Interesting article in a UK newspaper on the worship of Michael Jackson. Writes William Langley:
In the sense that Michael Jackson's life was a celebration of strangeness, his death, at the age of 50, lays the groundwork for something much stranger. Call it deconstruction, call it deification; the passing of the man invites an evaluation of the myth. "No one knows the truth," he said in 1987. "No one knows what, or who I am. And the longer it takes them to discover this, the more famous I will be."
Jackson's fans, as opposed to those who merely like his music, consider themselves to be different from the fans of other performers. The issues that consume them tend to have less to do with his talent than his meaning. Obsessive, wary, emotional, occasionally hostile to outsiders, they have come to see Michael as some kind of sui generis American miracle – part human, part spiritual – and themselves as the witnesses to its authenticity.
"They are unlike anyone else I've met," says Michael Joseph Gross, author of Starstruck, a recently published study of fan worship, "in that they consider they are performing a moral duty. They see themselves as the attendants of a holy innocent, representing what they perceive to be his values – generosity, humility and love in a world where goodness is persecuted." A conspicuously motley bunch, Jackson's fans were bound together by the belief that, for all his fame and money, Michael had had a rotten deal in life. Firstly, at the hands of his cosmically ruthless father, Joe, then from the media, and much of the entertainment industry itself which treated him as a freak show, and finally from the authorities who tried to put him in jail. It was painful to behold, and the only remedy was to love Michael more.
This form of worship drew its energy from pop-cultural notions of redemptive faith and martyrdom, and it proved immune to changing fashions, career slumps, personal dramas, as – in all probability – it will to his death. The ranks of Jackson's "true believers", as Newsweek magazine has called them, understood what was expected of them, and wherever they gathered the familiar contours of celebrity fandom exploded into an entirely new topography.
Jackson's passing is tragic, and the idol worship by the throngs of people at the gates of his property who never knew him outside of a record turntable or CD cover is as well. But also tragic was his life--an unhappy half-century lacking the most basic and simplest pleasures and relationships of life. But perhaps the saddest and most telling quote yet is this one:
Eight years ago, Michael arrived in Britain to address the Oxford Union wearing a surgical face mask, but his speech was informed by good sense and personal experience. "I come before you not as an icon of pop," he said, "but as a representative of a generation that no longer knows what it is to be children. What I really wanted was a dad. I wanted a father who showed me love, and my father never did that. He seemed intent on making us a commercial success. But what I really wanted was a dad."
