Friday, 26th June 2009.

Old Gods, Almost Dead

We were just turning in when we got the news. Emily’s mother is visiting, which means late nights, which I don’t really mind. The arrival of Daniel has to a certain extent put paid to my wife’s “be in bed by ten” ritual – this makes her tired and very occasionally cranky but it’s also nice to get to spend some time with her of an evening.

At about 11:30 her phone beeped, and she looked at it in astonishment: “Michael Jackson’s dead!”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “Who says so?”
“Caroline. Is the computer still on?”
“No, but the TV will be in a moment.”

Unless you’ve been buried under a rock for the past twelve hours you will know the details, so I will not bother to report them here. The news reports were playing a curious mixture of grief-stricken crowds lining the sidewalks of Beverly Hills and the concert footage they’ve pulled from the archives. The words CPR and cardiac arrest were mentioned and that was all I really needed to hear. I scratched my head and then knocked on Elisabeth’s door to let her know.

At this point we switched off the television. There really was no point in keeping it on: the best you could hope for would be coverage from News 24, who – while I had no doubt that they’d be dealing with the story for most of the night – would in all likelihood singularly fail to produce anything of interest before the first press conference. There would have been continuous footage of the mansion gates with no updates to speak of, save the occasional comment from his greengrocer or newspaper delivery boy (who, let’s hope, has never actually been inside the house). The vapid emptiness of News 24’s broadcasts reached its zenith in the aftermath of the death of Milosevic: they spent the morning lurking outside the walls of the Hague, where absolutely nothing was happening. You half-expected a youthful Chevy Chase to creep on from the sidelines and announce that ‘Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead’.

Things were a little different some four years ago, when News 24 (and by all accounts, every other station in the world) covered the trial and its memorable climax: a stately, almost sedate procession from Neverland across California to the courts for the verdict, all viewed from helicopter, like a slow-motion re-enactment of the O.J. Simpson chase. I stood in the lounge and read off the verdicts (“not guilty…not guilty…not guilty…”) to a heavily pregnant Emily, who was in the bath and who tired of it long before I did. It was the culmination of a two-year legal battle that had begun in the aftermath of Martin Bashir’s 2003 documentary and the fallout from the revelations therein, but more on that later.

In any event, I was glad that I learned this news while the two of us were still awake. The alternative would have been turning on the PC in the morning, as is my daily ritual, learning what had transpired and then going straight into the bedroom to announce “Michael Jackson’s dead!”.
“Whu….” the response would have been.
“Michael Jackson’s dead. Heart attack.”
“Oh. S’too early. Talk ‘bout later. Sleepy. Mmnr zzzzz…”

And, of course, the impact would have been lost. As it stood, we spent the next half hour reminiscing. The first thing she said to me when I got back to the bedroom was “So what was your favourite joke, then?”
“What’s his favourite song?” I said.
“Don’t know.”
“I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.”

During the 1980s this was about as bad as it got. Most of the jokes revolved around surgery or facial whitening or cheap puns on some of his song titles. It was some years later, when the trouble started, that the jokes took on a slightly macabre theme. They were generally even funnier when you told them to people who didn’t understand them, as Ewan once demonstrated when he informed a gullible Learning Support teacher that Jackson had attempted suicide:

“Miss, did you hear Michael Jackson tried to kill himself?”
“My word,” said Mrs Woolcroft. “That’s dreadful.”
“Yeah, he jumped off a bridge in Paris, landed in the Seine.”
“Really? How awful!”
“And the police found him about an hour later, bobbing up and down on a buoy.”
There was a pause, and Mrs Woolcroft said “Oh, the poor man.”

Between the two of them, Emily and Caroline managed to ascertain that the real victims in this tragedy were the paramedics who treated Jackson. “I mean, they followed procedure. Tilt head back, pinch nose. That’s when it all fell apart.”
“Oh God,” I said when we’d finished giggling. “It’s started.”
“It didn’t take long, did it?”
“There were a bunch of these jokes on standby. I don’t expect that the obituary programmes have been prepared yet, because this came out of the blue. But the gags were already written and ready. Besides, his nose is such an obvious target. It’s ripe for the picking.”

