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When Michael Jackson was pronounced dead on June 25th, a momentary cloud of stunned silence descended on the 24-hour news stations, celebrity blogs, and generally every living room in the country. Unlike practically every other celebrity death, this silence had nothing to do with sadness, surprise, or mourning. Instead, the reaction to MJ’s death was fostered by his status of self-willed alienation from anything resembling a typical person. It’s been at least 25 years since anyone has thought of Michael Jackson’s existence as near human, and so it was kinda shocking that the ghoulish recluse who had clobbered the music world for a steady two decades could just collapse one day and die. It was sorta like hearing that Bugs Bunny had been diagnosed with lymphoma. 
For as long as I’ve been alive, Michael Jackson has reigned as The King Of Pop. Even though every song he’s released since I’ve been actively listening to music has been atrocious, this designation has remained, if only because his catalog is fucking stellar. Sure, Prince had a good run in the 80s and some of that Madonna shit is undeniable (I’d also argue that JT, Andre 3K, and Gwen Steffani have been killing tracks for over a decade now), but Michael Jackson has always been a phenom, never a person. Prince went through great pains to mildly humanize himself with the Purple Rain movie, Madonna pissed away all her iconic cred by clutching at random pop culture trends, and the new set of pop stars have gone out of their way to reveal to us the human element of their images. MJ is the only one who seemed truly content to exist through his veneer. I remember watching an interview with him once where he talked about how he was more comfortable performing at the Super Bowl than he was having a one-on-one conversation. And that’s why he has continued to dominate the face of pop music, which is a medium that is driven primarily by performance. In all honesty, reality has never been an attribute that has been necessary to a pop star. Realism is probably more of a burden, if you wanna get down to it. That’s why MJ was the perfect pop star, because he was entirely disinterested in projecting anything about who he was as an actual person. For him, the image he inhabited was far more important than himself.
Weirdly enough, that stance fueled his most important music. Remember, this is a guy (it feels weird to call him a guy) who has essentially been famous since birth. He was singing “I Want You Back” on American Bandstand at an age where I was still terrified of sleeping without a nightlight. And not only that, but he was fucking charming in after-performance interviews to boot. I can’t stress enough how young he was then. To put it in perspective, at the age he was dueting with Diana Ross, you weren’t cool with your parents leaving you with the teenager from down the street for a few hours while they went out for a quiet dinner. And somehow he grew from that into Off The Wall (which remains one of the best post-disco dance records ever made) right into Thriller, and then on into that gaggle of infectiously idiotic singles he put out in the early 90s. Sure, everything he’s released since “You Are Not Alone” has been unbearable on even the most ironic of levels, but the fact remains that there has been no one else who has not only remained relevant, but was able to define pop music throughout so many cultural changes. That’s sorta staggering when you stop and think about it.
And that’s the sad thing. For the last, oh, fifteen years, Michael Jackson has been nothing but a punchline to the American populace. Granted, he brought this fate entirely on himself. I’ll let pass the pedophilia rumors simply because he was never convicted and the evidence was actually pretty shoddy in the second trial (I’m unsure about the first time because I was only eight years old at the time. As a brief sidenote, I sent Michael Jackson an invitation to my birthday party when I was turning six. I’ll only say that in retrospect I’m extremely glad that he didn’t show up.), but even without that, he was still pretty goddamn bonkers. Michael Jackson will always exist as Exhibit A in the case against childhood mega-stardom. Sure, he was able to evolve into one of the most transgressive mainstream artists of all time, but in the same span he devolved into a sad spectacle of regressive behavior. It is impossible to imagine a more eccentric icon. There were the constant plastic surgeries, the sham marriages, the weird habit of putting his kids in bizarre/dangerous circumstances to ensure their anonymity while also constantly thrusting them into the public eye, and the troubling step he took to change his skin color under the guise of a phony medical condition.
The worst part of all of this is that he undertook all of these appalling endeavors out of a strategy to endear himself more greatly to the general public. Make no mistake, he did all of that for us because he thought that’s what we wanted of him. We loved him as an adorable child? Well, he transformed himself into a living caricature that was ageless. MTV didn’t play videos by black artists for its first few years? Simple, he turned himself into a white man at the height of his stardom so that he might become slightly more popular. He morphed into a joke in the process, but the true joke is on us as a society. When we laughed at Michael these past few years, all that we were actually ridiculing was American culture as a whole. In his ghostly image, the worst of ourselves were on display. He embodied our idea of celebrity to such an extent that he accidentally became a critique on the cultural designation in itself. Again, Michael Jackson was pop culture, whether we liked it or not.
MJ’s sheer strangeness will be his lasting legacy. At this point, that is entirely certain. He was as odd of a person as anyone who has ever walked this earth, Gilgamesh included. Some of those eccentricities were kinda awesome (he wrote most of his best songs while climbing trees; for years he kept a monkey named Mr. Bubbles, who he dressed identically to himself, that he’d bring along to nightclubs and movie premieres) and some of them were utterly frightening (I could list some of his tragic misdeeds here, but they are pretty goddamn known to all of us by now. Okay, the dancing on top of an SUV outside of a court hearing was obviously him at his most maniacal, and he used to check into hotels with Emmanuel Lewis while telling the desk clerk that he was Lewis’ father. That is undeniably fucked up.). But what can’t be lost in his loss is the drastic spin that he put on pop music. His dancing prowess is legendary for a reason. Even by James Brown standards, the man is untouchable in that regard. And the songs remain as well. “Billie Jean”, “Beat It”, “I’ll Be There”, “Off The Wall”, and numerous others are blockbusters in the pop pantheon. Even tossed-off travesties like “Black Or White” and “Bad” have hints of genius when you allow them to exist as what they are. And “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” is quite simply one of the best tracks ever put to record. The man made masterpieces, and despite his poor judgment on about 1,000 fronts, those cannot be forgotten.
What will be left out of the public chatter in the aftermath of Michael Jackson’s death is that there was an actual person who has now left this earth. Granted, he showed hardly any of himself while he was here, but he was also a father who has left his children without a dad. He was an artist who not only c
hanged the pop music landscape, but American culture as a whole. His songs resonated around the world. He died not in his youth, not at his peak, but still extremely young. He marveled the world and was then shunned by it. He died in shame, and even if that was what he deserved on a personal level, he carved out a public identity that led to countless miraculous creations. And yet, we are now forced to wonder what he might have left us with if he’d had the courage to reveal his true self to us, if he hadn’t only been a pathetic anomaly of our projected desires. The King is dead, his throne will never anoint another like him, and while that is an entirely positive aspect to his demise, we must also mourn the loss of a person who created art that has both enriched and mirrored what we are as a society. Very truly, the concept of American celebrity is now faceless.