King of Poop

I don't if you've heard yet, but Michael Jackson has died. (I swear I instantly assumed cause of death as "choked on small boy".) So the worldwide rituals of vicarious self-actualization commence (and jeebus, but how psychologically damaged are you when you dress up like Michael Jackson and moonwalk on the sidewalk of his childhood home?), and everybody acts like something could or should have been done.

Eeee-fucking-nough already with this Princess Di schtick. Between the daily Demerol injections and the anorexia and who knows what all else, it sounds like he was lucky to make it to 50. He was never going to live to old age, not like that. But as the shade of Elvis Presley can tell him, there are more ignominious ways to go, like on the dumper at 42, stuffed with pills and peanut-butter-and-bacon sandwiches.

Look, it's sad when anyone goes, but when it's from a lifetime of not taking care of oneself, a toxic blend of chronic hypochondria and mental instability, it's not exactly a shock. What's shocking is that the supposed tour he was promoting just a few months ago had supposedly sold out, presumably everywhere but America. What the hell were these people -- the promoters and the ticket-buyers -- thinking? It had simply been far too long since Jackson had performed or recorded or even written anything at all, and had shown no signs of woodshedding to regain any of those lost skills. It ain't exactly like riding a bike, no matter what they say; you really do start losing it if you stop using it. I guess if you're the sort of person who shells out money to go to a Spice Girls reunion show, none of that matters, in which case you deserve to get fleeced.

A set of Jackson shows would have made Britney Spears' latest go-round look like the Jersey leg of a Springsteen tour. Pop acts don't really bother much anymore with even the pretense of "touring" anyway; everybody knows they're just paying for swag, and to watch choreography more-or-less synched with a backing track. A lot of this was covered in my epic takedown of Jackson's nonsense several years ago, and in review, I wouldn't change a word of it, unfortunately.

In the end, the thing that always annoyed me about Jackson -- and in turn his weirdly sycophantic fans; I mean, who else has such goofy-ass ball-licker fans like that? -- was the insistence on wild self-aggrandizement at every opportunity. He was a talented guy who made some good music over the years, but he could never be content with that; he proclaimed himself the reigning monarch of pop music as if the Beatles or about a dozen other great pop bands had never existed; he awarded himself some retarded "musician of the millennium" plaque as if Beat It was a triumph of composition that shamed Bach's violin partitas or Beethoven's symphonies.

Jackson always acted as if he had some sort of divinely anointed sui generis status that was really just self-anointed. These antics seemed to be inversely proportional to the actual amount of work put out, which made the whole spectacle increasingly embarrassing. The constant need for superlatives and overwrought validation just got old, and betrayed an ever-thinner grasp of reality, and an ever-wider set of unresolved daddy issues.

And it had fuck-all to do with the making of actual music. Seems like it would have been a lot easier to just put down the llamas and the teenage boys once in a while, write a few songs and record them, and keep steadily adding to that body of work, rather than lamely trying to burnish his icon status by lavishing titles upon himself like some comical third-world despot. Perhaps he should have tried to rename the months of the year while he was at it, but only the diehards would have remembered that today is Tito 27th.

As far as I'm concerned, the measure of a musician's efforts are most accurately shown in the depth and breadth of his influence on other musicians. You can find lots of pop acts who flash their Beatles influences, and you can find country acts who have a little Elvis in their sound. There are countless guitarists who are influenced even by people who died very young, such as Jimi Hendrix and Randy Rhoads, both of whose actual catalogs are quite small in comparison to most. Most of your prog acts have some Rush or Dream Theater (themselves disciples of Rush) influences, and pretty much every metal act is just redoing some variation on what Black Sabbath did nearly forty years ago. (In fact, I would say that because metal genres in particular mutate and propagate so fast, they're probably about six or seven generations out from Sabbath at this point -- and you can still hear it, in the tritone riffs and doomy incantations.) The point is that if you're popular and influential, you won't have to tell people about it -- there'll be plenty of other performers who will take what they like from yours, add some of their own, and push it forward. It has always been thus, since Mozart learned from Haydn.

But the only person nominally in the music bidness I can think of who shows a little Michael is our good friend Kanye West, with his lack of self-awareness disguised as hyper-awareness, the clueless over-the-top my-shit-don't-stink spasms of toxic self-regard, and the lack of fun. Music, even heavy music, is supposed to be fun, escapist, make you forget about the rigors of day-to-day life, not a weird pissing contest with the rest of the universe where skill and technique and passion are thrown out as criteria, and replaced by whoever has the largest video budget and the most dancers and moves the most units.

So while it seems like I'm pissing on his grave, there is actually a Michael Jackson I miss, and it's the cherubic little kid with the huge voice and grin. Even with his psycho dad and his equally cowed brothers, that kid was still able to enjoy what he was doing when he was up there. I don't think Michael Jackson had really enjoyed himself for a long, long time, because all his energy had been expended trying to levitate the myth, and all his money and talent had been squandered on his bad personal habits. That's really the sad part. I genuinely miss that kid, but I think we've all missed him for about twenty years or so.