Jackson’s problem was that for the last thirty years of his life he was surrounded by a plethora of yes-men. This has the effect of getting him everything he wants but nothing that he actually needs, to the extent that he remained to all intents and purposes a boy trapped in a man’s body (and even that’s pushing it). The irony was that despite his supposedly ghastly childhood, with enough allegations of abuse to make even Dave Pelzer raise an eyebrow, he seemed to be on his way to becoming a sensible and relatively well-adjusted young man when Off The Wall was released. It was only when he started to believe his own hype that things began to fall apart, and over the years we witnessed a gradual downward spiral into eccentricity, then pomposity, then apparent insanity. Things didn’t get really bad until the turn of the millennium, but even before that the warning signs were there: you only have to examine the video for ‘You Are Not Alone’, as early as 1995, to see how dreadful he is starting to look, and his performance of ‘Earth Song’ at the following year’s Brit Awards is the stuff of legend.

It’s hard for me to explain why this deterioration was such a big deal to me personally, but to give it some context, a large proportion of my generation absolutely idolised the man. The songs were fresh and catchy, with lyrics you could not only sing along to but really believe in; the videos were always memorable (sometimes for the wrong reasons) and he could even give Fred Astaire a run for his money – to the extent that Astaire telephoned him the day after the Motown celebration to say that he was “a hell of a mover”. He had girls swooning, screaming, and seemed to possess a magical stage presence wherever he was. We watched Moonwalker and we wanted to be Michael Jackson.

All right, not all of us did. At the same time, for a while back there he was the embodiment of cool – you had to be able to strut to ‘Billie Jean’, master the moonwalk (I know he pinched it from the street kids but I sense that we’ll always associate it with him) – and you needed to be ‘Bad’ in order to get on, at least you did in our neighbourhood. (I didn’t grow up in a ghetto or anything, just a suburban street where we used to listen to ‘Smooth Criminal’ at full volume if our parents would let us.) Jokes circulated round the school like childhood crush rumours – what did Michael Jackson say when he met Princess Di? What did he say in the courtroom? (Who knew the prophetic insight of that one?) What did he say when his ear fell off? “It’s just another part of me…”

It seems funny to think of him as dead. To a considerable extent, I don’t really know who I’m supposed to be mourning. Jackson had become, in his later years, almost a parody of himself, albeit a grotesque and twisted one, and there was no longer any semblance of the man visible beneath the sunglasses and face mask. Bernie Taupin decided that Marilyn Monroe’s spirit shone far beyond her mortal life span, reassuring her in song that “your candle burned out long before your legend ever did”. The same may yet prove to be true of Jackson, but whatever you want to say about his hit roster, his career was over. Even when the ‘not guilty’ verdict was announced, amid a flurry of comeback predictions, I dismissed him as ‘Invincible? Hardly. Dangerous? Probably not. History? Definitely’.

I hold steadfast to that opinion, because even without the madness, his music had gone into terminal decline long before his heart gave out. Even History, his last half-decent swansong, seemed grotesquely over-inflated next to the Wall / Thriller / Bad trilogy. By the time ‘Rock My World’ came along, we were indifferent. By the time the Bashir documentary was aired, we were concerned. By 2005 and the trial, with its inevitable media circus, we were downright hostile. The seeds had been sown in the depiction of his unusual relationship with Gavin Arvizo, but personally I’ve never believed that Jackson was guilty of the allegations levelled at him. I don’t think he’s capable of the things of which he was accused; like Arnold Schwarzenegger, I have always found it difficult to imagine him in the context of anything sexual, purely because that’s not what we associate him with. More than this, as he seems to have failed to mature in an emotional sense, doesn’t it stand to reason that he wouldn’t know what to do anyway? He can lie about the surgery and the origins of his children but there is a wide-eyed innocence about him that you can’t just turn on for the cameras, and somehow he just doesn’t fit the abuser profile.

