Michael Jackson: The Man in the Mirror

True, for a while he was the king of pop—a term apparently originated by his friend Elizabeth Taylor—and he’s the last we’re ever likely to have. Before Michael Jackson came Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and the Beatles; after him has come absolutely no one, however brilliant or however popular, who couldn’t be ignored by vast segments of an ever-more-fragmented audience. Not Kurt Cobain, not Puffy, not Mariah Carey, not Céline Dion, not Beyoncé, not Radiohead—not even Madonna, his closest competitor.

When the news of his death broke, the traffic on Twitter caused the site to crash, even though he hadn’t had a hit song for years.

But starting long before and continuing long after he lorded over the world of entertainment in the 1980s—his 1982 Thriller remains the bestselling album of all time—Jackson was the Prince of Artifice.

He was energetic, charismatic, and supremely gifted, but sexually unassertive—unlike swaggeringly heterosexual black male performers from Big Joe Turner (”Shake, Rattle, and Roll”) to Jay-Z (”Big Pimpin’?”). He neutered himself racially, too: his hair went from kinky to straight, his lips from full to thin, his nose from broad to pinched, his skin from dark to a ghastly pallor.

Why did he feel so deeply uncomfortable with himself? The hopeless task of sculpting and bleaching yourself into a simulacrum of a white man suggests a profound loathing of blackness. If Michael Jackson couldn’t be denounced as a race traitor, who could? Somehow, though, black America overlooked it, and continued to buy his records, perhaps because some African-Americans, with their hair relaxers and skin-lightening creams, understood why Jackson was remaking him-self, even if they couldn’t condone it.

As a singer, Jackson was too much of a chameleon—from the tenderness of “I’ll Be There” to the rawness of “The Way You Make Me Feel” to the silken sorrow of “She’s Out of My Life”—to stamp every song with his distinct personality, as Sinatra did, or Ray Charles, or Hank Williams. But these are demigods—Jackson was merely a giant.

In his last days, did the prospect of a comeback, of remythologizing himself one more time, excite him as much as it excited his fans? Did his magical moments in performance have an incandescent density that outweighed what must often have been burdensome hours and days? Whatever his life felt like from inside, from outside it was manifestly a work of genius, whether you want to call it a triumph or a freak show—those are just words.

We’d never seen anyone like this before, either in his artistic inventiveness or his equally artistic self-invention, and we won’t forget him—until the big Neverland swallows us all.

Tagged as: michael jackson, michael jackson death