I was never a Michael Jackson Fan. I am an average person who loves Barry Manilow. I always get tickets to Barry concerts and invite friends to go as my guest. “No!” they answer. “Well, you could at least pretend you have other plans,” I usually reply. Then they hang up. No matter. I go to the concert and call them from my cell phone, making them listen to whatever tune Barry is playing. I then put the phone back to my ear and ask, “Don’t you wish you were here?” They answer, “No!” and hang up on me. It’s a ritual, and with so few rituals left in the world, I treasure the moment.
Anyway, the fact that I love Barry Manilow means it’s hard for me to fathom the passions brought out by a Michael Jackson, or a Judy Garland, or an Elvis Presley, and especially not John Lennon, whose music as far as I’m concerned, went to hell in a handbasket after Rubber Soul. It’s hard for me to understand the adoring Jackson fans crying on the streets. I keep thinking that on some level little boys in LA are better off without him on the planet. (I haven’t much room for child abuse of any kind.)
But I figured it out. We all have music that is the wallpaper in the rooms where our memories dwell.
For some, so many memories – good and bad – are wrapped up in the music of Ben or Thriller or Billy Jean. (Who hasn’t sat in their room playing the same GD song over and over and over again whilst crying over the Bob Reids who broke their heart? In Bob Reid’s defense, I made him break my heart by breaking up with him first, but then he wouldn’t take me back when I saw the error of my ways. Instead, he became the boyfriend of that ho who’s name was whatever and looked sort of like me but not as cute. Imagine. And, the song was Cherish, and it still makes me cry with over the lost children I would have born him.)
Ok, back to Jackson.
The fact that the dark side of Jackson is not something I can resolve when I see how his life is celebrated, is because he doesn’t live in any of my memory’s rooms. If he did, perhaps I would feel differently.
Here is the clincher people. It wasn’t him. It was his music, and the music and the man (and even his dancing) were two very different things. And, maybe that was his problem. And, Judy Garland’s problem. And Elvis Presley’s problem. We Americans always confuse the music with the man (or women) which gives them no hope of a life at all. We don’t see the people; we just see what they bring to us. They haven’t a prayer after that, especially if they started as young as a Judy Garland or a Michael Jackson.
So, I will try and put up with this mayhem of media blitz for a bankrupt man on many planes who never grew up (or really was it he was never really a child?), and realize that he gave up a lot to put paper on the walls of so many. And, while it might look worth it from afar, it seems to me that the results of those who have become these icons says that perhaps it’s not worth it at all.
So I take my tone deaf self and head to my IPhone to play a few tunes for the future.
