A Few Words for Michael

Not much today, as the world mourns the passing of pop icon Michael Jackson. Michael didn't mean to me what he meant to some people, but growing up as a kid in the eighties he was ubiquitous. I remember, as an awkward black kid in a mostly-white school, wearing a black and red "Beat It" shirt, and the jibes that come with that kind of thing when you're young: "Hey, Timothy, do like your shirt says, and beat it."

So, in some ways I identified with his weird outsider status, even though he was the King of Pop.

That got harder to reconcile as I got older. The accusations of pedophilia, the lightening of his skin, and his bizarre obsessions made him difficult to sympathize with. At the same time, there were his rebuffs: he wasn't a pedophile, he was being exploited for his wealth, fame and strangeness; he wasn't lightening his skin to be more white, he suffered from vitiligo. For someone just watching the media bounce the accusations and rebuffs back and forth, it was hard to hold judgement. Anyone who's a little strange knows that others will be quick to take advantage of that strangeness to turn others against you. On the other hand, who knew what to think? Just because one strange person is victimized, doesn't mean another strange person can't victimize others.

Michael Jackson lived a very unusual life, to say the least, and as sad as his death is, he was never the one to grow into an old man. One can only hope he didn't victimize other children the way his father, the media and the institution that is the music industry victimized him as a child. "Man hands misery onto man," Philip Larkin tells us, and yes, that's true; on the other hand, for the short time we're here on this planet, the most we can strive for is to hand down something of our greater lights as well.

I grew up in the hip-hop era, a black kid who unselfconsciously listened to punk and goth. Michael struggled with his racial identity all his life; but he broke black music into MTV; he was a crossover artist who made it easier for the rest of us not to have to same identity struggles he went through. At the end of the day all we have or know of an artist (unless we know them personally) is the work, and our relationship to it. Michael may not mean as much to me as he means to others, but at the same time, he may mean more to me than I realize.