From Graceland to Neverland
Woke up yesterday and in my heart I just knew that Farrah Fawcett was no longer with us. Turning on my computer, I was taken aback completely - like everyone I suppose - to see the Michael Jackson headlines. On reflection though, perhaps it was not or should not have been so unexpected that, like Elvis before him, MJ didn’t survive the age of 50. He had seemed to be heading on a self-destructive path for a while, but he also seemed to be a bit teflon. For, how many lives has the man had? He just seemed to keep on keeping on, crossing between races, genders and musical genres, all the while manifesting professional and physical transitions with more vigour than even his endlessly tenacious colleague, Madonna Ciccione is able to muster.
While his musical genius is undisputed, much else in and of his life certainly was. I am disturbed to this day concerning the stories of abject neglect and abuse that the hapless members of his animal menagerie at ‘Neverland’ suffered on his watch. Likewise the stories about the abuse of children, also on his watch. It is hard not to wonder where the sweet-eyed boy from the Jackson Five went. And even if he did have at his core good intentions, as the Times UK online observed, by his mid-thirties Jackson had seemed to fall into “a moral black hole”, which occurred at the same time as his career was entering a financial one. Gary Glitter anyone?
Jackson once told a journalist, prophetically, that he “didn’t want to go out like Brando, I want to go out like Elvis.” This week he has achieved that and much more. Elvis Presley’s death was a huge story but we didn’t have anywhere near the media outlets when Elvis died in the late 1970s, that we have today in 2009 for the reporting of the death of Michael Jackson. That we are being saturated with images, stories from every conceivable angle and from so-called insiders of the Jackson camp is really testament to our insatiable appetite and desperate desire for intimate knowledge and contact with celebrity. The death of Michael Jackson - like that of Elvis and probably Diana’s too (although not for the same reasons) has become a cause celebre - and thus a moment to expurgate inner conflicts. It has become, in the strangest way possible, our excuse to somehow hook in and hang on the coattails of celebrity life that, despite its bitter aftertaste will instead probably be re-written and draped in a palatable mythology.
For, here is a man who was essentially a paranoic recluse, and thus fairly unknowable. Here is a man with apparently convenient marriages, children by surrogates, a messy personal history involving addiction, law suits, allegations, betrayals and financial extremes. Michael Jackson should be - like Elvis before him - a cautionary tale of the serious pitfalls of fame and fortune. But the lemmings, by which I mean those of us who lap this up, remain on the treadmill, graspingly insistent that celebrity and its identical twin, inconceivable wealth, are the only yardsticks of success in a supremely superficial post-post modern media world. When we indulge in celebrity worship, we simply confirm that we are all drinking from the same posioned chalice.
Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson’s destinies have certainly collided in spectacular fashion, in a way neither of them could have forseen. It remains to be seen what the fallout is and what the story will eventually become in this strangest of coincidences.
