Michael Jackson and the generation gap

September 11, 2009 • written by Andrew King

Did you hear that Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009?

Of course you did.  If you own a television set, a radio, or a functioning pair of ears, you most likely heard about it within the hour it happened.  And since then, pretty much everything there is to know about the pop culture icon has been rehashed by all major media outlets.  His accomplishments and his failures have been highlighted and re-examined, his life nitpicked and dissected to the point where we tire of hearing anything about the man, as majestic as his reputation may be.

But it’s important to take note of something most people gloss over.  Most of these pieces were written by people who were exposed to a different portrayal of Michael Jackson—almost an entirely different person—than many of those in high school today.

Our generation didn’t grow up knowing the Michael Jackson of the 1980’s, at the peak of his power and renown.  Instead of seeing the white-tuxedoed singer tearing up stages worldwide, we saw images of a gaunt, skeleton-like man fending off accusations of child molestation. Even though he was never found guilty in court, the spilt blood of Jackson’s reputation mixed well into the ocean of American media, and exponential amounts of paparazzi swarmed to fix their lenses on Jackson to catch his every mistake,

We grew up knowing not the Michael Jackson of his glory days but a stew of buzz words that would appear alongside the man’s name in almost every headline, tabloid or otherwise: “plastic surgery,” “Jacko,” “Jesus juice,” “molestation,” “Neverland,” and “creep”.

And the strongest of them all: “freak,” the word used to condemn and exile.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “freak” means “a person, animal, or plant which is abnormal or deformed.”  By some standards, Michael Jackson is certainly abnormal.  But deformed, unnatural?  This is partially thanks to the media and their assistance in transforming an already-eccentric musician into a virtual mutant whose doings they played out like a soap opera.  Or horror movie, to be more accurate.

Teens today have grown up in the shadow of Michael Jackson’s reputation as a music god, having been constantly barraged with information to the contrary: that Jackson was just that word, a “freak”—resigned to his oddball behavior and publicity stunts as he seemed to discard any dignity he had earned.

Ever since his slow return to mainstream commonality from the atmospheric stardom gained by  the albums “Thriller” and “Off The Wall”, it seems Michael Jackson—now, more accurately, Michael Jackson’s reputation—has suffered an endless stream of disdain, insult, and accusations of scandal that seem to eclipse whatever merits he had earned. Although a new sense of newfound respect for the singer did emerge after his death, this was founded just as much on the ability to profit from the artist’s legacy than an appreciation for the person the world had just lost.

Some students’ views of Jackson, while filled with admiration for his achievements, demonstrate a deeper curiosity aimed at the life behind the act.

“My perception of him is that he was a very confused man,” said senior Vinay Sharma.  “He never got the chance to grow up, so he lived out his childhood as an adult, with other children.  I think he was mentally sick, because of his lifelong stardom and being constantly in the spotlight.”

Let’s be honest.  If Michael Jackson had not died on June 25, 2009, chances are there wouldn’t be such coverage of him unless he had been again accused of an outrageous act.  The true tragedy here is not that the world has lost a musical genius and one of its best entertainers, or even that a man died under mysterious circumstances, although these events are undeniably dismal.  The true tragedy is the tabloid culture’s reduction of one person (because in the end, as his death makes clear, that’s all he was) to a buzz word, crass jokes, and higher prime-time ratings—a fabricated persona on which an entire nation passed verdicts as it saw fit.

Admittedly, when Jackson died, I felt as if the world had lost a paper cutout; a contrived persona devoid of meaning, opposite of the revolutionary artist generations before me had worshipped.

“He was a staple in America,” Sharma said.  “From his last trial to before he died, the media ripped Jackson apart, portraying him as a freak. But when he died, it was newsworthy, and the media worshipped him.”

As is the case with any human life, there is more to know about Michael Jackson than will ever be learned or understood.  But in a sense, our generation missed out on the positive points of his life and was instead saturated with the negative.  The man named “The Most Successful Entertainer of All Time” by Guinness World Records will undoubtedly remain in the memory of many, but it is unfortunate that the media’s endeavors to profit from the newest tidbit of Michael Jackson gossip—most recently, it’s that his Propofol-fueled death has been declared a homicide—has reduced a human life to a two-dimensional album cover or the ticker tape on the bottom of the nightly news.
In the end it comes down to individuals’ attempts to shed the prejudices they have been showered with in their age and see the musician in his or her totality.  Michael Jackson was not a “freak”, although he may have done some freakish things.  Neither was he a god, despite his towering reputation and achievement of pop immortality.  As his death reminded us, he was only a man—one with both successes and struggles, and who deserves to be acknowledged accordingly.

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