I know we’ve all been inundated with Michael Jackson (from one of my own children: “I loved his music, but all this media hype over his death is ridiculous”), but it looks like we still haven’t reached the saturation point since all the magazines at the supermarket checkout were still bearing the story on the cover this week. For all the glory and talent of his short, truncated life, it is indeed just so sad. What a tragedy.
Perhaps because he was only just a little bit older than I am, I feel as if Michael Jackson’s music runs through my life like a soundtrack, the lyrics popping out like mile markers on the highway, reminding me and many of my fellow baby boomers of the milestones in our own lives. Who can forget the angelic little boy singing “ABC, Easy As 123.” That was during my elementary school years. And then there was “One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl,” at the same time I was contemplating the meanness of some of the girls on the playground, way before the movie “Mean Girls” put the phrase onto the cultural map.
Jackson’s all-time best-selling album “Thriller” came out the year I graduated from college. That was the year I spent in China, and the thumping, catchy phrases of “Beat It” and “Billie Jean” fueled the wild dancing at all of the embassy and media parties of the international community in Beijing. Chinese workers inside the foreign compounds as well as Chinese throngs gathered outside the gates listened to the forbidden music and loved it too. The Chinese government, back in those “olden days,” cast Jackson’s music, along with many other western cultural offerings, as imperialistic poison. But whether we were 20-something Americans or from Australia, Somalia, France, and even Sri Lanka, Michael’s music moved us, the appeal universal, just as the language of good music always should be.
Of course, Michael Jackson had his quirks, to put it kindly, and then he had the more salacious and less easy-to-tolerate clouds of child molestation charges around him in later years. (From one of my own family: “Let’s face it, he was a weirdo.”) Who really knows what went on behind closed doors?
He was a cute little boy as the youngest member of the Jackson 5, and as a teenager, he was growing into the promise of his distinctive features and larger-than-life talent and personality. Again, who really knows about his illnesses –– his insomnia, his vitiligo and fascination with plastic surgery (which would explain how and why his features evolved so much as we watched from the sidelines, at once both fascinated and perplexed), his addiction to medication, his appearances in a wheelchair and “Zorro”-style hat, and last but not least, his much-gossiped-about “Peter Pan” syndrome.
I always saw the wounded child inside the strange man, the child who revealed that his own father abused him physically and psychologically. Who can understand a parent who would repeatedly tell his child that he was ugly? (I wish I had been on the sidelines urging the young Michael to cast parental respect aside and retort, well, if I’m ugly it’s all your fault since I got my genes from you).
As a parent, I consider it one of my constant duties and joys to praise my children, to pump up their confidence and self-esteem, and to remind them of how valued they are as human beings, and to express the happiness they bring to my life. The monster is Joe Jackson, though he is currently on the talk show circuit denying that any of that happened.
There are those who say that Michael Jackson’s death will be one where people will always say, “Where were you when you heard?” and certainly, like the deaths of John Kennedy Jr. and Princess Diana, it is shaping up to be that way.
It seems that many of the truly good do die too young. There are personal favorites like A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former commissioner of baseball, president of Yale University and father of actor Paul Giamatti, who died of a heart attack at the age of 51; and actor Michael Landon, “Little Joe” of Bonanza, hardy pioneer father of Little House on the Prairie, and subject of one my first childhood crushes, who died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 54. There are historical figures, composers like my beloved Chopin and Mozart, whose genius blazed so brightly so young that they flamed out, burned out, and died before they could leave an even greater legacy of music for the world to cherish.
Thinking of all of this, I am once again reminded of an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem that came to mind earlier this summer when we mourned the deaths of two family friends who also left this earth way too early.
“My candle burns at both ends, It will not last the night. But ah, my foes and oh, my friends, It gives a lovely light!
