Series Finale: The Media & Michael Jackson

A handful of thoughts on the final act in Jackson’s career — originally posted on EbonyJet.com.

The final episode in the series that was Michael Jackson’s life aired last week and as you would have expected the ratings were gold. It’s easy to forget that in addition to his widely credited musical innovation Jackson is the godfather of a much more dubious offering to modern life: the reality series. He started out stealing plays from PT Barnum’s book, turning himself into a spectacle knowing that adoration generates even more money when it’s mixed with a touch of condescension. Thus the storylines – each of them as real as cubic zirconium – about sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber and buying the bones of the elephant man. Those were the things you could get away with in the old three-network and daily paper days. But it was his skewed fate to actually become more eccentric at the precise moment when media became the new Jesus.

Back when the ten-year old Michael trilled and crooned with an old soul’s knowledge and a master artist’s self-possession, the television was built to more human dimensions. It shut down in the wee hours, as if transistors needed shut eye too. But the arc of Michael’s life is a curious Benjamin Button series of events. Go back to that clip of the little man with his brothers on the Ed Sullivan show singing “I Wonder Who’s Loving You” and you see no raw talent. It’s the level of nuance and dexterity, the effortless blend of lilt and coarseness, that still gives you chills. To simply call him a prodigy would be to diminish him somehow. Now reconcile that man-child with the childish man – the taupe-skinned curiosity dangling a newborn over a balcony. The grown ass man in need of a mama’s rebuke, “Boy, act like you got some damn sense”. The one eating through money and having his face carved into abstract art. Then consider that all this occurs within a media that has become a digital deity of sorts – never tiring, perpetually in motion, twenty-four hours, omnipresent, all-knowing.

John Steinbeck surveyed the wreckage of the Great Depression and observed that a bank was more than the sum of its human parts, that where individual men might feel sympathy toward those whom they evicted and dispossessed, the Bank was immune to such sentiments. Jackson’s demise illustrated that media is our version of a bank. Some lone soul with a pen, iPhone and laptop might have recognized that he was part of precisely the kind frenzy that drove Jackson into the abyss but that is a fleeting thought. Pixels have no conscience.

The complete piece is posted here