A Rose for MJ

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David Cantwell writes:

Michael Jackson’s death at age 50 was startling but hardly surprising. The strange saga of Michael Jackson had been outdoing itself for at least a quarter of a century—lately by the repulsion it provoked, mostly by the sheer pleasure it inspired, and always in just plain weirdness. It was only the timing of this final chapter that caught us off guard. We all expected, I think, that this story was bound to end badly, sooner or later, and we’d expected a bad end for a very long time. Indeed, as far back as 1986, critic Dave Marsh published a book on Michael Jackson that he knowingly titled Trapped. The first words of that book’s open letter to Jackson posed a question that people were already asking, even then, and that they have been asking ever since: “Dear Michael: What happened?”

At first the weirdness that was Michael Jackson was of the entirely delightful variety. How in the hell could a little kid sing like that? What did an 11 year old know, after all, about the anguished hindsight of “I Want You Back,” a single that is still as viscerally thrilling a record as any I’ve ever heard? Or of the devotion expressed in “I’ll Be There,” a pledge of unity and spiritual succor as sustaining as any other from its era, which is saying something since the early seventies was a pop moment largely defined by such songs: “Lean on Me,” “I’ll Take You There,” “Family Affair,” “You’ve Got a Friend,” “I’ll Be Around,” “Love Train.” On a similar theme and no less moving, 1972’s “Ben,” Jackson’s first solo chart topper, featured what will now go down as the most fetching melody of his career. But it will also be remembered as the most prescient of his early hits because it presents Michael singing oh-so-delicately (a vocal tact he mostly lost in his post Thriller years) to a best friend that just happens to be a pet rat. The real Michael, who would eventually afford a zoo’s worth of critters, upgraded to a chimpanzee.

Off the Wall, which produced four top ten pop hits and sold eight million copies in 1979, made Jackson into the biggest star in the world, its own brand of weirdness. Three years later, Thriller rendered such merely terrestrial claims meaningless and left Jackson with nowhere to go but down. Thriller remains a stunning achievement, and not only commercially. Someday that album will be universally recognized, if it isn’t already, as being as important to its time and to the sounds it inspired as Sgt. Pepper’s was to an earlier moment. And Thriller will hold up better, I think. Most eighties music has for a long time now sounded very much like eighties music, but “Billie Jean” and “Beat It,” “P.Y.T.” and “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” besides anticipating the Rhythm Nation that was to come, and in which we all now reside, already have a timeless feel.

But even as he was thrilling the world with a vision of possibility, and just plain fun, a vision of both both in human community and human distinctiveness, the joy seemed to slip from his own performances. Unlike his only commercial peers in the eighties—Springsteen, Madonna, Prince and U2—Jackson never seemed to be having a blast in the spotlight; even his most amazing dance steps came off like very hard work, and work he had to do alone. The young man’s sense of self seemed to slip further away along with his joy, and it was then that the weirdness of Michael shot through the roof. First, the nose job, then the skin lightening. There were the high profile though usually short-lived relationships with child stars of the past (Elizabeth Taylor) and of this or that particular present (Emmanuel Lewis, Ryan White). There was Neverland. The hyper-baric chamber. The creepy crawling-down-his-face hair. The marriage to Elvis’ daugther. The final Lon-Chaney-as-Phantom-of-the-Opera visage. And, of course, the charges of pedophilia…those despicable, unforgivable acts… As Carl Wilson put it, Jackson died last week, yes, but only “after a long illness.” Indeed, Jackson’s long weird illness was something we couldn’t get enough of, that we encouraged, and therefore for which we are partly culpable. Our individual and collective acts in nurturing today’s culture of celebrity constitute our own chronic illness.  I think Michael understood this, too, at some level. “You’re just a buffet, you’re a vegetable,” he blurts breathlessly, over and over, in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.” “They eat off of you, you’re a vegetable.”

One thing we ‘re after in our fascination with celebrity is the way shared pleasure can make us feel connected to other people, make us feel part of something larger than ourselves while at the same time validating our need to see ourselves as individuals, unique in the universe and therefore worthwhile on our own terms. The danger in this obsession for the celebrity, especially for the rare celebrity who has achieved the thin-air heights of a Michael Jackson, is that it leaves the star feeling connected to no one in particular, no one at all.

I think that’s what stands out most to me about Jackson in the years following his Thriller triumph. Michael always seemed alone. He was alone. Even when dancing, he danced alone.

The unassailable greatness of the Jackson 5’s music aside, and any nostalgia aside too (I’m almost 48, Michael’s contemporary; we grew up together), I love “I Want You Back” and “ABC” and “Dancing Machine” and the rest so dearly because Michael looks and sounds like he’s having fun, with his brothers. Some of the most soul-sustaining, emotionally-perfect musical moments I know are those times in J5 hits when Michael’s high sweet voice gave way to the voice of one of his brothers’, usually Jermaine’s, who would spell Michael for a line or a verse or a bridge, the older sibling with his musical arm around the shoulder of a kid brother.

