As a young child, I had a brief phase where I idolized Michael Jackson. I wasn’t fortunate enough to grow up around the time of the Thriller era (The phase of his career, most argue, where he was at his height). But I was growing up around the early ’90s, when its wave was still lifting the later hits to the higher points of the charts. Driving around with my parents, I was always amused by Rock with You, Man in the Mirror, and Will You Be There, all of which were in constant circulation on my favorite radio station. And whenever I had trouble sleeping, You Are Not Alone would always be on to help lull me to sleep. The last great experience I had in my childhood was when the last minutes of the Thriller video kept me awake in a Las Vegas hotel room a few years later, although the catchy tune that accompanied it would put my mind at ease again.
As a teenager, I remember coming home one day and glancing over my father’s shoulder at the TV, and seeing the headline-the man I briefly looked up to as a child had been indicted for sexually molesting young children at his private estate. I felt betrayed, and for a time, I absolutely loathed everything about him. I laughed my ass off at the multitude of jokes made at his expense, and I continued for a good long while.
When Michael’s stunts finally stopped happening and the Jesus Juice jokes slowly faded away, my grudge against Michael slowly followed suit. The organizer of a youth group I attended at the time would play ’80s Michael Jackson videos between events, and although I started off with a lingering repulsion, the music slowly grew on me again. I thought back to the wonderful times that his music acted as a soundtrack to, and I chose to remember him as the wonderful musician on the ‘95 Explorer’s radio rather than the half-plastic ghoul who pretended to be Peter Pan, gave little boys semen-laced wine and cuddled in bed with them afterward. As I began dabbling in Michael’s music again, I noticed that many of my peers had regained their interests as well… sure, there were the ones who cracked jokes and avoided the music, but for the most part, my entire student body would sing and dance along whenever they heard “Billy Jean” playing.
So of course, Michael would shock me a second time with the news of his death. I was on a yearly family trip with a few of my father’s friends when I got the news… the daughter of a friend ran out of her family’s RV, cell phone in hand, and announced to everyone in the campsite that Michael Jackson had been found dead by his family. The morose feeling slowly sunk in as I listened to the others talking about it, and we spent the night talking about the late King of Pop, both the good and the bad.
So where do I currently stand on the man himself, as well as his funeral service? While I still find the jokes about him funny, I forgave him a long time ago. He stopped showing up in the headlines, so my guess is that he got the hint and got his shit together again. And I think the people dancing on his grave should at least give him credit for that. (SPOILER: They won’t.) As for the funeral services, they were very extravagant and very over-the-top, and honestly? I think he would’ve wanted them that way. The man himself was extravagant and over-the-top in almost everything he took part in, and that’s what people admire about him.
Since my childhood, I’ve mostly phased Adult Contemporary music out of my life. The soft rock on my radio has been replaced by heavy metal, and the unfathomable happiness of my earlier years has been weakened by the experiences of my age. Still, Michael Jackson’s music is one of the last links between my childhood and my adulthood, reminding me of a much simpler time when mom and dad were just mean instead of low on money, when a cardboard box could provide as much entertainment as the TV upstairs, and when stepping off the school bus came with a euphoric rush rather than a mild satisfaction. And while I’m not in Los Angeles to “worship at the altar,” as Sean Hannity puts it, I will be playing the songs that helped define my childhood, as well as the songs that were just fun to listen to.
Quick aside:
I would also go into detail about Billy Mays, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon, but I don’t know enough about them to. Billy Mays is the newest addition to my personal list of entertainers I became interested in posthumously, along with Dimebag Darrell Abbot and George Carlin, and besides the references to her role in Charlie’s Angels, I only recognize Farrah Fawcett from the episode of Johnny Bravo she had a cameo in. Still, a death is a death, and I figure I might as well take some time out to recognize them as well.
