It is with a careful quill that I attempt to write this certain type of explanation of Michael Jackson. Michael’s death is not an easy one to accept for various reasons. He was still, relatively, young; he was and will remain famous possibly even more in death; and perhaps especially because in accepting his death we must accept that his life, like many lives, was not truly fulfilling because he spent it trying to escape himself; only to realize that self never deserts no matter how much abuse you heap upon it. Oh what Michael must have felt, looking at himself in the mirror, after years of prescription drug addiction and realizing that the little boy he was so desperately trying to change into someone acceptable stood before him still sad, still unsatisfied but now twisted and disfigured with little career left to salvage.
The real question is less how did this happen but rather why did we (his family, his fans, his critics, his management, etc.) allow it. Did we not hear the plea when he spoke publicly of the abuse he suffered as a child? Did we not witness his various transformations from black to mulatto to white to ghost? Didn’t we shake our heads when he claimed he suffered from a de-pigmenting skin condition when it was clearly a very evenly done bleach job? These are obviously rhetorical questions but the answers are not. We heard the plea, we witnessed the changes and we privately judged him and ultimately did nothing because to act would be to acknowledge our society’s nasty little problems with identity and race. To acknowledge that Michael was not well is to recognize that he is not the first person of color to have these issues and that hating ones self isn’t a commodity to be sold but a disease to be treated. I would even affirm that when one reveals the nasty bits of their existence which reflect negatively on their environment there is a perceived vulnerability about whether their existence will be in jeopardy because what the truth has uncovered is dirt the likes of which don’t get cleaned easily.
It has seemed to me over the years that I have been a fan of the man’s music (and less of the man) that we the fans are willing to accept extremely deep seated problems as long as there is pleasure even if borne via a very long, intense and troublesome labor. Or is it that we are just as troubled as Michael was? Maybe we too had someone telling us we weren’t good enough, or pretty enough. Maybe we were secretly applauding his efforts at transformation no matter how grotesque and troubling because we too wished our noses were a little keener and skin a lot lighter. The main is that we didn’t have the hundreds of thousands of dollars for cosmetic procedures. We did however have 14.99 for one of Michael’s CDs.
Interestingly enough as if the physical transformation wasn’t sufficient evidence, Michael provided us with direct references to the gravity of his angst in the songs “Black or White” and “Man in the Mirror”. I always found it interesting how some one who had gone through such pains to change the color of his skin and the shape of his nose could really believe that color (and/or race depending on how your linkages work) doesn’t matter. “Man in the Mirror” is equally as telling in that depending on the interpretation, Michael is either singing what he wished he believed, or lauding his transformative efforts by singing the anthem of all those young people like himself who grew up hating themselves
A brilliant writer I know has written about Michael referring to this posthumous hullabaloo as a circus. The body has been autopsied thus revealing organs rotted from drug abuse, a body that has been poked and prodded and marked. His father, the cause of initial suffering has spoken, his mother not so much yet. In death he remains the same broken man-boy that we once applauded and supported. It’s just that now our happiness has become grief. Our outright denial of his issues has turned into disgust that a life could be lived in this way and at the realization that we watched and participated in his demise frame by frame.
