Micheal Jackson

He finally did beat it!
Don’t shoot the messenger

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Michael Jackson might have spent the last decade of his life as a freak show, a moveable feast for the sardonic hipsters of the digital age, but for a while he really was the King of Pop. At the peak of his career, his unique gospel-influenced falsetto fusions of black man’s R&B and white man’s rock earned him critical acclaim, worldwide adulation and commercial success. His album Thriller remains the highest selling album of all time. The original chameleon, he morphed from a precociously talented eleven year old in the first black American boy band to an international brand name so powerful that even in 2009, even after the sordid details of his personal life had seeped into the popular consciousness, into conversations in exclusive clubs in New York and cassette shops in Multan, 750,000 tickets to what was supposed to be his comeback series of concerts in London sold out in a matter of hours. On the road from beloved to reviled he changed his style, his image, his skin colour and- reportedly- his nose: there are stories about how it once fell off during rehearsal and was stepped on by a back up dancer who thought it was a snail.

As far as MJ stories go, the one about his nose falling off is quite tame, and unconfirmed. Others, such as his hair catching fire during the filming of a soft drink commercial, the switch and belt-whippings he received from his father as a child for mistakes during rehearsal, the pet chimpanzee Bubbles who he used to dress in identical outfits and take with him everywhere he went, the sprawling ranch called Neverland where he built a castle and invited children to sleep in his bed, are confirmed. They played a pivotal role in his transformation from ruler of the pop dominion- the ultimate performer whose song/dance routines featured in the soundtrack of an entire global generation’s lives- to the licentious Peter Pan, the fallen idol.

Before MJ, a lot of the idols connoisseurs of low culture had chosen to worship had the decency to die young. Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, and Kurt Cobain, for example, were seared into peoples’ memories in the moment of their flowering. Elvis Presley might have allowed himself to slide irretrievably into a wallow of self-indulgent hedonism via drug addiction, the trimness replaced by lard, the sublime fading into the ridiculous, but the volume and quality of his musical repertoire far outweighed the scale and duration of his decline. That was not the case with Michael Jackson. His earlier records, his indisputably breathtaking musical talent, were buried beneath an avalanche of scandal. And still he would not die. Instead he would pop up periodically, like the deranged scarecrow he once played in a cinematic version of the Wizard of Oz, to do something inexplicably sinister like dangle a baby over a balcony or threaten to record an album written and produced by an Arab sheikh.

This put people who were once avowed fans into a difficult situation. One could not flat out deny that one had foot tapped to Billie Jean or Beat it, or practiced the moonwalk in front of a mirror. Neither could one deny that pederasty was no longer an acceptable social practice, or that following a song about how ‘it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white’ with an even more aggressive erasing of one’s natural skin colour was at its worst hypocritical and at its best just plain odd. The story of Michael Jackson epitomized for many a dilemma as old as entertainment itself. How do you, and indeed should you, separate man from talent, excess from achievement, messenger from religion?

Charting MJ’s popularity internationally post his fall from grace, his reception in different cultures revealed different perceptions about the magnitude of sin, the consequences of sin, even the notion of sin itself. In his home country, America, he was acquitted of one charge of child abuse and reached an out of court settlement with another plaintiff but was still widely considered a child molester. He still had legions of dedicated fans but the many musicians who reacted to news of his demise by enumerating his accomplishments and acknowledging his influence on their own music had wanted nothing to do with him in recent years. In Europe he was similarly marked, no longer a celebrity one wanted to associate with but rather an anomaly one wanted to avoid lest one be dragged into the tractor beam of the interplanetary mothership he seemed to live on.

In Asia though, and clearly the Middle East, he was still Michael Jackson. THE Michael Jackson, of the white socks and the crotch grabbing, the reason Zohaib wore fingerless gloves in that video with Nazia, the man Ismail Tara parodied in Fifty Fifty. Chinese students still listened to him, Japanese paid $600 for a single autograph from him, Indian filmi dialogue still made occasional flattering reference to him, Pakistani dancers like Sonu Dangerous paid ceaseless homage to him and in Bahrain Sheikh Abdullah offered to pay recording costs for a new MJ album. What was MJ doing in Bahrain? His brother Jermaine had converted to Islam, and his subsequent advice and support to his troubled sibling in recent years is supposed to have been a calming influence on the man dubbed ‘Wacko Jacko’.

It is tempting to use the death at 50 of- with the exception of certain sophisticated weaponry- America’s single most successful export to the rest of the world as a platform for further musings on culture-specific concepts of social deviancy. Was MJ’s enduring popularity in certain countries more than others reflective of their wisdom? Human beings are flawed. Artists tend to be more flawed than others so we will forgive them their trespasses, leave judgment to God and celebrate their greatness. Was it reflective of the local tolerance for practices considered perversion by ‘ferengi’ cultures? Was it consumerist nostalgia for another time, another era? Or is it simply the power of the other legacy of Michael Jackson, the way he made us feel? Before he made us feel betrayed and repulsed of course.

It might seem to some that, considering the troubled times in which we live, twelve hundred words in this paper about a dead pop star, a blot on the spiritual landscape, is about eleven hundred and ninety words too many. But, as Pakistan proved in the T20 world cup last week, things that lift the spirit are as worthy of attention as things that go boom in the night. Cricket is one, across this region. ‘Modern music’- and here I extend my sympathies to those amongst you who still nurtured hopes of younger Pakistanis return to the classical fold- is another. Inherently dramatic, it is as much about the characters, stories and legends it engenders as it is about the craft itself. Man or monster, victim or predator, regardless of what the autopsy underway at the time this obituary is being composed reveals, many in Pakistan mourn the loss of one of its most masterful practitioners. May he find the peace he never found in Neverland.

Shandana Minhas is a writer. Email: shandanaminhas@yahoo.com

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