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.
Ahhh…this is more of what I was expecting- although I was expecting harsher words with regards to the pedophile issue…you are full of surprises!
I’m a Generation Jones’er too and have the exact same thoughts. Can’t get him out of my head and wouldn’t have listed him in my list of favorite singers / bands until he died. Sure, I had some of his songs on my iPod…but I’ve now added many more! Was watching a video today from 1980 of Rock With You and I got teared up and was surprised! He looked so happy, he was so full of promise (and looked like our generations Billy Dee Williams)!
A tormented talent, no doubt. I use Michael Jackson and his mother when speaking to my kids (no grown). How must Mrs. Jackson feel to see the hatchet job done to her perfect baby? I tell my kids that I brought them into this world beautiful and perfect. Please don’t ruin yourself with tattoos, piercings, or plastic surgury. What torment.
Lisa, I’m with you on the Osmonds. Donny really has talent. They all have talent. Interesting to see the different outcomes of 2 talented families.
Enjoy the 4th!
Have you seen Donny Osmond’s performance in Weird Al’s White and Nerdy video? – you are spot on about his talent- great comedic timing and dude can dance! Now I have exposed myself as a total dork who watches Weird Al videos LOL
Michael Jackson was about a year and half older than I am. I grew up with him on my walls when he was part of the J-5, back when everybody in the black neighborhoods were still calling each other to yell, “Turn to Ed Sullivan. There’s black people on TV.”
I lost interest in him over the years as I had babies and he became famous as a solo artist, later morphing and revealing a self-loathing. Who gets blamed for that? My money’s on his dad and something in Michael we can’t understand. Growing older, I leaned more toward Prince and less toward bubble gum pop songs. So, while I could appreciate the skill behind Billie Jean or Rock With You, the creative genius of Thriller, I didn’t race out to buy the albums, yet I always recognized MJ’s tremendous talent and would tune in to see him dance. As I grew older, I was far more impressed by his ability to recreate in a 10-minute music video what felt like a Hollywood musical than I was into his his actual songs. Still, I know many of the words to his songs.
Michael was a complex, frequently tortured soul which makes it possible he was a pedophile but he could also have been what he said he was, a man trying to regain his childhood living vicariously through children. He admitted to sleeping with a child, not having sex with a child. While I think that was creepy, incredibly creepy, it’s possible all he did was sleep with the child the way a father, mother, or big brother cuddles with a child and that his fascination with children was a fascination with loss.
I know he was accused of horrible things and maybe he did them. It’s hard to defend him in anyway because let’s face, MJ was weird. But I also remember the children from the McMartin pre-school case. When they grew up, they recanted, saying they’d never been molested but were manipulated by paranoid parents and psychologists to say they’d been molested. I say this as a person who’s had to face both a molester and a rapist, who believes we should listen to children’s voices. However, with the big pay-off a parent could get accusing Michael Jackson of anything, it’s possible he settled the case just to make it go away, and the second case came about because a greedy parent bet on how he’d settled the first one. We’ll never know.
I have no substantive comment on his cross-over appeal or his being like MLK or any other Civil Rights leader. However, the analogy in general doesn’t sit well with me because I’ve watched some gangsta rap artists claim the same thing, that they’ve bridged the racial divide. How? Through projecting an image that sticks in the heads of white people and becomes a caricature of the black man or black woman as though we are monolithic?
But if people want to claim MJ, a man who clearly had a crisis in his racial identity, as a figure who could reconcile one group to another, then that’s what he was to them. I’ve always been black and MJ always sang the music I’ve been used to. I have no memory of getting closer to anyone of another race because we both listened to Michael Jackson music. I remember singing Billy Joel with some white kids, not Michael Jackson.
If he is such a figure, then should the credit be given to him or to the man who forced MTV to run his videos, which made MJ the first African-American artist to be played on MTV. Without his appearance on that network, he may not have achieved the level of stardom he did. Somebody kicked a door down for him for the sake of making money, and that gave him the chance to shine, something he’d been doing since he was 3 years old.
I think he was an exceptionally talented entertainer. If his music drew the races closer, then good. If not, he was still a gifted entertainer, much imitated, never repeated. I think he will be studied for years to come in the context of race relations, business skills, talent, and the struggle for identity some African-Americans face in America more than others. At the moment, I think this global mourning has as much to do with the death of an icon as it does to do with people grappling with their own mortality through the loss of someone they feel they knew.
Finally, if white kids don’t see MJ as black, then it’s possible he made no difference at all in matters of race. To be color blind or free of color has nothing to do with the eradication of racism. We have to see people as they are even when they are “the other” and love and respect them just the same.
N.
Michael Jackson’s Message on a Napkin
Much much food for thought here Nordette. Which is why I was hoping you’d weigh in.
I was being a little glib when I said we didn’t think of MJ as Black. But, there was a point when many Americans couldn’t (and some still can’t) see beyond race. They saw a Black face and that’s all they saw, not the individual behind the skin. I think Michael Jackson was one of those breakthrough people where, as young kids, we didn’t see “A BLACK KID”, but we saw what we thought was a Cool Kid, an individual. Same with earlier characters like Sydney Poitier, who was one of the first Black men in movies who was not seen just as “A Black Man”, but as a more complex person, a romantic hero, an actor, a complex individual.