy, Rev. Al Sharpton had to declare him the racial barrier-breaking precursor to Barack Obama. And let's not forget that, as good as Jackson's "Thriller" videos were, if it wasn't for the corporate power of CBS threatening to pull all their videos off MTV, that racial barrier might not have fallen either.
(The president's carefully worded statements about the King of Pop suggests that the father of two in the White House also instinctively recognizes Jackson's problematic dual nature.)
For Sharpton, it wasn't enough for "We Are The World" to be a good song and ultra-successful charity single. No, Michael had to be responsible for discovering famine in Africa"before Live-Aid," Sharpton gushed.
In fact, Jackson and Lionel Richie were inspired by Bob Geldof's Band-Aid single, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" which was a huge worldwide hit over the holidays in 1984. The duo wrote WATW in time for the '84 American Music Awards, gathered the talent -- and the rest is history.
Did WATW's success enable Geldof to put on a Live-Aid far greater than he could have ever imagined (in Philadelphia. AND London, for example)? Absolutely. But the fact remains Jackson followed Geldof's example, just as he and the Jacksons built upon the music of earlier cross-racial trailblazers -- many of whom recorded for Motown.
Point is: Michael Jackson was an amazing talent -- with more than a few emotional "issues," as the saying goes. But why the need to pump him up even higher than his own prodigious efforts already did? If anything helped contribute to Jackson's fall in later life, it was his own perfectionism that made it impossible for him to live up to the monstrous talent that he had created.
Like all people, Jackson wasn't a saint. Like all of us, he was a sinner. But to the extent that Pete King states? That's still a question that will linger for many a year. But, he's not quite the demon King wants to make him.
But amazing as he was, he wasn't the deity Sharpton wants to portray either. Superbly talented, yes, but stunningly haunted and tortured as well, with afflictions which led him to certainly harm himself -- and possibly others as well.
But again, that is for historians to decide. Perhaps the one thing that was truly worth waiting for in Tuesday's memorial was Jackson's 11-year old daughter Paris speaking in public for the first time, "Ever since I was born, Daddy has been the best father you could ever imagine. And I just wanted to say I love him — so much."
That was, the appropriate poignant coda to a too-long public mourning. At a certain point, grief must become personal, owned by those who knew the deceased best. That moment has at last been reached.
For now, finally, it can be said: Michael Jackson, R.I.P.
Labels: Al Sharpton, Michael Jackson, Peter King
Wednesday, July 01, 2009
Birds Of Pray
Reading Time magazine's special issue on Michael Jackson is a great way to get angry.
The articles and personal testimonials are all very nice, but i's the pictures that make one's blood boil. When you look at the cherubic little black boy with eyes alternately showing irrepressible joy and a hint of shyness (almost sadness) and then see the more recent pictures of him, the question screams out -- "HOW!?? How could this have happened to this person?" Even when putting the ugly molestation stuff aside, just look at Michael Jackson and one realizes how things went terribly terribly wrong.
Yes, taking note of the ridiculous excesses of Neverland and everything else, a lot of this deterioration falls on Jackson's own head: He had all this talent and allowed his own ego and narcissism to drive himself hundreds of millions into debt.
But then again, if you've turned on the television of the last few days -- or checked the stories on the Internet -- you realize that with Michael Jackson, whatever he did to himself, there were at least a half-dozen people never too far away to help him ease on down the road to damnation.
It's as vivid in the barely a week since death as it was in his life. Joe Jackson, the so-called "patriarch" of the family who, in his 80's can't let a media opportunity pass without shilling his new record company or some garbage that is being released on Blu-Ray disc. Goodness knows, if Billy Mays hadn't died a couple of days after Michael, you know Joe would have hired him to do the evening infomercial selling the memorabilia.
As horrible a man as Joe Jackson has been reported to be as a father -- the severe beatings when recording sessions didn't go right, for example -- one is tempted to give him a modicum of slack. As a 40-something black man, I'm uncomfortable judging the choices made by a man several decades my senior who -- growing up in an America with many states having Jim Crow laws -- saw the talent within his children and wanted to harness it in the best way possible to rise the entire family out of poverty. He played the hand dealt him -- and it was not done pretty.
That said, after decades of success, when he helped produce the biggest star in the world, someone who made himself and his family millionaires many times over (nearly all of which was squandered), is it really the case that his son's death is seen as just another hook with which he can gain one more buck in his dotage? His son essentially had his soul squeezed out of him -- left as a walking drained husk well before his heart gave out -- and this is the best Joe Jackson can do before his son is even buried in the ground? Just squeeze still more blood from a stone.