In fact, he doesn’t really fit the human being profile. In the first half of the documentary Michael comes across as pleasant, likeable, friendly, if extremely eccentric – a $6 million shopping spree was a case in point, as was his reaction when (during an examination of an Egyptian sarcophagus) Bashir asked him how he’d like to be buried. Jackson, without making eye contact, said “I wanna live forever” – delivered without a trace of irony. Here was a man, you felt, that was stuck in his own autistic world, partly out of choice and partly out of obligation. When Bashir visited him in his Las Vegas hotel suite and asked Michael why he had a gigantic motorised scooter in his room, his answer was that he liked to “drive round the lobby and corridors, late at night”. For an instant, I got a mental picture of the kid from The Shining, racing around the corridors of the Overlook, running to – or from – something unseen, but monstrous.

What’s curious about the Bashir documentary is the juxtaposition between old and new. I remember studying the video footage of Jackson as a young boy, performing ‘I Want You Back’ (in nightclub terms, the floor-filler to end all floor-fillers) with his siblings. Generally, when you’re faced with these old videos you can find some resemblance between the young and the contemporary, despite the differing appearances and hairstyles – a way of standing, an approach to a particular vocal passage, other idiosyncrasies. But as Bashir was beginning “to understand how his childhood might have affected him” (or words to that effect), I was struggling to maintain any kind of link between the vibrant and energetic child and the misshapen Kraken wearing the red shirt.

Certainly he didn’t seem fit to be a father. Even ignoring the balcony scene, his virtual force-feeding of the infant “Blanket” was painful, worrying and more than a little grotesque – one baby looking after another. That didn’t stop him from having children to stay. Whatever went on in that house (and amid the accusations of unreliable witnesses, altered narratives and alleged hush money we may never know), one thing was clear: by admitting that he slept in a bed with children – no matter how innocent his remarks may have been – he was doing himself no favours. In a post-Megan Kanka / Sarah Payne world, we have become almost as paranoid about child abuse as we can get without resorting to lynch mobs, and as I cringed with horror at Michael’s use of the words “It’s a wonderful thing – everyone should be doing it”, I could see the rows of lawyers, making copious notes on legal pads, the dollar signs burning behind their eyes.

But despite the obvious cash incentives you still need to investigate these things, particularly where there’s something tangible. I may be trusting but I’m not an idiot, and my former admiration for the man and his music does not extend to blind devotion. It’s feasible that in this country he’d have been probed long ago, but let’s not get into logistics. Either way, once the documentary had aired, and legal proceedings instigated, his career – regardless of the verdict – was more or less over. I don’t know if it was the baby, the surgery denials (people do not just “turn white” like that; my aunt has a similar condition and it’s patchy) or the abuse allegations. I suspect it was a combination of all three.

Following the trial, Jackson disappeared into the wings again, resurfacing only to answer enquiries about his financial state, or tentatively speak via his P.R. department of glorious comebacks (to much scepticism and many a raised eyebrow). There would be occasional reports of visits to Bahrain and the odd lawsuit. And the next thing we know, he’s back, albeit in a lacklustre, thirty-second performance of ‘We Are The World’, which is apparently a precursor to a triumphant return to the stage, in a tour that is booked and sold out and then postponed (blacklisting him on the O2 insurance list) and then, finally, cancelled altogether.

That’s what bothers me. It seems awfully convenient, this sudden unloading of burdens just a few short weeks from a tour that realistically we didn’t think would ever happen. The official party line is that the fifty-year-old singer has pushed himself to the limit over the past few months, training and exercising and preparing himself for a triumphant return, all in the wake of ongoing family concerns about his general health. And now, of course, he’s dead, as a result of over-medication and the simple fact that he pushed himself too hard. Am I the only one here who finds this just a mite suspicious? The timing, in its own way, is quietly perfect: close enough to the tour for the conspiracy theorists to spot a connection and be branded nutters, but not so close as to arouse the suspicions of the populace at large.

