Left Coast Cowboys

So I was planning to resist this whole Michael Jackson sobfest. And here I am putting up my second MJ post in two days. I still have deeply ambivalent feelings about him. Sure, his songs played through my childhood and young adulthood, although I wasn’t a super fan. I even went so far yesterday as to reclaim him from Generation X to his rightful place with those of us sandwiched between the Xers and the Baby Boomers, Generation Jones. But I also firmly believe that he was a pedophile who did some deeply inappropriate things with kids then weaseled out of a conviction using his money, his sycophants and his famous friends. I’m usually willing to overlook celebrity foibles in the face of incredible talent, but child molestation is just one of those lines that shouldn’t be crossed and can’t be forgiven.

But I find I can’t get Michael Jackson out of my head. And looking back, I think he had a much bigger impact on my life than I’ve given him credit for.

The most significant impact Michael Jackson had for me — and a lot of White people my age — was by blurring some color lines we grew up with. Sure he was the Jackie Robinson of MTV, a talent so big he couldn’t be shut out of the venue. But I’m thinking even before that.

One of my elementary schools was segregated in all but name. Now before you think I was in school before Brown versus the Board of Education, let me enlighten some of my younger readers. Segregation lasted long after Martin Luther King and not just in the Deep South. There were still riots in Boston in the Seventies over the bussing of inner city (read Black) kids into Southie (a bastion of White working class Irish).  In my leafy Maryland suburban elementary school in the Sixties, the possibility that the school board would have to go beyond saying they were desegregated and, you know, actually let Black kids in, was the trigger for foam-flecked rantings and ravings at the PTA meetings.

I remember finding out that my best friend’s mother was running around the neighborhood trying to get a newly relocated Black family’s kids banned from our school. Her reasoning was that, according to my friend (who didn’t understand the words any more than I did) “Black boys rape White girls”. Now this Black family wasn’t headed by Stokely Carmichael or Willie Horton. The father was a college graduate, a military officer and serving in the Pentagon as my father was.

Yet when my friends and I discussed the pending desegregation (which I don’t think we did all that much), I think we were mostly excited. Even if we didn’t articulate it, I think we were expecting a busload of Michael Jacksons to show up. You know, cool kids with sunny smiles who could teach us great dance moves to Rockin’ Robin (Remember we were White. We couldn’t dance.)

I’m not saying that radical intergenerational perception shift made much of an immediate difference. And I don’t want to take anything way from Dr. King and the untold many who fought and even died for Civil Rights. But I think every major point of cultural evolution must also need such a moment. That point when the oppressors suddenly find out their kids are identifying — or at least think favorably of — the people they’ve been trying to keep down. Nothing can ever be the same after that.

I’m giving Michael Jackson much of the credit. To my contemporaries, Diana Ross, the Shirelles and the Ronettes were too exotic and too grown up. But Michael was just our age. And he looked like someone who would be the Coolest Kid in School. I’m not even sure we thought of him as Black (although he was back when he burst onto the scene with Motown in the late Sixties.) His music and dance moves spoke to us White kids, maybe even more than the scrubbed-clean Osmonds. (Although I will admit to being one of the few who says Donny Osmond’s talents are underestimated.)

Nope, I’m giving Michael Jackson credit where credit is due. I’m busy downloading his songs to my iPod and I’m reassessing his place in my life. So Rest in Peace Michael Jackson. I was appalled by what you became, but I’m learning to love you again for what you once were.

ADDENDUM: Here’s one way I want to remember Michael Jackson. As a great little kid who had all the talent and all the dance moves, even way back in 1972 when we were both barely in our teens.

Here’s another revealing moment, this time from the 1988 Grammy Awards. Michael, with few pyrotechnics, costumes or special effects, shows that he didn’t need any of it. His talent could stand on its own. It’s also nice that he’s included a full Gospel choir as a shout-out to his musical and cultural heritage. And in that great old Gospel tradition, he’s calling for us, and himself, to do something bigger than we think we’re capable of.

Since the news has become All Michael Jackson All The Time, it was inevitable, no matter how I tried to resist, that I would have to put up a Michael Jackson post. But this won’t be the one you expect.