But this is why Michael Jackson is dead -- because those in his orbit, even those tangentially, can never subsume their own personal dramas for their supposedly beloved relative or friend. And, standing front and center, right by the rapacious Joe -- the political ministers of black America, Revs. Jesse Jackson (no relation, as much as it galls him) and Al Sharpton.
Michael's death has renewed the simmering rivalry between the political ministers and one-time presidential candidates. Did they step in to try and provide some order to the growing chaotic circus around all things Jackson? Hah! They had to become part of the show, of course! Thus, Jesse was zooming to Los Angeles within 24 hours of Michael's death to emerge as yet another spokesman to declare that the family wasn't satisfied with the first autopsy and requested another one.
Meanwhile, Sharpton held court in New York, rushing to the Apollo Theatre to take the lead in East Coast mourning. Sharpton, of course, has practice at this: He orchestrated the James Brown viewing and wake at the Apollo three years ago. In fairness, he and Brown truly were close: Sharpton's once signature pompadour hairstyle was directly modeled after the Godfather of Soul's. While he may have known Michael for 35 years, he was never quite as much an intimate of the King of Pop. Regardless, Sharpton was in California Monday before zooming back to the Big Apple to lead a cheering, dancing mini-revival memorial back at the Apollo.
For his part, Jesse Jackson knows something about gaining some personal prestige by being in the right place at the right time when a legend known as a "King" passes in untimely fashion. A late-era member of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s entourage, Jackson notoriously kept wearing a sweater stained with King's blood for days after the April 4, 1968 assassination. How the blood even got on the sweater was a point of mystery itself -- a fact that Sharpton didn't mind reminding media of some years back, when a reporter brought up Tawana Brawley between the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns. Regardless, Jesse has also made himself available to record a public service message to prevent overzealous fans from killing themselves over their idol's death.
It's sad. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson have become famous themselves, controversial though their methods may be. But are they so starved for attention that they must bask in the reflected glory of a truly tragic entertainment figure? To ask the question is to answer it.
No wonder Jesse and Al needed to rush to be in front of microphones by Joe Jackson's side. Birds of a feather flock together. And vultures love to share in a tasty meal.
Labels: Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Joe Jackson, Michael Jackson
Monday, June 29, 2009
Why Michael Jackson Was So $^%@#$-ed Up
|Thursday, June 25, 2009
End Of The Seventies
Yeah, I'm going to be little maudlin here tonight.
But for the generation born in the 1960s and '70s, a large piece of our childhood died today.
While many of us certainly grew up with recently-departed Ed McMahon as Johnny Carson's sidekick, he definitely "belonged" to the boomer's cultural experience more than our own. Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson? Now that's something else. They were as different from each other as any could be and their deaths were as dramatically different too. Regardless, they "belonged" to us in a unique way. And, their deaths within hours of each other forces certain thoughts of mortality.
Farrah's death was not unexpected. She'd been ill for some time. Her last TV appearance was in, of course, a reality TV show where she plaintively prayed for a miracle from the anal cancer that was destroying her.
Her career was a rather strange one, blasting into the cultural consciousness (as Farrah Fawcett-Majors) like a comet. In one season of "Charlies Angels", she became the "It" pin-up girl of every pubescent and post-pubescent male. Even after she made an ill-advised career choice to split the show after one season (except for a few guest appearances over the next few seasons), she managed to stay linked with the culture. Eventually, she even showed that, amazingly, she wasn't just a pretty face, but could act too doing Emmy-nominated work in made-for-TV movies in the '80s like "The Burning Bed" and "Small Sacrifices."
In short, she proved that she could be something more than just a pin-up girl. The culture captured her at her most radiant -- in a snap-shot, but the lesson she told the post-boomers is that life is a motion picture. She chose to keep moving and reinventing herself.
Those two words sum up Michael Jackson -- "moving" and "reinvention." Even with all the strangeness of his later years, he's not supposed to be still so soon. Boomers can lay claim to the Jackson 5 part of his story -- the last great group to come out of the original Motown empire. At 11 years old, Michael was this incandescent ball of energy -- a miniature James Brown with a scary emotional vocal range. His solo early-70s songs were nice and sweet pop extensions on what he had been doing with the J5.
