You may have your third? Michael Jackson?

[Hildegard]

Originally Posted by The Lurker

Honestly I could care less about either of them....a B list actress more famous for dying than anything she did while alive and a very talented man who ruined his life becoming an "alleged' child molester.

I don't really care either but I disagree with your larger point. They were entertainment icons. I think being the most famous pin up girl ever counts for something. Think of a more emblematic woman of the 70s. Farrah was purdy and sunny and athletically sexy in a uniquely American sense (and I don't mean that to sound patriotic, just in terms of cultural distinction), plus she had a redneck vibe I kinda dug. I bet she could fight. I bet she was fun to be around.

Michael Jackson was a freak and I don't know what to think about the seriously fucked up post-traumatic psychology that underpinned his behavior. All's I know is I loved to watch him perform. He was great.

[Sappho]

Originally Posted by Hildegard

I don't really care either but I disagree with your larger point. They were entertainment icons. I think being the most famous pin up girl ever counts for something. Think of a more emblematic woman of the 70s. Farrah was purdy and sunny and athletically sexy in a uniquely American sense (and I don't mean that to sound patriotic, just in terms of cultural distinction), plus she had a redneck vibe I kinda dug. I bet she could fight. I bet she was fun to be around.

Michael Jackson was a freak and I don't know what to think about the seriously fucked up post-traumatic psychology that underpinned his behavior. All's I know is I loved to watch him perform. He was great.

YEP, says it all.

[Apeville]

Originally Posted by jsmith

I agree. Hey, maybe you can get your Indonesian guy in the White House
Nevermind.

dia tidak orang asli, aduh!

[Dixie Belle]

Sorta kiddin' but given the 24 hour news-cycle, could he have caught a better break?

[pages]

What Hildy said.

[Hank IV]

Maybe MJ will finally get his wish. He and The Elephant Man's bones will tour the world with Ringling Brothers.

Seriously, he was a talent. Tortured soul, but a talent. I thought it sad tonight when his death was announced from the stage at Sundown in the City the crowd gave a rousing cheer.

[gypsy]

Originally Posted by Hank IV

I thought it sad tonight when his death was announced from the stage at Sundown in the City the crowd gave a rousing cheer.

my sister called me tonight to talk about michael. not that she was shaken up by it exactly, it just gave her pause. "i feel old," she said. (she's 19 months younger than me.) she owned the family copy of thriller, which i listened to happily without ever really committing to. "you probably thought michael wasn't cool enough," she said, and that was true. there was something of a prince/michael divide in those days, and i was on the prince side -- prince could play guitar, he could rock, and he was weird in ways that seemed less embarrassing than michael's weirdness, which was already apparent even at the thriller peak (i remember a rolling stone feature story where he talked about his pet snake and monkey and whatever else he had).

i imagine there were a lot of phone calls like that when elvis died, or john lennon, even among people who weren't particular fans. somebody who is so much a part of the cultural landscape of your own time, you can't help but note their sudden absence. my sister speculated that our brother (born 1981) probably has no identification at all with michael jackson, except as a weird guy with unhealthy proclivities. she's probably right. my brother's cultural landscape was nirvana and nine inch nails.

actually, i think i was a little old for michael, or at least for his thriller phase. the people i know who are most intensely attached to him weren't teenagers yet when that album came out -- they were 8 or 9 or 10 or 11, and i can imagine that michael jackson represented something approachable to children. (ok, c'mon, i don't mean it in a dirty way. although of course that was part of the eventual problem, you can see why parents let their kids go to slumber parties at his place. he had that whole eternal-child thing about him.) but so i felt a little distanced from him and the whole phenomenon, it was something big going on that i didn't need to be part of. i still liked the songs. i had a 45 of "beat it" at one point, don't know what happened to it. i loved "wanna be starting something," and still do. and "billie jean" is still just such a haunting song. slinky and sinuous, but also sinister. "who will dance/on the floor/in the round."

if you actually think about the lyrics on thriller, there's a lot of weird, dark stuff on it. lots of paranoia, persecution. "be careful of what you do/'cause the lie becomes the truth." "they'll kick you, then they'll beat you, then they'll tell you it's fair." "you're a vegetable, you're a vegetable/still they hate you, you're a vegetable." and the title track ends up playing as camp, because of vincent price and because of the video, but the first line is still, "it's close to midnight and something evil's lurking in the dark." it's really a pretty fucked-up record.

i think part of the problem of thinking about michael jackson is the sense of complicity. like he's something we made, all of us together. a pop-culture frankenstein's monster. and once we made him, and the ugliness and awkwardness became apparent, we didn't want to acknowledge our own role. what it said about us, about fame, about what our culture does to children given half a chance (because he was a child when we got our hands on him), none of that is stuff we like to think about. it wasn't just us, obviously, it was his fucked-up family. but we were there, for the whole thing. and it's possible we cheered at all the wrong times.

[joethelion]

i never knew him. rest in peace you sad little clown, it's all over. and so long farrah faucett, i never owned your poster and i never knew anybody that did. and goodnight to you also ed macmahan, you big drunken, loveable, bastard. i will not miss any of you. i'm sorry

[gypsy]

[G-Ho]

Originally Posted by gypsy

there was something of a prince/michael divide in those days, and i was on the prince side -- prince could play guitar, he could rock, and he was weird in ways that seemed less embarrassing than michael's weirdness

I had the same experience at that time. My younger brother was about 7 and he loved Thriller and Purple Rain. Purple Rain reached me more, so we listened to that together more. I tried to get into Thriller, but MJ's songs have never gotten under my skin. They always felt like high-performance sports cars that could only be driven by the King. They aren't really for everybody.

He was a master of time, pitch and phrasing, apparently from his first utterance on. That's the awe-inspiring raw excellence that puts him in a place with the other American geniuses. His signature sound was catalyzed by heavy doses of Mavis Staples, Stevie Wonder, and Smokey Robinson. Those are folks whose best work is not just entertaining and masterful, but inspiring to the core.