Full disclosure, I was never a huge fan, so my mind is free to roam, when the subject is Michael Jackson, to other tangentially related topics. Today, it’s Generations. It all started when a self-identified Generation X blogger I read reprinted an article about how the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett were a great loss for Generation X. Yet, she was focussing only on the Billie Jean years. I know she’s young enough that she probably has no memory of Michael as part of The Jackson Five and bopping out to Rockin’ Robin and ABC, especially since Michael burst on the scene in 1968, a year after this blogger was born. Now me, I remember those songs, because I am exactly Michael Jackson’s age. (Well, at least chronologically. The latest news is making it clear he was a very different physical and mental age.) But are Michael and me Generation X? What generation are we? I’ve always been confused on this point.

Let’s get some ground rules down. Although some reports have the Baby Boomers born from 1945 to 1965 and others peg Gen X from 1961 to 1981, I categorically reject that. If a generation is defined as a group of people, who by birth time, have a set of shared experiences, cultural and historical references and rituals, how can a generation encompass a group where the eldest could have given birth to the youngest? No, for me a generation can’t be more than 10 years — Zeitgeist Siblings, if you will. Maybe in some periods it extended a bit beyond ten years, maybe in other times of rapid cultural shifts, it’s a bit less than ten years. But ten years is pretty much the standard. That lets those who were born in the eleven years between 1916 and 1927 qualify as the Greatest Generation. They came of age during the Great Depression and were all of them old enough to have fought in World War Two. That lets my parents out of that group as both were in early high school and junior high by 1945. So, even though my parents remember the Depression and World War II, they weren’t trying to gain employment during the former or fighting or waving off a contemporary to fight in the latter. That makes a big divide between them and people a little bit older. I’d say that dividing line marks the end of one generation and the start of another.

What defines a Baby Boomer? How about if you were old enough to contemplate hitching to Woodstock. Even if you were just 15 and you had a curfew. Poster photo: Shelly Rusten.

Likewise, I don’t see myself as a Baby Boomer. I remember Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors and Ina Gadda Davida. My baby sitters used to play those songs. I remember Viet Nam. But it wasn’t a war my contemporaries fought. My father did. I knew someone who joined the SDS. She was the much, much older sister of a friend and when she came to our house, she sat with the adults. My brother, her sister and I sat at the children’s table. So I’d say, that generational divide was pretty clear.

Just as the Baby Boomers like to claim they invented everything from Rock to Civil Disobedience, Gen X, at least in many of the articles I’ve read, screams loudly that they brought down the Berlin Wall. They also claim Grunge as their music. Desert Storm was “their war”. If those cultural touchstones define them,  let’s figure out who was 18 to 29 around that time. Well, the youngest veterans of Desert Storm would have to have been born in 1973 to be 18 at the time of the war. Grunge hit it big in the early 90s, so lets cap the generation at those who had not yet reached thirty by 1992 — the year after Nevermind hit it big and Nirvana played the MTV Awards. That’s people who were born no earlier than 1963. So can we peg Generation X at roughly 1963 to 1973?

If you believe Gen Xers' hype, they brought down the Berlin Wall. By listening to Grunge and voting for Reagan.

So if Gen X is 1963-1973 and the Baby Boomers are 1945 to 1955 — old enough for the Summer of Love (1967),  Woodstock (1969) and still in danger of being drafted (the Draft ended in 1973) — where does that leave those of us born between 1955 and 1963?

Wikipedia has an answer. We are Generation Jones.

“Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970s made this slang word [Jonesing] popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of jonesing is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the 1960s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the 1970s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.”

Yup, that’s us. Remember the Recession and the Gas Crisis? Yeah, we couldn’t tune in, turn on and drop out then come back from the Peace Corps or a commune and walk right into a good job. And we were struggling out of college for that first professional job in a tougher time than a later generation that could leap from barista to Vice President in the Dot Com era. Apparently we always were and still are jonesing for a better deal.

But I’ll tell you what, Generation X. Michael Jackson, for better or worse, is OURS. You might have been just old enough to go to the roller rink and skate to Billie Jean and Thriller. Yeah, we did that too. But we were also in elementary school and junior high boppin’ to Rockin’ Robin with a similarly aged Michael, who at that time was a Black kid sporting a purple pimp hat and a polyester jump suit.

And you know who else we have in our camp?

His Barackness, The Big O, born 1961.

It’s a bit late, but, as Generation Jones, we’re finally coming into our own.