Like much of the rest of the world — or at least that segment of it that cares about such things — I was shocked by the unexpected death of Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, last week. News of the passing of Farrah Fawcett saddened me as well. (The Pinup of My Generation had the misfortune of crossing the River Styx on the same day as MJ, and thus received diminished press coverage.) Her death was actually more disheartening to me — perhaps because she had lost her struggle against cancer. And though it may be harsh to say it, one expects — at some deep, dark, unspeakable level — that cancer is going to win most of those heroic battles.
MJ’s final departure from the stage was stunning because he, unlike Farrah Fawcett, was a part of my life almost from the moment I became aware of popular culture. My cool cousins who lived in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D. C. had Jackson 5 albums on 8-track cassette. (I listened to the songs so much that even today, I remember when the cassette player would “click” as it switched tracks during the music.) I watched the Jackson 5 cartoon on TV and saw “The Wiz” in the movie theater. And years later, as a student at a residential high school for North Carolina’s freaks and geeks, I sat spellbound in a crowded and hushed room as MJ’s “Billie Jean” premiered on MTV, then a fledgling upstart cable channel that previously had only played music videos by White artists. From that point onward, my life could be divided into two epochs: BMJ (Before Michael Jackson) and AMJ (After Michael Jackson). Okay, perhaps that is a bit of an exaggeration; but his music was the soundtrack of my adolescence.
The King of Pop’s personal eccentricities and later scandals, when I cared to take note of them, were in turns amusing and deeply troubling. But the thing that really grafted MJ to my cultural DNA was his brief marriage to Lisa Marie Presley. Elvis is the real musical love of my life; and though I participated in the joking about MJ’s relationship with Lisa Marie, I was secretly jealous of him for having wooed and won the daughter of the King.
All of this is my long-winded way of saying that I had foolishly believed, like most people in my generation, that MJ would always be with us . We would grow old together and someday — many decades from now — die together. None of us expected MJ to check out early.
Our 24-hour news and entertainment cycle is, at least for the moment, obsessed with measuring MJ’s impact on music, culture, and society. That is well and proper as he was a figure of global stature, whether or not we wanted that to be the case.
But there is a small part of me that hopes against hope that the King of Pop is not really dead. Maybe he just got tired of it all and decided finally to accept Elvis’ offer to join him at his villa in Argentina. Rumor has it that Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina had a good time there.
Philadelphia Negro 