I never really liked Michael Jackson, though when I was 18 and his LP Thriller was released, I couldn’t help but secretly tap my foot to his songs when they played on the radio, or feel goose bumps when the new cable channel called MTV showed “videos” of his songs. My generation was probably the most excited about MTV — I now wince when I recall saying that the Duran Duran video for Rio was art, and there were friends who would smoke pot most nights just to sit and spend a few hours watching MTV. It was as if MTV was our generation’s paradigm shift, and Michael Jackson was somehow inextricably intertwined with the birth of MTV.
My objection to Michael Jackson’s songs was that they were too stupid for me and appealed to the lowest common denominator.
After all, which college intellectual wants to share his musical tastes with grandmothers and 13-year-old girls? One’s aesthetic criteria evolve with age, education and refinement. I vaguely remember Socrates saying that if something was popular then it probably wasn’t good. The only problem was that girls liked dancing to Michael Jackson songs, and I liked dancing with girls, ergo: I had to start dancing to Wanna be startin’ something.
Trouble was, Michael Jackson and his damned videos raised the bar on dancing, particularly after his Moonwalk became the rage. Any young man who could simulate that slow-motion backward walk was sure to get the attention of the ladies so naturally even high-browed young men like yours truly had to try and learn it (and then practice it). Most humiliating was the fact that it was my brother, two years younger than I, who taught me. Curiously, he was athletic and handsome and thus did not need the Moonwalk to attract the ladies (who found their way to him like bees to honey), yet he was the one who knew the Moonwalk. There is an internal logic to this life-dynamic which I still do not understand.
So I learned and I practiced and I ruined a very excellent pair of shoes by rubbing their soles against hard floors and gravel paths in trying to perfect the Moonwalk. I have never told anyone this, even my mother who presented those shoes as an expensive gift, and I am still ashamed. Of course, when the time came to dance and impress the ladies, everyone was too busy having a good time to notice my newly acquired moves, and in any case, by the time I had mastered it, the Moonwalk was no longer in fashion.
Michael Jackson’s next record came several years after, by which time I had already begun working in India, and without satellite TV or the Internet I didn’t have much exposure to the album, so it barely registered. There was a song from his following album that I heard in a Delhi discotheque in the early 1990s when I went with my wife and her cousin and her cousin’s future husband; Black and white was quite catchy, and everyone on the floor seemed to know the words, and I wondered if my ignorance meant I had gotten too involved in journalism and terrorism and all that crap.
What registered more with me during those years were Michael Jackson’s adventures in plastic surgery. I could not understand how someone could mutilate their own body. Perhaps he felt shame in being Black, but to turn into a ghostly white was inexplicably weird. His nose changed shape. His lips were thinner. His chin was different. His eyebrow looked strange, like the Joker from Batman comics. He definitely did not look African anymore; it is arguable whether he looked human. It looked awful; however, when I expressed this opinion to my wife’s friend and the friend’s father, they disagreed and said they preferred the new Michael Jackson.
And they say Australians are racist.
This radical change to his face somehow seemed an extremity of shame at being oneself, a pathological attempt at self-improvement.
And why would he need to do this, when he had attained so much wealth and status and honour with his original persona? The fact of Michael Jackson’s selfdisgust makes it more wondrous that the USA elected an African-American as its president. Michael Jackson really had lost touch with reality.
So by the time that news of Michael Jackson’s troubles with little boys came, I was ready to believe the worst about him. Perhaps he did not touch pre-adolescent genitals, or perhaps nothing could ever be proved against him, or perhaps, like O J Simpson (who killed his wife and her lover but was acquitted), he had a sympathetic jury. I vaguely remember all sorts of pop psychotherapy about his maniacally driven father, or some other bad childhood experiences, but frankly the fact that he tried to change his skin colour meant to me that he lacked dignity at his core, and if he lacked that, then anything was possible.
After that, the Michael Jackson news that was mildly interesting was about the celebrities who hung out with him. Why? I wondered. Paul McCartney: Well, he was always a slime; he tried to also use Stevie Wonder to build a crossover audience for his post-Beatles records. Elizabeth Taylor: I don’t know, but I’m sure Richard Burton is turning in his grave. Elvis Presley’s daughter: That was obviously a sham marriage meant to counter his pedophile image since the marriage lasted as long as the molestation case/controversy. It all seems to fall into a pattern, with money as the unifying theme. I almost feel sorry for Michael Jackson; even his famous relationships were built on the solid foundation of cash.
For a long time now many of us had forgotten Michael Jackson. A year back I visited my parents and I showed my children my collection of vinyl LPs stashed in the basement. I played a few, driven by nostalgia and zeal to expose my teenagers to some “classic” pop and rock. I have a copy of Thriller, but I skipped by it without batting an eyelid. Now he is dead, and I will probably listen to a couple of old hits as they play on TV, and I will think: Yes, he made me dance, but he certainly was a most curious fellow.