My thoughts on Michael Jackson
The king of pop is dead.
Ok, that has been around in every newspaper and blog and twitter. The sales of his albums went through the roof and every club has now a MJ week or month. None of this really matters in this writing. This is about my experience, of being far more shocked about MJ’s death, than I ever would have thought…
I was never a real Michael Jackson fan. Of course I adored his music, his dancing and his music videos. When I was 15 and started to be aware of his roots and the brilliancy of his first albums, he was already at the “Earthsong” stage. I did not really like it. But nevertheless, I did spent hours dancing at the Sunday afternoon parties at Burgblick, Oberviechtach, Germany. I wore a hat and a 3.5 meter long scarf, that my grandmother made for me. Among the hardcore Oberpfalzian natives, I surely appeared as a boy with a very, very troubled mind and childhood.
Then came Metallica, Guns ‘n’ Roses, Rammstein, Dio, AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Rock im Park and their metal tones slowly forged cophosis into my ears, while executing Michael out of them. Ten years later, I arrived at Four Seasons from Vivaldi and the zombies from Thriller did not visit even my worst nightmare anymore. MJ seemed to be eradicated from my memory for good.
Execpt, that he wasn’t.
The minute I heard the news of his death, all those childhood and teen memories kicked back in. I remembered the videos I watched, the recordings of the giga-concerts, I wished to have seen live. The moves, the moonwalk. Everything.
Maybe it is because he was always there. He was already the King of Pop, when I started to listen to music. An era already so huge, that it took very long, to consume it all. Something in your life, like a place or grandparents, that always have been there, and you live along with the naive assumption that this will never change.
Strangely, I never really believed any of the accusations against MJ. Maybe I did not want to. I was on a different music by that time, sure, but I realize now, that I always considered Michael Jackson more as an unreal product, a ghost, rather than a person. A product to be entertained by, to be consumed at wish. You may think, that this just goes along with fame and is the result of PR, but I actually NEVER thought of Michael as a human beeing! And that scared me at first.
I do not feel ashamed though, because I would be a hypocrite, trying to sweat a sensitive vain all in sudden. He was presented to the world as a product. That was part of the game. As an asexual thing, to be turned on and off, twisted and bend. A thing, you put away, if you do not need it, and that you can pull back, if you feel like it.
So why so many thoughts? I may realize, that he was a human after all. That he must have lived a hell of a life, and that he must have suffered. And yet I know nothing. I never will. I certainly am sad, that I will never see a concert of him. That is again, the consumer in me, the egoist.
But deep inside I feel, that an era is ending. A great artist is dead. What has been always in my life is now lost and I feel old.
To put it simple: It sucks!
Long live the King.