Grim Reader Reads On, Michael Jackson: A Special Edition
by Michael Schaffer
JUNE 26, 2009 TAGS:
Grim Reader learned about Michael Jackson’s death, oddly enough, when he was visiting a blog that has been offering more or less nonstop coverage of the tumult in Iran. “So,” Andrew Sullivan joked, “cable coverage of Iran is now over.”
No kidding. By mid-evening, when Celine Dion was on Larry King likening Jackson’s death to the JFK assassination, it was already a full-blown pop-culture phenomenon — blotting out coverage of Iran, coverage of Farrah Fawcett, and all sense of logic and restraint on the part of the cable-TV commentariat.
Dion’s political-science acumen notwithstanding, the better comparison was probably to the 1976 death of Elvis Presley, another pop-music icon from previous decades mired in self-destructive decline. But the contrasts are as telling as the similarities. When Elvis left the building, there were just three TV networks — none of them specializing in music — and a national news media that disdained celebrity coverage. By the time Jackson was taken to UCLA hospital Thursday, the news was beamed around the world via a pop-culture media infrastructure that Jackson helped create and quickly followed by an elite press corps that he helped open up to pop music, TV, and the places where they overlap. Tellingly, his cardiac arrest was first reported on the celeb-fueled website TMZ.com. Just as revealing: The death became a four-column, above-the-fold story in Friday’s New York Times.
In fact, the major papers that still represent the Obitosphere’s heavy hitters handled the Jackson story admirably, devoting resources to covering the still-uncertain cause of death, reporting on various local and national reactions, and running first stabs at obituaries, too. It’s safe to assume the papers all had rough Jackson obits in the can already — a logical enough move, given his history of erratic behavior and physical transformations, and one that made Grim Reader snort every time someone referred to his death as “shocking.”
The obits all present the same rough outline of Jackson’s life: Born in Gary, Indiana; raised by overbearing failed-musician father, a child star, a Reagan-era phenomenon, a racial transcender, a media innovator, and, later, a total freak, complete with child abuse allegations, on-camera baby-dangling, and $300 million in debts. More varied are the belletristic efforts of obituarists trying to explain what made Jackson special. The New York Times called him “the Peter Pan of pop music … suddenly gone, this time for good.” The Los Angeles Times looked elsewhere in the J.M Barrie oeuvre, likening him to “a visiting alien who, like Tinkerbell, would cease to exist if the applause ever stopped.” And invariably, Jackson’s life is cast as cautionary tale, in the Washington Post’s telling, “a metaphor on the delusions and cruelty of fame.”
But such was the cultural significance of Jackson that nearly every thoughtful magazine, website or blog feels the need to weigh in on … his cultural significance. In Slate, Jody Rosen explains Thriller’s singular impact, explaining how the bestselling album in pop history created an “era of pop consensus,” but also represented a curse for the musician who spent the rest of his career trying to repeat the feat. Brow Beat columnist Stephen Metcalf weighs in on the country he represented: “What to make of Jacksonian America, now that the King himself is dead? An immense and spectacular frenzy; an urgent celebration; the affect of triumph; at its center a derangement; beneath that, in all likelihood, nothing.”
The Nation’s John Nichols, though, painted him as a worldwide ambassador for the friendlier face of America: “The better part of a quarter century before Barack Obama was credited with remaking America's global image, Michael Jackson presented the United States as a country where an African American kid from Gary, Indiana, could on the basis of remarkable talent and drive -- as well as a musicologist's understanding of the soul and R&B traditions -- become fabulously successful, fabulously influential and fabulously wealthy.” Likewise, in the Daily Beast, Toure called Jackson “MTV’s Jackie Robinson” and decided it was time to ignore the personal train-wreck and focus on the music: “I’m leaving the ‘Wacko Jacko’ meme behind and liberating his peerless, timeless music from it.”
Sounding a rare sour note, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg harps on the overuse of the word icon, which he seems to think is intended to absolve Jackson of his various crimes. “Calling Michael Jackson an icon doesn’t let him off the hook for anything. But to listen to the news anchors you’d think it absolves him of everything,” Goldberg writes. “If anything, Michael Jackson’s life, not his death, was tragic.” Grim Reader was likewise horrified by the TV chatter that seemed to treat Jackson as a universally beloved figure whose controversies were somehow not of his own making. But he thinks that picking on the misuse of “icon” is foolish. It was hard not to walk away from reading one of the Jackson obits and not feel as if his life had been a disaster. All icon means now is that someone is famous for being famous. Which, for someone who transformed music, media, entertainment, and America’s sense of its cultural boundaries, is quite a comedown.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader column appears in Obit every Friday. Schaffer is the author of One Nation Under Dog about culture and the American pet industry.
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More Obit Coverage of Michael Jackson's Death
Black or White
by Kevin Nance
The deracination of Michael Jackson
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Moonwalker: A History of Michael Jackson's Signature Move
by Ben Popper
From Cab Calloway to Fred Astaire to finally the King himself.
