In light of that, when the news broke late last week, Plugged In's writers put their first thoughts about it all down on paper. In this Up Front column, we'll share those thoughts.
Paul Asay: I went back to junior high Thursday. I didn't go physically, to wander the halls. I didn't go willingly, either. Who, after all, wants to go back to junior high?
But when I heard of Michael Jackson's death, my memories forced me back to a time when my face was thin and pimpled, my hair stuck out in odd directions and the inside of my lips rubbed against a mouth full of metal.
Jackson was at his prime when I was in junior high. Granted, my school was too tough to embrace the Jackson phenomenon openly: Judas Priest and AC/DC were all the rage for the ruling class, and singing "Billie Jean" was a sure path to a beatdown. Yet even there, I remember we all tried to moonwalk. Some of the kids started saving money for red zipper coats. And one afternoon, a guy waved me over to his locker so he could show me, in secret, a single, sequined white glove—the product of three months' allowance, he told me.
Jackson was a revolutionary back then—a guy who sang and danced and dressed so differently than anyone we'd seen. We already sensed he was a little odd: Greatness rarely stems from normalcy. But all of us in junior high were a little odd, too. We looked odd. We felt odd. And so, in our own odd way, we embraced him.
As time went on, Jackson faded in relevance. In high school, he was a peripheral figure. In college, an afterthought. By the time I felt like an adult, Jackson had become less a musical genius and more a sad tabloid storyline—strange and scary and impossible to relate to anymore.
And then, on Thursday, he was gone.
The day after he died, I ran across a story by Robert Hilburn, longtime music writer for the Los Angeles Times. In it, he tells of how, while he and Jackson were leafing through a pile of pictures in preparation for an autobiography they were working on, Jackson came across a picture of himself as an older teen—pimple-faced, gangly, awkward, odd. At that moment, Jackson admitted that this was the worst stage of his life: People would come up and ask him—to his face—where that cute little Michael went.
"It was," Hilburn wrote, "like the 'whole world was saying how dare you grow up on us.' After repeated rejection, Michael said, he started looking down at the floor when people approached or would just stay in his room when visitors came. ... Michael vowed after those wounds to do whatever it took to make people 'love me again.'"
Maybe Jackson spent most of his life in junior high—feeling awkward and different, always looking for ways to fit in, to excel, to make people love him.
No wonder we loved him back then. No wonder.
Bob Hoose: My first memory of Michael Jackson was of him as a smiling 9-year-old prodigy, belting out lead vocals and dancing up a storm with The Jackson 5. He was incredible.
Years later, but still before Thriller thrilled and the King of Pop officially crowned himself, I heard a story from a musician acquaintance who worked with Michael Jackson in the studio. This guy talked of Jackson's ethereal giftedness, but illustrated his plethora of strange ticks and an obvious need for some kind of help. And while his chuckling tale was meant to give us—the faceless throng on the outskirts of the California music scene—a glimpse of the wackiness inside, it actually made me worry for the young singer and frown over the industry itself.
And now, 30 years later, having seen the MJ saga unfold, and heard tales of battered childhood and accusations of twisted adulthood, I'm left with that same tug and pull. In what other industry could the bedazzled man/child/virtuoso have given flight to his creative genius and risen to such godlike status? But where else would his "ticks" have been so readily overlooked, amplified, and then enabled to the point of televised self-destruction?
In remembering his life, some will focus on the overall greatness and say it was all worth it for Michael Jackson. And they'll even claim that the fall from handsome prince to deformed buffoon (or worse) would have happened no matter what. But I can't lose the image of a cherubic-faced young boy singing with the voice of a seasoned R&B pro. And it makes me feel sad.
Adam Holz: Michael Jackson's story is one of layers—layers that reveal both tragedy and triumph. There are so many that in thinking about his life and death, it's hard to know where to begin. The self-anointed superstar. The biggest record of all time. The moonwalk. The burning hair incident. The bizarre behavior. Accusations of child abuse. The constantly evolving and increasingly haunting appearance. And the incredible reports that someone who may have sold north of 750 million albums worldwide somehow owed $400 million at his death.
Even now, in the wake of Michael Jackson's death, it seems there are new layers—layers that have a distinctly 21st century feel to them. Murmurings about prescription drug abuse. Leaked pictures of the final attempt to resuscitate him. Tapes of the 911 call playing on morning radio shows. A media frenzy the likes of which we haven't seen since O.J. Simpson's trial or Princess Diana's car accident—and the likes of which we may quite possibly never see again.
I'm not merely a passive reporter in all of this, mind you. I'm culpable of participating in the spectacle, too. On Thursday night, my wife and I watched a couple hours of the nonstop cable coverage. Madonna, we heard, couldn't stop crying. Dame Elizabeth Taylor was too upset to issue a formal message. Cher prattled on endlessly with Larry King. Britney. Justin Timberlake. And on it went. It seemed everyone who was or is (or ever might be) anyone felt compelled to issue a statement. At some level, I was disgusted by it all.
