When I first heard that Michael Jackson had died, I was neither shocked, surprised nor sad. Having grown up in a world where Jackson the entertainer was constantly overshadowed by Jacko the tabloid fodder, I merely viewed his death as a surprisingly quiet and toothless end to a career that would be completely unbelievable if it weren't true.
Within minutes after the initial report, as Facebook news feeds and Twitter pages became breeding grounds for speculation and/or curious expressions of grief, I remained ambivalent about the passing. This was a man who, to me, died sometime following the release of Thriller. But at 50? It all seemed like a little much--nothing about him in the last 10 years suggested that the man who had just died had anything in common with then pop music demigod responsible for "P.Y.T."
But for that afternoon--and this has only been amplified in the days (weeks!?) since--it seemed like the entire world had stopped what they were doing, turned to the person next to them and said "Michael Jackson died?"
Even for my generation, who I would assume spends just as much time discussing the appropriateness of his relationships with children as listening to his music, nothing about the death seemed right. Here was the most electrifying performer in the world turned sensation media trainwreck, and he's just going to die at 50 of a heart attack. Figures as big and controversial and loved and villified as Michael Jackson shouldn't pass without redemption or at the very least some final judgement. He was a man whose eccentricity and general curiousness was forced down our throats for so long--I once watched Fox News cover his motorcade from Neverland Ranch to an LA court house in its entirety--and for him to die unexpectedly and without explanation? We deserved answers.
And now, it seems, we have them. They're not what we expected or even answers to the questions we've been asking about him since his nose started shrinking and his skin began turning white. The truth is that, for better or worse, none of that mattered anyway. Michael Jackson belonged to the entire world--his career spanned too many generation and was too diverse to just be dismissed as a youth phenomenon. Kids who grew up with the Jackson 5 grew up to have kids of their own who grew up listening to Thriller. He spanned LPs and cassettes and CDs and music videos--and now as a post-mortem nostalgia act, he's conquered the internet and MP3 downloads as well. He was the platonic ideal of an entertainer--his entire existence was surreal and impossible. We've forgiven his transgressions because if Michael Jackson--this towering, inconceivable public figure--dies as a shamed, drug-addled pedophile, it reflects on all of us. We made him into what he was, and we will ultimately decide how he will be remembered. America's greatest export is its culture, and Michael was its ambassador. Just as Elvis was before him, Michael will be remembered as an amalgam of his great accomplishments. These last 15 years were merely his "fat Elvis" period. No one has ever dominated media the way Michael Jackson did and now, no one ever will again.
Save for possibly Barack Obama, there is no person on earth who could die tomorrow and shock the world in the way that MJs death did. He became the biggest star in the post-Elvis, post John Lennon world and we have yet to create anyone bigger. In this decade, the ways in which we consume media have changed radically; the internet allows us access to even the most obscure, esoteric and highly-specialized areas of interest. No single figure will ever again galvanize the entire world in the way that Michael did because we are each so fanatically involved with our own subcultures. We'll all mourn another entertainer, but we'll never mourn together.
For Jackson to die in the last year of this decade is fitting. In the last 10 years we've seen the decline and near death of the traditional media that made Michael Jackson the superstar in the first place--we're living in a new world now, and the coming decade will radically change our notions of what a pop star is and should be, but no matter what that turns out to be, I guarantee you that Michael Jackson will never, ever happen again.
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