philipmartin’s posterous

LITTLE ROCK — When Michael Jackson died June 25, a lot of people thought there was an overabundance of media attention given the event and the singer’s subsequent funeral.

They were probably right, for as noteworthy an event as death is to the individual, it is something that comes to kings and paupers. When we grieve for a pop star we’ve never met, the truth is we’re indulging an unseemly habit of self-regard. We’re really mourning ourselves and our mortality, or taking opportunistic advantage of the occasion to declare ourselves sensitive. Jackson was a thing to me, an image I saw moving on TV, a noise I heard on the radio.

Granted I had grown up with this image. I had been acquainted with Jackson’s sound and vision since both of us were 10 years old.(Does it mean anything that the three great transitional pop music figures of the 1980s - Jackson, Prince and Madonna - were all born within a few months of each other in the upper Midwest in 1958?)

And my generation’s relationship with television and pop music was such that we probably felt a greater intimacy with our rock’n’ roll heroes than prior generations - we had their lunchboxes, we watched their cartoon versions - but I had nothing like a personal relationship with Jackson.

I simply consumed his music and the proffered gossip, legends and hype. I grew up a little and considered his music a little more seriously than perhaps people should. Over the past 30 years or so, I’ve probably written as much about Jackson as I have about any performer save Elvis Presley. I’ve thought about Jackson professionally, which, when I think about it, is an odd thing to have done.

LOVING THE ALIEN

As early as 1984, it was difficult to write about Jackson without introducing a note of melancholy- without wondering if we all didn’t bear some collective responsibility for his overweening strangeness. Jackson has been famous for most of his life; celebrity descended upon him when he was a child and took him in its talons. He had no chance - he was singing ballads to rats, he’d been molded into a Saturday morning cartoon, before he was out of middle school.

A friend of mine had a chance encounter with Jackson - and his bodyguards - in a New York record store that year. Jackson was already wearing his ridiculously ineffective disguises, as well as a medical mask over his face. But what struck my friend was that Jackson’s face was a peculiar shade of gray - the color of cigarette ash, he said.

Jackson was a pop force from the very beginning, an acceptable, purifying filter through which the raw and dark roux of black sound could be forced. Jackson was, in the beginning, a kind of anti-Elvis, a polarity reverser who reclaimed pop and soul and infused it with a kind of kiddie innocence. He made good bubble-gum music - it might not have been hip to love the Jackson 5 but the singles “I Want You Back,” “ABC” and “I’ll Be There” were sublimecounter-insurgencies against the sorties of the colonizing faux-soul Osmonds.

“Puppy Love” wasn’t a bad record. But compared to MJ’s early solo work - songs like “Got to Be There,” “I Wanna Be Where You Are,” even the aforementioned “Ben” - Donny was definitely dealing derivative greasy kid stuff.

Those early records with his brothers are enough to credentialize Jackson. He could have retired at 14, spared us the spectacles and been remembered as one of the all-time greats, the successor to Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles - a great song and dance man.

But he wasn’t inclined to retire, and though The Jacksons era can now be read as an awkward age, it still produced the fantastic “Dancing Machine” single, the pleasantly inane “Enjoy Yourself” and “Shake Your Body.”

In retrospect, the Quincy Jones-produced albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad that kicked off his full-fledged adult solo career must be considered some of the finest American pop music of the past century, as important and influential as Presley’s Sun recordings. Hear those albums now, and they sound better than they did then, like a dose of the real thing after a couple of decades of imitation funk rock. They pushed through the confining envelope of conventional pop thought.

They kicked out the jams and kicked down the doors where the cross-pollinating Eddie Van Halen was waiting in the wings, strangling his Frankenstein Kramer. Jackson opened up MTV for black - or, as they had it, “dance” - artists with “Beat It.” A lot of MJ haters owe him big time, for he was the one who gave hip-hop access to the suburban bedrooms of white-flight kids.

But if Jackson was a mature artist at the onset of his solo career, like Peter Pan with whom he famously identified, he was determined to never grow up. At the cusp of the 1980s, despite his years of showbiz success, Jackson seemed as naive as he was famous. He seemed to consciously adopt the aura of an alien - he seemed to bean asexual and untouchable creature not unlike E.T.

It says something about our collective mental health, the world’s mental health, that we could embrace such a synthetically sweet being, that we could find ourselves loving this alien. The Michael Jackson of Thriller and “We Are the World” was a fantasy being divorced from messy carnality, suspended in a chilly, self-constructed image cocoon.

In the decade of the AIDS plague, Jacko provided the safest sex of all, a vague, prepubescent tingle of mysterious longing - he was the Jonas Brothers without the promise rings, or maybe more to the point, a kind of Edward Scissorhands figure - an unembraceable, artificial man possessed of the will. (And who, Jackson apologists might point out, was falsely accused of a sex crime.)

Of course, Jackson was not the same as his image. By the end of the 1980s his private life was meat for the tabloids, and his serial “friendships” with children were already inviting scrutiny. (Though, like any savvy celebrity, he had a complicated relationship with the vulgate press - Jackson himself was the source of a lot of the tabloid gossip. He floated the false rumor that he was trying to buy The Elephant Man’s bones and leaked the sensationally creepy photos of himself sleeping in something called a hyperbaric chamber to the National Enquirer.)

BELOVED IMMORTAL

I never came up with anything like a unified field theory of Jackson. He was damaged, he was crazy. There is a lot of evidence that suggests he was a criminal. He was a spendthrift and a deadbeat. What had that to do with me? He was brilliant, he was an otherworldly performer. I liked - I still like - a lot of his records. I never saw anyone who did what he did better.

I am sorry he’s dead, because 50 seems to me a cruelly young age at which to die. Because I believe that people are capable of doing amazing things at any age, that genuine genius is rare and we ought to appreciate whatever gifts are bestowed on us. I am not prepared to argue that Jackson was a good man or a bad man. I only know he had a gift for lifting hearts and we can use that sort of thing around here.

On the other hand, the people at Sony have hinted that there are hundreds of finished yet unreleased Jackson songs sitting in their vaults. It seems likely that Jackson will enjoy a long and prosperous posthumous career. He will in all likelihood be the best-selling recording artist of 2009; before the release of the concert film This Is It and its obligatory “soundtrack” (made up mostly of previously released versions of the hits performed in the movie) album, Jackson had already sold nearly 6 million solo albums since his death. That has injected the flagging industry with a boost similar to the one his Thriller album provided back in 1982.

Jackson may be dead, but the image and noise with which I am acquainted is likely to abide. It may well outlive us all.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style, Pages 27 on 11/03/2009