Yes, we heard he’d been ill, but had he really? Could this not in its own way be another stunt – not one to raise his public profile, but one to get him out of the limelight entirely? Should we in fact blaming his allegedly dire financial situation on a reallocation of funds, perhaps to a goat farm in West Fiji, where he is heading even as I put finger to key this afternoon? Put another way, I think it’s quite plausible that he’s been sending his money out there in preparation for his retirement from public life, following one last tour – a tour that realistically could never take place given that the man has become increasingly frail and unreliable over the years, for whatever reason. Cashing in his chips right before the fact would cause a great many people to cry ‘foul’!, as they did in a memorable Carlsberg advert when a harassed CEO, faced with the prospect of having to admit that they’d been exporting lager from Denmark, faked a heart attack rather than face any further questions.

As it stands, however, this timing is far better – they had until the eleventh hour to solve problems and then, realising that the obstacles were insurmountable, resorted to ‘plan b’, which consisted of getting him out of the country and under the knife, before living out the rest of his days in obscurity, and hopefully a bit of peace and quiet. Am I being horribly insensitive? Probably. It’s just that in my experience things generally aren’t quite this neat. And if nothing else the astronomical record sales that are sure to follow will go some way towards clearing his extensive debts. When you’re an artist of any sort, dying is always a great career move.

It’s a moot point, really, because even if he’s still alive he has the money to stay hidden – and to be honest I think that would be best for all concerned. We have lamented for his career for almost a decade, and the loss of the man himself, whilst significant, carries less impact than that of an artist whom you felt still had something to contribute. Jackson’s death – whether real or staged – has, at least, relieved me of the burden of having to one day explain to my children why the skeletal, pasty-faced white woman who has once again made the headlines was formerly one of Daddy’s childhood heroes. I’ll just stick to the seventies and eighties and perhaps throw in a video or two from Dangerous for good measure, and avoid all subsequent archive footage. They’ll never know.

But we will. And we will grieve for him, in our own ways, whether it is via the sycophantic lamentation on a hundred and one news websites, the sudden mass consumption of his back catalogue (according to reports, at time of writing the entire top fifteen slots on the Amazon music chart are occupied by Michael Jackson) or the simple act of going home and playing Thriller at full volume. The relative anonymity of the Internet has made human expression that much easier – this morning the BBC’s Have Your Say file was at 8,000 comments and rising by the hour. Interestingly they seemed to have filtered the negative remarks, which is more than can be said for the Sun: I gave up after the third page and the fourteenth time that someone had written “ROT IN HELL YOU KIDDY FIDDLER”.

As for me, I recall the comment in a 2003 edition of the Sun that “records like ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It’ will never sound as good again, now that they are tainted in this way” – a sentiment that I’d have to disagree with, just like I disagree with most of the Sun’s journalistic ‘opinion’. As far as I can see, the early records sound even better these days because they remind us of better times – a period when Jackson was a shining beacon instead of a fading (and now entirely burned out) star, when other groups tried to sound like him instead of trying to avoid sounding like him, and when you really thought that with Michael at the helm we could Heal the World and Make It A Better Place. Regardless of what he may have done since, and regardless of the fact that at the time of his death he hadn’t written a really good song since 1991, the earlier material remains a telling reminder of who he once was.

But we watched him slide down that path towards insanity and final isolated seclusion, and it disturbed us, because whatever I can get away with telling my own sons, there are still a whole heap of children who are the same age now that I was when he was at his peak who will in all likelihood not understand what I once saw in him. However long I’ve had to get used to it, it’s the decline and fall from grace that’s astonished and upset me the most – the then-and-now photographs, the path that led from wackiness and eccentricity (“Poor people are crazy, Jack. I’m eccentric”) to out-and-out lunacy – all this is somehow far more disturbing than the fact that he once had a full-sized amusement park in his back yard. You listen to ‘Billie Jean’ – a song that he never bettered, as far as I’m concerned – and you’re swept away to 1983 when everything was good, and he shone, and was an untouchable god. And then you hear ‘Earth Song’ and you remember the Brits fiasco, and you realise that as much as you’d hate to admit it, this is the same guy, the same person, your former hero. “And so,” as Alfieri remarks at the very end of A View From The Bridge, “I mourn him – I admit it – with a certain…alarm.”