But there I was, watching, listening, wanting in some way not to miss this tragic, macabre cultural "event." We watched more on Saturday, as VH1 Classic looped a three-hour retrospective of MJ's career over and over again. So, in the end, we weren't so different than everyone else also watching with a messed-up mixture of reverie, sadness ... and disdain.
Amid all those layers, all the voices, it's easy to lose perspective on the fact that Michael was, at the end of his day, like you and me, a human being. And perhaps the biggest tragedy is that Michael's simple humanity is something he seems to have struggled his whole life to come to terms with—a struggle made all the more difficult by a world of fans who needed him to be something bigger than life.
Meredith Whitmore: My first memory of Michael Jackson is permanently etched into my brain—along with the popcorn, junior high jokes, Coca-Cola and chocolate cupcakes that came with him that evening.
We'd been sitting around the basement talking and laughing—mostly about boys—when two or three girls suddenly got very quiet. Then others sat up and looked at the TV, too. I was slow on the uptake and kept talking (not so unlike today) and hadn't realized that a skinny, moonwalking American idol had suddenly become the absolute center of the universe. I got a stern "SHHHHHH!"—even though I'd been chattering about the 8th grader of all our dreams.
I don't remember liking the song or video as we watched the premiere of "Thriller" on Friday Night Videos. It seemed hyped-up to me. But I do remember my slumber party girlfriends coming completely unhinged when it was over. That was the first time I realized a human can become a god.
As an adult, when I look back on Jackson's career, I see that regardless of any quirks or moral failings he had, as we all have, he was truly a gifted musician. I gasped when a colleague told me the news—and somehow I was a junior higher again.
Bob Smithouser: "I have something I want to tell you: I'm not like other guys." Immediately after delivering that line to a cute bobby-soxer in the long-form music video "Thriller," Michael Jackson's mannerly character morphs into a horrifying werewolf. That scene was creepy-cool in 1983. Little did we know it would foreshadow the artist's own looming metamorphosis.
From the time Jackson was 11 he wasn't like other guys. Even at half-wattage, he would outshine his brothers on TV variety shows while singing with The Jackson 5. A decade later, my friends and I frequented a local roller rink where his 1979 hit "Rock With You" always emptied the benches for an enthusiastic all-skate. And when Thriller became the album of 1982 (and most of '83), it was hard to tell whether upstart cable network MTV was drawing attention to Jackson or the other way around.
Not like other guys, indeed.
But in the mid-to-late '80s, Jackson's artistry seemed to take a backseat to his eccentricities. From the sequined glove and choreographed crotch-grabs to Bubbles the chimp, ugly tabloid rumors and cosmetic surgeries with androgynous results, the talented little boy I used to watch on Saturday morning cartoons had become a cartoon. And before long, a punch line. That's a shame, because this is the same caring soul whose sincerity helped "Man in the Mirror," "Heal the World" and "We Are the World" feel like heartfelt calls to action rather than sonic photo-ops intended to enhance one's Q rating.
So, who was Michael Jackson? I guess that depends on how old you are and which Michael you remember. Sadly, young people may only recall the caricature. I was watching a tribute to Jackson the other night with my preteen children, who could only grimace at how his appearance changed radically from one clip to the next. "He looks like a puppet," said my 8-year-old son, shocked by the artist's chalky skin and grotesquely chiseled features. As for me, I couldn't see past the images of him with his children, who now have lost their father and need our prayers.
We may never get a clear, fair picture of who Michael Jackson really was. But no matter how we might feel about his legacy, he was not like other guys.
Steven Isaac: When news of Michael Jackson's passing filtered through to my family—and it did relatively quickly, too, even though we were intentionally trying to avoid all news sources (TV, Internet, etc.) while on our summer vacation—I asked my 8-year-old daughter if she knew who he was. "Yeah, I guess," she said. "He's some kind of singer, isn't he?"
"Yep," I replied, "he was a super big deal when your mother and I were in junior high—that's the same as middle school now, honey."
She looked over my shoulder as I read a couple of obituaries online, and she actually gasped when she saw a picture of Michael from when he was 21. "That's the same guy?" she asked. "That's the same guy," I repeated. "Wow! What did he do to his face?!" she wanted to know. "How did he get to be so white?" And then she asked, "Why did he do that?"
I didn't know the precise medical answer to her second question, so I mumbled something about plastic surgery and bleaching techniques (I forgot about his 1993 announcement that he had the skin disease vitiligo) while thinking about how to tackle her third question—the why one. And while I did so I realized that even though I didn't know exactly why the man who came to be called "Wacko Jacko" decided to utterly alter his face, I did know that it had to stem from how he saw himself.
My daughter thought his 21-year-old face was handsome, and she thought his 10-year-old face was cute. But Michael could not and would not have seen things that way. He had to have seen himself as ugly and nearly worthless—never mind that he was already well on his way to becoming the King of Pop. His heart just couldn't accept what his body was.
I knew then that I was being given the perfect opportunity to talk to my precious and beautiful daughter about what she thinks of herself. I took it. And I'll take it again from time to time as 8 turns into 10 which turns into 16.
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