I was taken aback by the death of Michael Jackson; like nearly every single child of the ‘80’s, he was a staple of the era which saturated my first pop culture experiences. Thriller was my first “big girl” album, and he was referenced on, of all things, an episode of The Golden Girls.
But I was not as much taken aback by the news itself than by the news coverage which followed.
In death, Jackson commanded a feat which he was largely incapable in life: Wall to wall coverage. Some networks dumped breaks when the news first came. Fox News did away with regular programming entirely, parking Shepard Smith back in the anchor chair after Glenn Beck’s program, even as the evening progressed into time blocks set aside for Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. Ratings suffered as a result. Still, the beat went on.
Although Jackson’s later life was marred by child molestation charges and increasingly erratic behavior, the coverage on the evening of his death (which was often labeled, bemusingly, as “developing story”) was an equally bizarre combination of tribute, celebrity obsession, and who-cares details: One network brought in an economist to find out how much Jackson owned his creditors. What will these people do when there's an actual major news story? And have we consumers become so inured to this kind of hype that we won't even know it when it hits?
Under normal circumstances the fixation would have functioned as a distasteful annoyance, but the story broke at a time the House of Representatives was taking a close vote on a cap-and-trade bill, which will have enormous economic repercussions at a time when the national loss and profits sheet is in crisis mode. Only C-SPAN carried the vote itself. Elsewhere, full web pages, complete with ads on the side, were broadcast by television networks, some with what were purported to be Jackson’s “last photograph.” More appropriate coverage included shots of fans converging at the Apollo Theater.
Is this a story, then, of human forgiveness, a spontaneous decision to celebrate immense talent despite possibly committing, as some say he has, one of the most wretched sins imaginable? Or is this a triumph of celebrity over substance?
“I’m Peter Pan. I’m never gonna grow old,” Jackson told one of his business collaborators. At the time, that comment meant plastic surgery, an unsettling predilection for young boys, and the creepily equipped Neverland, which held far more full-cabinet video games than people. But it now means that Jackson now sits with Marilyn Monroe, Elvis, and JFK, whose deaths, perhaps, catapulted them into an iconism they may not have achieved had they lived to see old age.
The nation implied this question in Jackson’s direction throughout his life: How do you top the best-selling album of all time? Did too much adulation break him? Might he have topped Thriller had he simply lived in a one-bedroom condo in Topeka, with nary a chimpanzee or a Ferris wheel in sight?
We’ll never know.