What’s probably my favorite moment in Michael’s solo work, and the saddest, comes at the end of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin.” As that skittering, mechanical-sounding high-hat pulse fades in and out of the dance beat, Jackson tries to strike a deal with us:

Lift your head up high
And scream out to the world
I know I am someone
And let the truth unfurl
No one can hurt you now
Because you know what’s true
Yes, I believe in me
So you believe in you

I don’t think he really believed it, though. And maybe one reason he couldn’t believe it was because, most of the time, we don’t believe it either, not really. We crave freedom, we want to believe in each other, to believe in ourselves, to achieve ourselves, but we are also terrified of exposing ourselves that way. So, instead, we cling to that which has robbed us of ourselves and of one another all along. Michael Jackson clung to that which had robbed him, too, as people will.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 9:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

12 Responses to “A Rose for MJ”

  1. steven j messick Says:
    June 29th, 2009 at 11:42 pm

    I spent the whole weekend trying to write about this. I couldn’t figure out exactly what I wanted to say, and mostly made it harder than it had to be. Oh well.
    One thing that struck me was that after Thriller…shit, I’ll even spot him Bad, warmed over Thriller that it is, Jackson seemed to concentrate more on the spectacle than on the thing that got him there in the first place. As much as he eventually came to want privacy, for so long he craved the attention, encouraged it. And the music suffered mightily.
    Listening to Off the Wall you get the sense of a young man letting himself go. The enthusiasm and joy leap out of the speakers. And it was matched by equally high craftsmanship. Thriller upped the ante, not just doing it better, but pushing it a little further; “Billie Jean” still seems like a breakthrough, even today. The darker themes added to the intensity.
    And then Bad, Thriller-by-numbers. Hard rock guitar here, the seamy side of celebrity there (actually both together, on “Dirty Diana”). For the rest, who knows what happened. Lack of strong collaborators. Lack of interest.
    It’s tempting to say that he didn’t meet his potential, but that’s silly. We don’t criticize Springsteen for not bettering Born to Run. What Jackson didn’t do…what the people you cite above did do, was risk failure and evolve. Jackson, for whatever reason never again approached a recording with the sense of wonder and self discovery that’s all over Thriller. He seemed to believe that the sales figures alone (impressive as they are) demonstrated the success of Thriller (this is man whose proudest acheivement was his Pepsi contract).
    That’s a tragedy, too.

  2. acne.care.jenny Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 2:22 pm

    michael jackson is a very very talented person to the point that he rose as a pop icon. he would live forever in our history books and memories…

  3. Pete Cenedella Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 5:37 pm

    Thanks for a thoughtful, well-writen (as ever) and heartfelt piece, David. We are virtually the same age (I’m 46) and so I Want You Back, The Love You Save (every bit the equal as a 45 of I Want You Back, in my estimation), ABC and I’ll Be There, Mama’s Pearl and Goin’ Back to Indiana and Ben and Rockin’ Robin were all indispensable, perfect defining moments to me too. And, because we are that age, we hear the precise sort of move into unwanted complexity and weirdness across the unusually long arc of MJ’s storied career. But critical lines are often drawn in maters like these precisely at some personal point where the music ceased to make sense and connect to the critic’s life. For me, I was a punk rocker by the time Thriller came out, and though I was not an ideologue as punks went, Thriller struck me as a load of over-produced rhythm tracks trying desperately to signify, with a hollowness at the core. In that sense it sits for me as a template for all that is wrong with the music of the 1980s.

    So I take issue with the idea that Thriller transcends the “sound of the 1980s”… I would argue it defines it to a large degree, maybe it’s the ur-80s record that was followed from here to England and back again — often imitated never duplicated, as Captain Lou Albano used to say.

    But to my ears — still, as objectively as one can use them — the sound of the 80s is a hollow one. Lots of flash up top, lots of compression and busy-ness. And rarely a good idea, a great composition, a warm and inviting record that works the pop narcotic into the pleasure centers of the human soul. The J5 had that quality as much as any of the greatest hitmakers of all time. You evoked the diference between the late60’s/70s and the 80s perfectly when you ran down the honor roll of great warm humanistic pop-soul 45s in this piece — I’d add What’s Going On and Freddy’s Dead, People Get Ready and any number of Al Green tracks, but, you know — Yeah. And the 80s will be defined by creepy sounding records filled with paranoid trifles in the lyrics and synthetic drums, hyper-compressed high end and tempos almost invariably too fast (coke vs. weed among the producers, artists and engineers is the simplest explanation there). The 70s sound like a deep, wide, warm, expanse of generosity and questing for meaning; the 80s were all about skimming the surface looking for a party.

  4. Danny Alexander Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 6:34 pm

    Both great commentaries, David and Steve. David, that loneliness comes through so strong here, and it’s right on. And, Steve, you’ve made me appreciate Thriller in a new way. In both cases, I see a story I thought I knew, I kind of did know, with new eyes.

