The news of Michael Jackson’s death was at once shocking and predictable. It was shocking to see a man die suddenly at such a young age. It was also sadly predictable that such a tormented genius would not live to old age.
What I find most surprising is the idea that he was 50 years old. While most of us get older year by year, Jackson seemed to go further into childhood. He refused to become an adult. He was emotionally damaged. A childhood marked by an abusive father and life in the spotlight. Early adulthood marked by dazzling stardom. He lived in his own fantasy world, unable to cope with real life. The last decade saw him turn into something of a zombie, he was Wacko Jacko, someone who many of us had stopped taking seriously. In fact I had almost forgotten how talented he was. When I heard of the run of concerts at the O2, I was astounded that they should sell out so quickly. Jackson had become such a parody, who would want to see him make a fool of himself?
It reminded me of another tormented genius. I once saw Rudolf Nureyev dance. He too was hitting fifty. He too was a shadow of himself. Those who had seen him in his prime watched with growing discomfort. Those who had never seen him dance before just wanted the chance to glimpse a shadow of his genius. So what if he was not as good as he once was? He was still a legend; you could go home and say you had seen him dance. But it was like watching a car crash; you watched him and grieved for what he once was and what he had become. The same would have been true of Jackson who knew he was not up to the challenge of those gigs yet went ahead because he desperately needed the money. The stories now coming out of his last days suggest that he was tormented, beset by crippling insomnia, clearly forcing himself to go ahead with something far beyond his strength.
And how obscene the actions of the tour promoters who now talk of releasing CDs and a DVD of his rehearsals. The short clip they have already released is supposed to reassure us that Jackson was fit and healthy and more than able to do a run of 50 concerts. He had passed a grueling medical exam, we are told. Yet it is clear to anyone with an ounce of sanity that Jackson was far from being mentally fit. If anything, what we have seen yet again is the corrupting power of money. Those gigs would have made, had already made, millions. As for Jackson, he had bought himself a team of medics that kept him unwell. Pay enough and someone will supply you with powerful painkillers, sleeping pills, anti-anxiety drugs and any other drug that can make life a little more bearable for someone as vulnerable as Jackson.
HIS face alone tells his story. He started off a beautiful black boy. He died an androgynous looking creature, with skin that was neither white nor black. Years of plastic surgery had erased the identity he was born with. His big nose had been replaced by a thin wedge, his Afro by long shiny straight hair. His lips had been thinned, his cheekbones had been replaced by those of a white catwalk model. He did not look beautiful. He looked like a ghost and that is what he had become, a ghost of himself. And yet, plastic surgeons performed the surgery that turned him into something grotesque. Pay enough and someone will be willing to do it.
Despite those who say the contrary, Jackson remained true to his black roots. Now that he has died and his musical talent is coming back into the frame, we are reminded of how he was able to transcend his skin color. Just like US President Barack Obama, he could win through because of his talent, by being exceptional and gifted, and his skin color was part of his strength while not being the sole definer of who he was.
Watching his videos on television, I was struck by the images from “Black or White” the single from the album “Dangerous.” “I’m not going to spend my life being a color,” he sings and the video ends with faces of people of different races merging into each other. Jackson essentially reminds us that there is only one race: human, and that skin color only matters because we decide that it does. His anger is aimed at those who classify people according to skin color. In his simplistic and idealistic world view, racism would disappear if people stopped categorizing people as black or white. And that is exactly what he was, a man trapped with the idealism of a child. When he sang “Heal the World,” cynics like me made fun of him. Yet the truth is Jackson clearly believed in his utopian vision of the world. He was someone who refused to lose the lenses of innocence.
I have to hold back as I watch his fans mourn him. My instinct is to put it into perspective. People die every day; why should we make such a fuss about the death of one individual? How can people cry and be upset by the death of someone they never met? It is the Diana, Princess of Wales phenomenon all over again. Outpourings of grief that seem out of scale.
What I understand, however, is that what we grieve is not the loss of one individual but what that individual has come to represent to us. Diana was just the former wife of the Prince of Wales to me. Her death shocked me because she was so young but I did not cry for her. Those who cried did so because she represented the fairy tale gone wrong; they cried for lost innocence, just as those who have been descending on Neverland and who will throng the streets of Los Angeles on Tuesday and do the same for Michael Jackson.
