I was not old enough to remember Michael Jackson’s true heyday – I was born after Thriller and the initial success of songs like “Billie Jean” and “Beat It.” My first MJ memory was in 1991, when he had another hit with “Will You Be There,” the theme song from Free Willy. The VHS tape I had of the movie began with the music video for the song. I pestered my mother into purchasing the Free Willy soundtrack and Dangerous. I liked both, but after those releases, Michael Jackson began his very public downward spiral and stopped making decent music, and I moved on in my evolving music taste.
By the time he died, I was of course well aware of his impact on popular music and a fan of his early work, but Michael Jackson the person honestly seemed to have died a long time ago. Starting in the early 1990s, he gradually devolved into something barely recognizable. His face became totally disfigured by multiple plastic surgeries, he took to speaking in a high-pitched whisper, his public behavior grew more and more absurd, he dangled his infant son from a balcony, and was twice accused of child molestation. The day he died, he was, in the minds of the casual observer, “the unbelievable singer and dancer who changed pop music forever in the 1980s…but is now a creepy batshit-crazy shell of his former self.” I never thought twice about dancing to “Billie Jean” or “The Way You Make Me Feel” at house parties in college, but all I could do when tabloid stories about his latest antics popped up was shudder.
The obituaries in the major media outlets have struggled to balance his undeniably iconic impact on popular culture with the fact that he was a very disturbed man and most likely a pedophile. American popular culture is generally very forgiving – musicians and entertainers who suffer from drug addiction, alcoholism or other self-contained inner demons are pitied, but they are still unflinchingly celebrated as heroes: Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison, John Belushi, Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Marilyn Monroe…the list goes on. Jackson is in a different category because he was not merely abusing his body, but potentially harming children. That’s a lot tougher to reconcile with professional achievement then a fondness for heroin or whiskey.
In the end, perhaps moreso than the others I mentioned, Michael Jackson is a truly tragic figure. A lot of his bizarre behavior and his inappropriateness with young boys can be explained – though not by any means excused – by the abuse he suffered as a child. His incredible fame exacerbated the effects of the abuse, and from there a downward spiral into his own terminal Neverland was imminent without some intervention that never came. How sad that somebody with such talent, who had all the money and power and connections in the world, could not save himself from himself.
