I don’t remember a world without Michael Jackson.
I was born in 1983, a year after Thriller came out. It was still the #1 album on the Billboard charts when I was born. As a little girl, my neighbors — older girls who I worshipped — let me listen to their MJ albums; when I was a little older and went to Disneyland and saw Captain EO, they gave me their old Michael Jackson posters, since they had long ago moved on to George Michael. I saw the Thriller video at a friend’s house years after it came out, but still found it terrifying — and wanted to watch it again and again. When I was eight or nine, a close family friend was stricken with brain cancer; she was six or seven, and best friends with my little sister. Her older brother and I were born three days apart, and our moms had been friends during their pregnancies. She adored Michael Jackson, and toward the end of her life, her parents bought her a karaoke machine so that she could sing his songs with her family. She died when she was eight. There are a few MJ songs that I can’t hear without thinking of her. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV as a kid, but the older neighbor girls (who by this time were old enough to babysit me) convinced my parents to let my sister and I watch Black or White, arguing that it was a positive message that we should be exposed to. Not long after, we spent most of a family vacation watching the television coverage of Michael’s child molestation charges. None of us had any doubt that he did it, and I have a very clear (and strange) memory of my mom theorizing that maybe Macauley Culkin was somehow involved. Through middle school and high school, Janet began to eclipse Michael as my favorite Jackson, but I still bought HIStory and thought the Scream video was one of the cooler things I saw on MTV. When I went to college, I bonded with the woman I would live with for the next four years over a shared love of Michael’s music — or more specifically, a shared love of memorizing every move from his videos. My affection for the Billy Jean dance carried over to future friendships, and my current room mate and I still break into it whenever that song comes on — it’s common enough occurrence where we took to calling Billy Jean “our song.” In law school, I went to Egypt to see someone I was involved with, and we spend eight long hours driving across the Sinai, sharing his ipod and listening to Michael Jackson albums.
I don’t believe that Michael Jackson was a great person; I think he probably did molest children, or at the very least had inappropriate interactions with them. He had serious and fairly well-documented psychological issues; “man-child” seems to be the favored description, and it’s pretty widely accepted that he had the psycho-social development of a boy. He was an abuse victim, and very possibly an abuser. His childhood and his own suffering certainly isn’t an excuse for the choices he made as an adult, but it is important context when looking back at a life that was tragic, damaged and damaging to others. I don’t think any of that should be overlooked or whitewashed. But as Holly points out, “I don’t think we have to have outlandishly complex thought processes in order to hold multiple, conflicting things about Michael Jackson in our minds. We’re human beings, we have really powerful brains capable of complexity and nuance.” Natalia’s post addresses some of that complexity, and she’s right about holding onto the music rather than the musician. For me, in my life, his music was important. I loved it, even while I found the man sometimes repulsive but mostly sad — and I found the man sad even while recognizing his profound influence on racial and gender presentation.
There are a lot of posts up around the internets today about Michael Jackson. This one at Juan Cole’s place, about Michael, Islam and the Middle East, is one of my favorites. And this one about Michael Jackson’s influence in Albania is also a must-read.
It’s not that I’m “grieving,” or that I’m heartbroken over the death of a larger-than-life musical icon (“celebrity” feels too small a word), even though I’ll admit that my voice cracked a little when I poked my head out of my office to tell my supervisors at work that MJ passed. It’s more that, possibly more than any other artist, Michael Jackson provided a soundtrack for some of the more personal and notable points of my life. I still love his music. I loved hearing it blasting from car windows and stereos while I walked down the street yesterday. I love listening to it as I write this post. For that, I will miss him.