I’ve been thinking a lot about Michael Jackson. How can you help it? His life and death and music is all over the media. It has eclipsed news about Iran, Iraq and North Korea. Between Michael, Farrah, Ed, Billy and the deaths of other high-profile people in recent weeks, the recession, billions being spent on the economic stimulus package and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on prisoners seems like yesterday’s news. Celebrity deaths, it seems, is in fashion, replete with memorial t-shirts and swarming fans in it as much for being part of history and seeing a great show as they are for mourning the death of a human being.
That’s right, Michael Jackson was, in fact, a human being. Talented? Yes. Tortured? Yes. Broken? Deeply. But he was, despite our desire to make him something more, fully and entirely human.
I have to disclose here that I have never been star struck. Even as a young girl I wasn’t one to put posters of dreamy Teen-Beat guys on my walls or try to get back stage passes to shows. I love good music or art or movies (I even love bad music, or art or movies), but I have always seen “famous” people as the ones who happened to get seen. Walk through a subway or park in New York City or go to Rosie’s Turn a piano bar in the Village where Broadway extras sing their hearts out between shifts waiting tables and tending bar and you’ll find people who are as talented as those who have top 40 hits. Their songs and art are as captivating as any million-dollar-budget show. That said, Michael Jackson was an extraordinary talent – one that shaped generations – and fact that cannot be ignored.
But, as both the entertainment and the “hard news” stations focus on his death – wrangling and speculating about what will happen to Michael’s kids and his fortune and what he did and did not do behind closed doors at the Neverland Ranch – the coverage has missed something that his sister Janet shared at the 2009 BET Awards Ceremony. Addressing the audience in what clearly appeared to be deep sorrow she said, “To you, Michael is an icon. To us, Michael is family and he will live forever in our hearts.”
To you Michael is an Icon. The words made me pause and ask myself, “An Icon of what?” Icon is defined most simply as “an image or a representation” of something. What is that “something” that he represented for you? How has that informed your response to his life and his death? What happens when we view someone as less than human, treating them like a representation rather than a person?
Makes me wonder how anyone receiving that kind of attention could ever feel seen at all.
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