Michael Jackson 1958-2009

I remember being more than a little outraged when, in 1994, a very tense and touchy nuclear situation involving North Korea was replaced as the top story by the death of Nicole Simpson. Her death was tragic and certainly due the appropriate mourning and prayers that it got, and perhaps then some because it was such a brutal death and no one should die like she and Ronald Goldman died that night. But the country was on the verge of a nuclear confrontation with a crazy strongman, and CNN was devoting its time to a Ford Bronco moving slowly down an LA freeway. It was surreal and a lot of people made careers, received fame, inked cable television deals, and still haunt cable stations devoted to these kinds of things in an industry that did not even exist before Nicole Simpson's death. Its Los Angeles, everybody has their hand out for their big payday and everyone is just a little weird.

So why am I writing about Michael Jackson? For two reasons. First, I want to document the Los Angeles virus of ready made and shameless fame fanned on by a television news industry that seems perpetually perched in a helicopter in Los Angeles following vans and ambulances while anchors search for something to say like Cronkite used to during space flights, the latter a much more honorable example of bsing that what we see every so often when something happens in L.A.

The new shameless stars from this moment are: Vogue writer Maureen Orth who proclaimed Jackson guilty of drug addiction and child molestation with the certainty of a seer, who was given broad room on Morning Joe on MSNBC by Willie Geist, but short shrift across the hall on Today on NBC by Matt Lauer; former Jackson family attorney Brian Oxman, who declared Michael Jackson another Anna Nicole Smith with the studied media stare of a man starved for the media attention that he was now assured of getting. Who knows, this may lead to a cable show!

Los Angeles. This is why I travel east.

The second reason I write about Michael Jackson, knowing full well all of the other things in the news, is that, well, Michael Jackson was special. Not to put his life above Simpson's, but one might consider devoting time to MJ because his death really is about more than just the salaciousness that Orth and Oxman would like to mine from this. It was about, well, among other things, my teenaged years.

Its 1969 and I am a high school freshman heading to the band room after a Friday night football game in Beaumont, Texas. I am a band member and football player, but as a freshman, I am not on varsity, so I got to march and play in the stands with the band. As I walked to the room from the bus, a cute junior twirler whom I had been pining over for weeks, walked up to me and placed a kiss on my cheek. It was dark enough that not everybody saw us, but enough did to totally embarass me as I did not know what to do, I am 14 remember, so I walked on not understanding what I was feeling. Someone walks past my flustered and nervous self with a transister radio that was playing "I Want You Back". She became my "I Want You Back" crush. Forty years later that moment is still part of my youthful memories (by the way later in the fall I offered the twirler an umbrella at a rain game and we stood there with my arm stretched over her shoulder with me still not knowing what to do).

I also remember 1970 when the Osmonds broke out with their imitation of the Jackson 5's hits, and their subsequent shadowing of the Jacksons in everything they did. Jacksons got a cartoon show, Osmonds got a cartoon show. Fights broke out in high schools and junior high schools across the country between white and black kids over who was coolest, the Jacksons or the Osmonds, the controversy every bit as hot as J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO surveillance of the Black Panthers that same year. I went to an all black high school so no fights broke out, over that issue.

As time continued, I started lying about my relations, as every black kid named Jackson must have during that time. I had distant relatives in Indiana, and, well you get the picture.

There was much innocence in these memories, the kind of innocence that is not much attributed to black youth of my generation. Depictions of my group are usually surrounded by civil rights strife (The Learning Tree), or inner city angst (Cooley High, J.T.). Sometimes all we experienced during that time was an occasional hopeless crush on a girl in short blue and gold tights carrying a baton. And the sound track of that period ranged from "I Want You Back" "ABC" "The Love You Save", "I'll Be There", the latter being the number one "phone sing" song that girls, at least in Southeast Texas, asked you to sing for them while on the phone avoiding chemistry homework, which resulted in a C and threats of sanctions from my father. Literally, there was no other music. Except for James Brown, of course.

Others in their mid to late 40s will focus their memories on the CBS label Jacksons which was a five member group of equally sized brothers, minus Jermaine with Randy added to keep the group as a quintet. Those in their early forties and late 30s will remember Michael Jackson, the one man act and Thriller, and Bad as sign post of their teens. But for a 54 year old, the memories focus on the Motown quintet of uneven sized teenagers with high voices. By the time the other iterations of the Jackson phenomon came about, I was listening to jazz, Stevie Wonder, Earth Wind and Fire, and War. As far as I was concerned, at 20 the Jackson 5, or the Jacksons, or whatever they were calling themselves then, were kid stuff.

But they were part of my youth.

Many of the well meaning pundits want to create a Michael Jackson that brought whites and blacks together in the same music like no other artist before him. This is not true. Duke Ellington holds that distinction--white bobby soxers in the 40s bopped to Ellington (and Count Basie for that matter) as much as their kids and grand kids danced to MJ. Music was not nearly as Balkanized as the social commentators, including Michael Eric Dyson (who should know better) claim to remember. Stevie Wonder was a staple on top 40 radio, and does anybody remember a guy named Jimi Hendrix? We need not embellish MJ to make his contributions important. He was just, literally the greatest pop entertainer in Western history (there probably is a superstar in Asia somewhere whose numbers at concerts or someother category of entertainment dwarf MJs because there are more people over there).

We need to learn to appreciate MJ without the embellishments.

Brace yourself, the embellishments aside, there will be, after the initial shock is over, a race to the bottom to remind us all of his dark side. Like Tom Joyner noted, he was like the relative that you were always concerned about. Much of what is hinted at about MJ's life is indeed troubling, but we have been living and wringing our hands over that stuff for years now.

Let the guy rest in peace.