But it wasn't until he released Off The Wall in 1979, with a new, vibrant sound, that the world noticed that there was something really special in its midst. The album arrived at just the right moment. Rock was in a drudgy period; disco was on its last legs, the economy was a shambles (and, hey! there was a revolution going on in Iran)!! But Jackson produced an album that mixed R&B, disco and rock. It was of the moment while sounding like nothing else in the moment. (The nervous mumbling that builds into an exuberant yelp to kick off album-starter "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" is pure magic.) It was music that insisted that black and white kids could still listen to the same sounds -- despite what the rest of the culture seemed to be saying. (And, yeah, the "new" Michael had a new nose as well -- presaging the type of perpetual physical transformation would make him a tragic figure as the years elapsed).
Jackson took that sound and musical philosophy and launched it into the stratosphere with Thriller.
At the same time, he single-handedly turned music video into an art form all its own. He became the Rosa Parks of MTV -- forcing the then-new music channel to play videos by black performers. MTV insisted that it was a "rock" station, and "black" music didn't fit the format. But Michael Jackson was a product of a generation that grew up with both "black" and "white" music. Having Eddie Van Halen play the guitar sol on "Beat It," may have been a gimmick, but it was one that worked and "fit. As a result, Jackson ended up leading an early-'80s pantheon that appealed to a broader cross-section of music fans than any before or since: Jackson, Prince (my personal favorite), Madonna, Bruce Springsteen all could be heard on Top 40 radio, the last moment before the industry began to segregate itself again.
In 1983, with Thriller selling well, Jackson appeared on a Motown 25th Anniversary TV special. After much debate with the producers, he agreed to play a couple of Jackson 5 songs, but insisted on playing one of his current hits. It was on that show that he sang "Billie Jean" and performed the moonwalk for the first time. In that one show and moment, Michael Jackson told the world that the boomer's "Big Chill" era was over. He inherited it, but was not going to be bound by it. He moon-walked pop music into a different era.
Jackson released Bad in 1987 and it produced five Number One singles, but the magic culture-commanding moment had passed. The tours were immense, but already the "weirdness" had begun, as his face seemed to be something new and strange every time he appeared.
The tragedy of his child molestation charges (which were never proven) is that, even if he were truly innocent, his bizarre personal behavior/facial refigurations soured so much of the benefit of the doubt out of the minds of too many.
That said, Michael Jackson musically bridged the boomer soul-pop of the '60s, stood as a solitary shining light in the '70s and created the musical goulash of the early '80s. At his peak, no one worked harder to create musical perfection. He wanted a sound that had no defining color, appealed to the masses but was dynamic in a way that "pop" music traditionally wasn't perceived. His multiple plastic surgeries suggested he didn't like his own looks, and so was driven to produce outer aural beauty. For the generation that grew up in the shadow of the boomers, he was the perfect soundtrack and antidote to a chaotic childhood, a light in an at-times dark period.
That light has dimmed much earlier than it was supposed to. And a generation realizes that it's older than it thought it was.
UPDATE: The Motown 25 performance that put him and Thriller in a different orbit.
UPDATE II: Ta-Nehesi Coates has some great thoughts (and, d'oh! -- almost the exact same title as I used for a slightly different version of this I did for NBC's web-sites).
Labels: Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson
Friday, July 20, 2007
Ragged Retro Moment
Madscribe:Time flies, when you realize that some of your all-time favorite hip hop albums are now as old as some PFCs and Lance Corporals serving in Iraq. I only feel my age when my grammar-school-age nephews now have the same reaction to my 80s adolescent soundtrack that I had to my parents' 45 rpms from the 1950s and 60s.
Take, for example, my recent shining to the song "Krispy" by Kia Shine. In two decades, stylish young black men have gone from being FRESH to CRISPY. In another 20 years, I expect a new culinary-haberdashery connection ("Yo, man! Them Nike's is Sauteed! ") I've been duly informed by my oldest nephew, a high school senior, that all his friends hate the song. So Kia, consider my endorsement your middle-aged Kiss of Death.
Anyway, back to the Golden Years of Stetsasonic, Just-Ice, and Whodini. Before Afrocentric Fashion (and Fascism) and "Gangsta Street Cred" took over rap, LL Cool J was my main man. The fact that he went from being the skinny bad-assed kid in Run-DMC's 1985 movie Krush Groove (below) to "all swol' up" (as we called LL's Joe Piscopo-like transformation back then) in the course of one album, only made his 1987 sophomore effort B.A.D. (Bigger And Deffer) that much better.
B.A.D. was my top album that summer two decades ago. I played it to death on my radio show at Ohio State's student station. Ahhh, to be 21 again! The icing on the cake was that LL dropped his record in July, a full month BEFORE Michael Jackson's long-awaited Thriller follow-up with the same-title. By then, MJ was beginning his slow decline to High-Tech Howard Hughes status, and LL's album was like a Gen-X dopeslap to the so-called King of Pop.