  5. Rick Hellman Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 8:54 pm

    Nice to read you again, David!

  6. Rene S. Saller Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 9:27 pm

    I think that might be the best, most worthwhile MJ assessment I have read thus far (and god knows there have been a lot of them). Just beautiful, David.

  7. David Cantwell Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 9:29 pm

    Peter, Thanks for writing such a thoughtful note. We’ll have to disagree about the 80s, generally, particularly the notion that they were “all about skimming the surface looking for a party.” (Not that there is anything wrong with parties, particulalry if we’re after humanistic generosity and meaning.) There are too many exceptions for that to make much sense to my experience then, though of course in many instances you are exactly right. As for the sound of Thriller, what I meant was that while Thriller sounds like an 80s record, for sure, it doesn’t sound dated, similar to the way those 70s records you mention certainly sound like the 70s but are still listenable today. Whereas Sgt. Peppers have very nearly gotten to the point, I think, where it exisits only as a signifier of that time, unlike so much of the rest of Beatles records.

  8. David Cantwell Says:
    June 30th, 2009 at 9:30 pm

    And I can’t believe that no one has latched on to how obviously I’m ripping off/using Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily here… !!!!

  9. Alan Says:
    July 1st, 2009 at 12:59 am

    I was thinking more Miss Havisham, David.
    An excellent piece, as always. I especially enjoy your evocation of the Jackson 5 highlights. Those songs fizz with a pleasure that everything post-”Off the Wall” lacks. Even a bouyant hit like “The Way You Make Me Feel” has a strain about it — instead of a balloon lifting free, it’s a balloon manned with all the hardwork of the ones in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade.
    You lay some collective blame, though, that I’m not quite buying. Our fascination with his “illness” is less the responsibility of some cruel *us* than it is of a lazy, image-driven media. I’ve enjoyed my share of Jacko jokes over the years, but I’ve never enjoyed them as much as I have even a somewhat laborious later hit like “Smooth Criminal,” and I fail to see what sins of passive fans like me or my mother might have fed this sad man’s public flame-out. We wanted more records, not destruction!

  10. David Cantwell Says:
    July 1st, 2009 at 12:56 pm

    Alan…No, Miss Havisham doesn’t work primarily becuase she didn’t have a mass audience who sat back and enjoyed the show, delighting at each new titillating revalation. Miss Emily, on the other hand…

    In an early draft I’d written “of course, this is culpability at a great remove,” then deleted it to save space as I figured the second hand nature of the responsibilty went without saying. Then again, cigarettes kill at second hand too. At any event, I think it’s very complicated…True enough about a lazy, image-driven media, but “we’ and “us” are implicated there as well. The Enquirer puts Jacko on the cover because it sells copies…The Most Trusted Name in News does the same thing. There is blame enough to go around: Michael’s family and especially his father, his physician apparently, and of course Michael himself all get included, I think, without saying.

    (”cruel” doesn’t really enter to it, I don’t think, just as “greed” doesn’t explain the harsh human impact of free markets)

    Of course, our desire for more records and our desire for destruction aren’t mutually exclusive. Certainly, when the records weren’t forthcoming we settled readily enough for the destruction we were offered. As people will…

  11. Pete Cenedella Says:
    July 1st, 2009 at 3:19 pm

    Hey, point taken about parties, David, lol. And of course no sooner had I hit Submit then I started thinking about 80s pop that does signify for me in the 00s. I’m not counting the records that were my mainstays at the time like Husker Du and the Minutemen and the like. But Sheila E’s Glamorous Life and The Pretenders’ Back On The Chain Gang, both different responses to Reagan’s world, sound fantastic and equally smart now, as do, to my ears, Tears for Fears (Bob Mould’s British brothers beneath the synths, IMO), Til Tuesday, and Borderline (the single) and Like A Prayer (the whole damn album). And, weirdly, maybe everything that’s both yucky and strangely fascinating about 80s music can be found in the synth squiggles and cheese of the one single by Berry Gordy’s son: “I always feel like somebody’s watching me…”

    As for Michael the narrative, I was equally alienated this week from the profuse tears and the mean-spirited, diffident jokes. I guess in the end I don’t consider myself one of the people (or part of the abstract culture of celebrity that you and Carl Wilson and many others have been discussing) who particularly delighted in his rise or reveled in his fall; don’t think I was one of the you and me’s who killed this particular Kennedy. I just shook my head years ago at the loss of that beautiful guy on the J5 album covers, with his disarmingly innocent face, his cool fro and chocolate skin. But then I moved on.

    But I respect the sorrow, and the deep sense of connection, because I felt those things when Altman and Vonnegut died. And I know this: when Dylan goes, I’ll be a wailing fool.

  12. Ellyn Maholmes Says:
    April 20th, 2010 at 12:31 pm

    I have begun to listen to MJ a lot lately. I wish i would have started that before he died :( . RIP

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