Beat It

A new acquaintance, R, asked me this morning if I had heard about the passing of Michael Jackson. Of course I had. It was bigger than Iran. But then R asked me if I was sad about the whole thing. If I was having emotional feelings toward a man I had never met. For a second, I pondered. How did I feel about the passing of the King of Pop?

"Honestly," I replied. "I didn't really think about it."

That wasn't entirely true, so first, let me apologize to R for being so short. I did think about MJ's passing. I actually thought about it a lot. But not in the way one would imagine. In all honesty, the first thing I thought about when I heard of Jackson's passing...was...my mother.

I thought back to 1982. I thought about Albuquerque, New Mexico and our little house on the hill. I thought about a power outage while watching Entertainment Tonight on our 13inch screen while eating macaroni and cheese that we cooked with our gas stove. I remember mom cranking up a battery powered tape player and popping Thriller in. "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" blared. We danced throughout the candlelit house, oblivious to the storm that had taken down our power lines. It is one of my fondest memories. So, R, if you asked me again if I had emotional feelings toward the King of Pop's death yesterday I suppose you could say yes. But they are not feelings of remorse or devastation. I wasn't excited about the next Michael Jackson album, nor, had he been a transformative part of my youth (a la Kurt Cobain). But he was a memory, many memories actually, of my love for my mother.

I feel for MJ. I do. I feel for many stars of both the stage and screen who for them, the burden of fame became just too much to bear. From Chris Farley and Jim Morrison, to yes, even Lindsay Lohan, the bitch that is American popular culture has no attention span. Like the burst of a handful of Pop Rocks, American fame is fleeting. It uses those in the limelight without remorse. And then, when Robert Downey, Jr. turns to the needle, or Brittany is so fucking high she's showing her vagina to the force-fed gluttonous paparazzi, we laugh. We ridicule. We despise.

The Michael Jackson I knew growing up had long-since become an American joke. A horribly in-debt, pill-popping, plastic-surgery-addled, boy-loving, son-dangling, washed-up ex musician whose last hit, 1991's "Black or White," has become a metaphor for his freakish appearance. I can't feel sorry for the passing of a man who gave so much to the world, only to have his very essence ridiculed on every news outlet. From CNN and NBC to schoolyard jokes and Saturday Night Live, the man formerly known as the King of Pop had become a side-show. He most assuredly knew what a farce his life had become. I cannot feel sorry for that man.

Instead, I believe in my heart that the Michael Jackson we knew and loved, the Michael Jackson who had our heads bopping at a year old to, "Don't Stop 'til You Get Enough," is still alive. When "Billie Jean" rocks at your 4th of July party, when "Rock With You" spins at your local bar, when "The Girl Is Mine," makes you fondly remember that first kiss in elementary school, Michael Jackson is alive and well in our hearts and in our minds.

This is the first in a (hopefully) daily effort to bring you an honest approach to Pop Culture news. The flash of E! News, the dirt-stained lapels of TMZ, the potty-mouthed hypocritical Perez Hilton...it all disgusts me. Yesterday, the passing of a legend reminded me of why I do what I do. Why I think my voice matters. It's because, once, long ago, art meant something. It wasn't manufactured and disposable. It was what connected our memories of the passing years and carries, for me, much more than the price of admission.