Like the entire population of the planet yesterday, I sucked gladly into the saturation of “all things Michael”. I watched the Anderson Cooper coverage on CNN, I watched a produced special about his life and the messed up childhood, the allegations of child abuse, how Michael single-handedly changed the context of live performance and music video and about his genius as an entertainer. I listened to Thriller, I watched many Youtube videos, I cruised the entire catalog of Facebook posts from the time the news hit until now. Twitter crashed, as did Michael Jackson’s Wikipedia entry. Facebook lumbered under countless Michael Jackson video uploads retrieved from an over-accessed YouTube, and both ground to a halt. It reminded me of the song “The Day The Music Died” which referred to the airplane crash that took the loves of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper I’m looking forward to some inspired songs about Michael to surely be under way from music greats in the next few weeks.
Last night The Pack played an event at the Seattle Aquarium and Troy pulled out his iPod, clicked on an MJ number and started singing along with it. At first I thought he was nuts – because we’re a swing band – but I was the nutty one. The place absolutely bounced wild. It was crazy… people started moving toward the band, snapping pictures, capturing video, dancing, singing and smiling. Mainly it was the smiles that I noticed the most. I moonwalked, did the funky little leg-snap thing, sang the backup parts to “PYT” in a falsetto voice and felt fantastic. The Pack’s homage to a legend.
Look at Madonna, Brittney, Christina Aguilera and just about any large-venue pop idol today and the shows they do are clearly influenced in visual content by Michael’s pioneering genius. That cat wasn’t just an entertaining genius either – far more than that – he believed in achieving greatness. He wrote on his bathroom mirror that Thriller would be the greatest album success in history while he was creating it. He read it every day and then he WORKED HARD to make it so. Not just on the music, but on the entire concept. And not just for Thriller, but on everything he did. Countless hours in front of the dance studio cameras, perfecting every body movement. He set the bar for not only artistic creation but in technical execution. Flawless, seamless… to the point that it became as automatic for him as breathing. It’s astounding, really. How many balls has Tiger hit at the driving range? How many free throws did Larry Bird shoot alone in the gym? The concept of the 10,000-hour rule…? Which is that if you do something for 10,000 hours, you have achieved mastery… MJ probably had surpassed that benchmark in about two years – and there are only 8,640 hours in a calendar year. His dedication, his intensity, his vision and his focus, will and tenacity are what took his art to a level that made jaws drop open wide.
In all of this there is a price to pay. A lost childhood and what there was of his youth, not all – or many – of the memories were happy. He is universally touted by those who knew him at his organic, true, self as a warm, sensitive, caring individual full of love. The stuff about the kids at the ranch has received more speculative opinion than any celebrity topic in the past 30 years. As for myself, I’m in the camp that believes he was emotionally challenged in his interpretation of being one who nurtures and shares the love that he felt deprived of as a young boy. The Peter Pan thing. Did he, in his muddled interpretation cross lines that society condemns? Was there an element of extortion involved in the civil lawsuits? Would you accept $40million to settle a case if there was certainty that some 40-year old man diddled your pre-adolescent son? Or would you be after justice to the end and not be about the money. I wouldn’t want the dude’s money, I’d want him put away – the sick bastard… if indeed this happened to my son. Which to me begs the question of the validity of the claim. If it looks to be about the money, sounds to be about the money and in the end involved money… My bet is that it was always about the money.
This is not to say he wasn’t freaky in his own way. When a pendulum swings to an extreme in one direction (genius) it’s only logical that it swings just as far the other way too. But really it was from that freaky mind that the world was treated to a genius that will last the test of time. He did shatter boundaries. He did take chances and failed from time to time. He was a brave artist, an intelligent businessman, a man who felt every emotion in himself to about the third power in comparison to “average” folks and surely that energy was key to the fuel that drove his art. When I think about individuals in history that “rocked the world they lived in” – regardless of industry or medium, many of them were so far outside the box you could define that a box existed. Cole Porter was a coke-addicted predatory homosexual. Edgar Allen Poe spent most of his creative years in an opiated state of stupor. Mozart was a self-indulgent lunatic. Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Howard Hughes… Hell, I’ve read some crazy stuff about Benjamin Franklin!
In closing, yes a volume has closed, but in the creation of that story, its touch was great enough to inspire the genesis of many new stories. And I know it’s crazy, but I can’t get it out of my mind… So what now happens to the Beatles Catalog? (MJ had a conversation with Paul McCartney when they were recording together long ago. Michael respected Sir Paul as a savvy businessman and asked Paul what he should be investing in. Paul supposedly told Michael to invest in what you know. Michael took him to heart and almost immediately purchased the publishing and licensing rights to the entire Beatles catalog. Who’s the savvy businessman in that epithet?)
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