Too many words about Michael Jackson
As the 1980s wore on and the sociopathic aura of Reaganism settled over my little suburban street, I remember feeling deeply cheated to have grown up in the eighties. Veterans of previous decades spoke longingly—if annoyingly—about the thrill of living in stirring, decadent times, but I was reasonably sure that the only great adventure offered by this decade was a siege mentality of the few who cared surrounded by the many who didn’t.

By 1984, the decade's fun New Wave early years were over, replaced by a pop culture that seemed formed from an especially noxious and gooey mix of bubblegum and silicone. What wasn't schlocky and insipid (E.T.) seemed vicious and shallow (Andrew Dice Clay) and the Reagan Revolution seemed to give an entire nation permission to let out its inner slick dickhead.

It's possible, of course, that my alienation had nothing to do with the culture. Perhaps I had simply become sufficiently adult, and therefore hip to the world, to become appropriately cynical. It's possible that Americans had always been as shallow and selfish as they suddenly appeared to me around the time of Reagan's re-election, only I had grown out of my puerile Disney-ish fantasies of a nation of people who shared certain humane beliefs.





Growing up in the 70s, my brother had a plastic peace sign dangling from the ceiling of the bedroom we shared, though it may have symbolized bong hits more than anything more enlightened. It still seems to me, however, that the 80s were the decade when people finally gave up on having the least thoughts of anything like "the public good," withdrawing to their sanctuaries of late night cable, doing lines of coke off Poison CD cases, and whacking off to some seriously deranged free market fantasies.

You could neither say the 80s were good to be enjoyable nor so dramatically bad as to be interesting. It was just something to muddle through until something else came along. (This isn't to say that some great music wasn't made in the 80s, but one common thread to that music was a collective alienation.)

Perhaps because he had always seemed too effete to do anything as badass as OD, the death of Michael Jackson took me by genuine surprise. But after I processed the fact, registering his death as perhaps the least appealing pop star personality to OD since that guy from Blind Melon, what I was left with was the music—music that brought back to me the whole of the 80s in one hair sprayed, sequined, overly shoulder-padded swoop.

There has been nonstop talk about Michael Jackson all week. At one point, I was walking down Snyder Avenue when I heard three cars in a row playing Michael Jackson. Earlier today, I was behind two burly union-looking guys who were talking about MJ. "Yeah, he was really talented,” said one with an accent that sounded like it should have been coming from under the hood of a car. “Not really my thing, you know—but a very talented guy."

Now I understand the power of pop music as well as anyone. I am, I confess, a sucker for a catchy tune. I recently listened to “Come on Eileen” four times in a row. I contend that good pop songs—even the dumb ones—are important. They give people a common point of reference, allowing people of the same age to sync their nostalgia with that of millions of others. Inescapably, the Michael Jackson phenomenon was something our generation shared. We all can remember how lame the tough guys looked in the video or “Beat It” and we all can remember the creepiness of the Vincent Price intro to "Thriller."

Still, in the donut hole of the 80s emptiness—at the very center of the falseness and selfishness of the mid-80s—there will always be Michael Jackson. He was, undoubtedly, a superstar—creating a string of songs that ingratiated themselves into your brain like some sort of repetitive fever dream. But for all of his fame, Michael Jackson’s music never seemed to carry much in the terms of cultural meaning.

Unlike Elvis, who brought black music to white America, or the Beatles, who absolutely destroyed the limits of what was possible in pop music, Michael Jackson seemed to be mostly about… acting as butch as possible while wearing silk, sequined shirts. Thematically, he tended towards gestures of faux toughness and masculinity— note the lyrics of “Bad” and his many videos involving dancing gang members. If anything, his accomplishment is letting Quincy Jones add some rock edges to a disco beat.

In the end, I would never discount someone’s grieving over a musician they admired. They have their Michael Jackson, and I have mine. (Note: “My” Michael Jackson loved molesting little boys.) And they have their 80s, and I have mine. But for me, the essential falseness of Michael Jackson mirrored the essential falseness of the 1980s—and there are some limits to my sorrow over the passing of an icon of a benighted age.