As embarrassing as LL's moves are in the video for his album's title cut, it's a good thing he moved into TV and film acting and left the dance moves to the Moonwalker. Comparing the two BAD videos, Father Time gives us unintentional humor as Michael Jackson exclaims in the opening lyric of HIS "Bad" video (surrounded by young men), "You're butt is mine!" Luckily, for Michael, a recent jury did not concur.
If hip hop is not your cup of tea, pick up a copy of my man LL's workout tome. Mr. Smith hits the Big 4-0 next year, but no one will ever confuse him with the majority of pot-bellied, beer swilling slugs among America's other 40-year-old men ("You're the type of guy that says, 'My lower back is killing me' / Catch my drift?"). What LL neglects to tell unsuspecting readers who marvel at his physique on the cover is that (a) you need genes like his, and (b) 20 years of bodybuilding experience to get a figure like that. Take heart, however: Peter Lupus of Mission: Impossible fame is 75-years-old and still bench-presses at least 300 lbs. There's hope for some of us yet!
Next Month: Lose Weight the Easy Way with The Courtney Love Diet! (burnt spoons not included)
Update: If LL and Peter Lupus aren't enough fitness incentive, this prospect will definitely encourage a visit to the YMCA ...
Labels: 80s Hip Hop, Bodybuilding, Kia Shine, LL Cool J, Michael Jackson, Obesity
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
It Takes Two, Two
It was 1984 and MJ had declared his independence from Motown's legacy and his siblings with the release of Thriller, and his show-stealing performance on Motown's 25th Anniversay Special on NBC. That was the 1983 show where Michael unleashed the "moonwalk." Riding the wave of Michael-mania the next year, the other Jacksons released the so-so Victory LP on the public, complete with an "Including Michael!!" cover to boost sales. Ironically, Michael is the most sanely dressed one on the cover. The public should have known the album was a stinker by the first single, aptly titled "Torture." Also on the album was what should have been a hot pairing of rock's two greatest stage performers. The only thing that saves the song is a catchy guitar hook which grates on your nerves after a couple of listenings. The single goes totally silly at the end with Mike & Mick shouting, "Look at Me! Look at Me!" like a couple of Top 40 Dorian Grays. Jagger did a better job the second time around, with Tina Turner at Live Aid '85.
R.E.M. / KRS-One, " Radio Song" (1991)
I've always considered R.E.M.'s megahit album Out of Time to be a very weak rendition of their preceding major label debut, Green. I've never understood why people consider Green to be a "sellout" for Warner Brothers. Then again, my favorite R.E.M. album is Monster, so what do I know? Out of Time, of course, produced the monster single "Losing My Religion." The very next year, Stipe would be singing "Losing My Hair." The album opens with an interesting pairing that ultimately disappoints, "Radio Song." Now, I actually love most of "Radio Song". Culturally, the pairing of Michael Stipe and KRS-One was an important pop moment as Hip Hop was already starting to degenerate into Afro-fascist Goth music, and Nirvana's Nevermind (one of my all-time favorite rock LPs) would unleash a whole new generation of narcissistic navel-gazers and monochromatic moaners. What kills the song is KRS-One's weak rap coda. For a guy of his talent and intelligence, the last 30 seconds of "Radio" sounds as if the studio producer shouted, "This is the end of the track ... SAY SOMETHING, quick!!"
They could have brought Joeski Love out of obscurity for this one. I'm not too crazy about R.E.M.'s second attempt at Rock-Rap hybrids, either. Q-Tip is a great actor, though!
Chrissie Hynde / Frank Sinatra, " Luck, Be A Lady" (1994)
Listening to this version of Ol' Blue Eyes' classic show stopper, I am sad, sad, sad. I will never be a fan of Sinatra's Duets albums, but will always be a fan of both Sinatra and the Pretenders. On this disc, however, The Chairman's co-stars only warbled along to his tapes and there is no true person-to-person interaction. Inspired by Natalie Cole's then-groundbreaking technological feat of "dueting" with her deceased father's recorded voice, I guess the record company thought this would be a great way to expand Sinatra market share to a younger audience. No dice, chickie baby! What's so sad about this particular pairing is that Hynde's performance is very emotionally nuanced for a pop singer doing an overdub, and to my ears was one of the best "pairings" on the album. At least we'll always have real duets that are worth a listen.
Labels: Chrissie Hynde, Duets, Michael Jackson, Mick Jagger, R.E.M., Sinatra