"Where were you when Michael died" an Obit editorial
by Krishna Andavolu
The media coverage of Michael Jackson's sudden death has hinged on one question. Do we remember Michael Jackson as the transcendent performer? Or do we remember the other side of Jackson’s legacy: the accusations of pedophilia and the radical plastic surgery that destroyed his face and seemed to deny his race?
No kidding. By mid-evening, when Celine Dion was on Larry King likening Jackson’s death to the JFK assassination, it was already a full-blown pop-culture phenomenon — blotting out coverage of Iran, coverage of Farrah Fawcett, and all sense of logic and restraint on the part of the cable-TV commentariat. Dion’s political-science acumen notwithstanding, the better comparison was probably to the 1976 death of Elvis Presley, another pop-music icon from previous decades mired in self-destructive decline. But the contrasts are as telling as the similarities. When Elvis left the building, there were just three TV networks — none of them specializing in music — and a national news media that disdained celebrity coverage. By the time Jackson was taken to UCLA hospital Thursday, the news was beamed around the world via a pop-culture media infrastructure that Jackson helped create and quickly followed by an elite press corps that he helped open up to pop music, TV, and the places where they overlap. Tellingly, his cardiac arrest was first reported on the celeb-fueled website TMZ.com. Just as revealing: The death became a four-column, above-the-fold story in Friday’s New York Times.
In fact, the major papers that still represent the Obitosphere’s heavy hitters handled the Jackson story admirably, devoting resources to covering the still-uncertain cause of death, reporting on various local and national reactions, and running first stabs at obituaries, too. It’s safe to assume the papers all had rough Jackson obits in the can already — a logical enough move, given his history of erratic behavior and physical transformations, and one that made Grim Reader snort every time someone referred to his death as “shocking.”
The obits all present the same rough outline of Jackson’s life: Born in Gary, Indiana; raised by overbearing failed-musician father, a child star, a Reagan-era phenomenon, a racial transcender, a media innovator, and, later, a total freak, complete with child abuse allegations, on-camera baby-dangling, and $300 million in debts. More varied are the belletristic efforts of obituarists trying to explain what made Jackson special. The New York Times called him “the Peter Pan of pop music … suddenly gone, this time for good.” The Los Angeles Times looked elsewhere in the J.M Barrie oeuvre, likening him to “a visiting alien who, like Tinkerbell, would cease to exist if the applause ever stopped.” And invariably, Jackson’s life is cast as cautionary tale, in the Washington Post’s telling, “a metaphor on the delusions and cruelty of fame.”
But such was the cultural significance of Jackson that nearly every thoughtful magazine, website or blog feels the need to weigh in on … his cultural significance. In Slate, Jody Rosen explains Thriller’s singular impact, explaining how the bestselling album in pop history created an “era of pop consensus,” but also represented a curse for the musician who spent the rest of his career trying to repeat the feat. Brow Beat columnist Stephen Metcalf weighs in on the country he represented: “What to make of Jacksonian America, now that the King himself is dead? An immense and spectacular frenzy; an urgent celebration; the affect of triumph; at its center a derangement; beneath that, in all likelihood, nothing.”
The Nation’s John Nichols, though, painted him as a worldwide ambassador for the friendlier face of America: “The better part of a quarter century before Barack Obama was credited with remaking America's global image, Michael Jackson presented the United States as a country where an African American kid from Gary, Indiana, could on the basis of remarkable talent and drive -- as well as a musicologist's understanding of the soul and R&B traditions -- become fabulously successful, fabulously influential and fabulously wealthy.” Likewise, in the Daily Beast, Toure called Jackson “MTV’s Jackie Robinson” and decided it was time to ignore the personal train-wreck and focus on the music: “I’m leaving the ‘Wacko Jacko’ meme behind and liberating his peerless, timeless music from it.” Sounding a rare sour note, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg harps on the overuse of the word icon, which he seems to think is intended to absolve Jackson of his various crimes. “Calling Michael Jackson an icon doesn’t let him off the hook for anything. But to listen to the news anchors you’d think it absolves him of everything,” Goldberg writes. “If anything, Michael Jackson’s life, not his death, was tragic.” Grim Reader was likewise horrified by the TV chatter that seemed to treat Jackson as a universally beloved figure whose controversies were somehow not of his own making. But he thinks that picking on the misuse of “icon” is foolish. It was hard not to walk away from reading one of the Jackson obits and not feel as if his life had been a disaster. All icon means now is that someone is famous for being famous. Which, for someone who transformed music, media, entertainment, and America’s sense of its cultural boundaries, is quite a comedown.
Michael Schaffer’s Grim Reader column appears in Obit every Friday. Schaffer is the author of One Nation Under Dog about culture and the American pet industry.
--
More Obit Coverage of Michael Jackson's Death
Black or White by Kevin Nance
The deracination of Michael Jackson
Moonwalker: A History of Michael Jackson's Signature Moveby Ben Popper
From Cab Calloway to Fred Astaire to finally the King himself.
"Where were you when Michael died" an Obit editorialby Krishna Andavolu
The media coverage of Michael Jackson's sudden death has hinged on one question. Do we remember Michael Jackson as the transcendent performer? Or do we remember the other side of Jackson’s legacy: the accusations of pedophilia and the radical plastic surgery that destroyed his face and seemed to deny his race?
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