The Real Loss of Michael Jackson's Death

Posted by Tom Degan, AlterNet at 12:00 PM on June 26, 2009.

This may not do me a bit of good. Gather 'round, children, while Mr. Degan commits journalistic suicide. Please forgive me for not participating in the canonization of Michael Jackson.

This is not meant as a condemnation of the man's private life, his eccentricities or the accusations hurled against him in the last decade and a half of his all-too-short life. A jury found him innocent of the worse charge (other than murder) that can possibly be made against a human being. We can speculate forever but in the final analysis, we have no other choice but to respect their verdict. My problem with Michael Jackson is a bit more complicated.

One day in the Spring of 1971 I heard a song on the radio by a group called the Jackson Five that was called Never Can Say Goodbye. It was (and is to this very day) one of the most beautiful pop songs I have ever heard. A couple of months later I read in the paper that he would be celebrating his thirteenth birthday the following day on August 29. This news piqued my curiosity; I had just turned thirteen less that two weeks before on August 16. Because the two of us were born on the same month in 1958, I would find myself over the years following his triumphs with the pride of a schoolboy watching a favored classmate win the World Series one year after another. Over a span of time, however, that pride would devolve into bewilderment and then later on, disgust.

Although I was never a huge fan of his music (my Jackson collection comprises a mere handful of 45 RPMs and one long-playing album) there was never any denying that the man was possessed of immense talent. It was my belief that, like Sinatra, he'd still be packing them in at eighty years of age. How ironic is that?

Last night in front of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, Al Sharpton was lauding Jackson as a shining example to the Black community. I am sorry but no statement could be further from the truth. At a time in history when young African American males were desperately yearning for a positive role model to look up to, Michael Jackson was running scared from his racial heritage.

This is where I will probably get myself into big trouble. After all, I'm just a middle-aged white guy (assuming I live to be one-hundred-and-one). What right have I to judge Michael Jackson - or any other black person for that matter? Who the hell am I? My "right" (such as it is) is as an casual observer of "American pop culture" and nothing more. I attempt here to be neither psychiatrist nor sociologist.

Watching the slow evolution of his features through the years - the "Caucasianization", if you will, of Michael Jackson - could not have been something that would make your average African American kid swell up with any amount of pride. The martyred South African dissident Steve Biko used to tell his people that "Black is Beautiful". Although Jackson never dared to say it out loud, he spent most of his adult life implying that "Black is Ugly". There is no other explanation for it - none.

Here's the irony: In his heyday, before the multitude of "procedures" which would eventually alter his looks to a horrible, grotesque degree (procedures he would deny to his dying day) Michael Jackson was an extraordinarily good looking guy.

No one could fault him for his first plastic surgery in the early eighties. In the past many Hollywood legends, for whatever reasons (not all of them bad) have sought to "soften" their features. Actually the result pretty was good. Picture him as he appeared in 1983 with Paul McCartney in the Say! Say! Say! video. He looked great, didn't he? Why couldn't he leave well enough alone? What was the man thinking?

By the turn of the new twenty-first century he no longer looked like a African American male. Do you remember the infamous mug shot after he was arraigned in 2003? He reminded me of Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. Google both images if you think I'm exaggerating.

What has amazed me since the news of his demise came over the television yesterday afternoon are the writers who have credited Michael Jackson with being the first "cross-over" African American artist to reach a predominantly white audience. Most of those writers are in their early thirties and may be forgiven for not remembering the names Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Sammy Davis Jr, The Mills Brothers, Josephine Baker, Jimi Hendrix, Ella Fitzgerald, Billy Eckstine, Bill Cosby, Diana Washington, Sarah Vaughan, Eartha Kitt, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Sidney Poitier, Richard Pryor, Dick Gregory, Stevie Wonder, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Diana Ross and the Supremes - and a score or more other pioneers who were able to chip away the walls of America's racial divide years before Jackson entered our collective consciousness. That he was a major influence cannot be argued. But he was not the first - far from it.

One can't help wonder what might have happened had this most gifted performer not attempted to hide who he was and made more of an effort to reach out to those children of his own race; the youth who would eventually look to identify with the jackasses who produce "Gangsta Rap". Some of these kids - most of whom had no conscious memory of the Jackson Five or even Thriller - believed him to be white. And why shouldn't they think that? He was white! He was whiter than I - and I'm pretty damned white! (Irish complexion, you know).

To say that he was a good example for African American kids to emulate is - forgive me - one step shy of insane.

We have to give the man his due: Michael Jackson was - beyond a shadow of a doubt - a great artist whose recorded legacy will endure for decades, maybe even a century or more. But an examination of his life is riddled with questions of all that might have been; all that should have been. It is more than likely that this was a severely mentally ill human being who never sought the treatment he so desperately needed; surrounded by fawning sycophants who enabled his sickness by constantly reassuring him that he could do no wrong. As John Lennon once said in the same context about Elvis Presley, another victim of the excesses of fame: "It's always the courtiers that kill the king".

The sad, inescapable truth is that, for reasons we will probably never be able to fully understand, his talent and his career were ultimately wasted. Therein lies the real, unspeakable tragedy of Michael Jackson.

AFTERTHOUGHT:

Oh yeah, and by the way, Farrah Fawcett died yesterday, too.