The king of pop is dead
Michael Jackson, 1958-2009.
The life of Michael Jackson, so often in the public eye, so picked at by the world's press, is over. In the hours after he died, the speculation has already begun about whether his heart problem was known, or treatable, or exacerbated by his preparations for the his upcoming performances. But what will he be remembered for? His music, or his life?
In the coming days every aspect of his life will be combed over again, from the childhood star to becoming one of the leaders of the MTV video revolution, making his promotional videos for his songs into miniature films and events in and of themselves. He wrote We Are The World, for goodness sakes. It might not be a very good song, but it was a good thing - he was, for a long while, the biggest star in the world.
Like many people growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, Thriller was the first music video I ever remember watching, from behind a sofa – literally – so scared that I dreamt of his zombie horde for nights afterwards. He was the pop star of pop stars, the person wannabes, well, wanted to be. His were the songs that kids knew all the words to, and his dance routines the ones they faithfully tried to copy - often leading to an unsightly mess of juvenile crotch-grabbing and spinning on the spot.
And later on, the press had turned on his eccentricities, his apparent oxygen-tent sleeping, questions over the gradual lightening of his skin and changing of his facial features until, by the mid-1990s appearances, he looked less like the boy that became famous and more like a young Elizabeth Taylor.
The bizarre stories kept coming, in volume more frequent and shouting far louder than the music he continued to release. The marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, the three children born of surrogates, the baby-dangling from high-up Berlin hotel windows. The songs may still have been strong and soulful, but the man visibly became weaker, ever more reclusive and swaddled from the public gaze.
And then, of course, there was the extremely famous court case in 2005, charged with seven felony counts of child abuse and three of administering an intoxicant to an underage person. He was found innocent of the charges, but the case polarised people in their opinion of him.
Whatever he was, and despite all his troubles he remained popular, the King of Pop for millions of people. He was a complex being, seeking fame and shunning it, he is unarguably, an icon. Michael Jackson fans are fervent and fiercely defensive of their hero – they took the fan out of fanatic and really decided to run with it. As I write this there are shots of people in Los Angeles, running toward the hospital where he died, in their thousands, to mourn – and to say they were there at the end.