Yesterday morning, I was still in bed, when my teenage son, who had a few moments before left for college, rushed back screaming Michael Jackson is dead. “Michael Jackson can’t die,” he kept saying. My son has eversince been either humming MJ’s tunes or playing them on the mobile.
It was difficult to believe the news though we all knew Jackson was not in the pink of his health. Whatever be one’s views about Jacko, not in the recent past has anyone caught the imagination of the entire world, cutting across all strata, like MJ did. Essentially what was in him that got a such a huge number of people around the world adore him will a remain a mystery, like the way died.
Excerpts from some articles:
“… Like Orpheus, Jackson was destroyed by his fans, whose adulation and adoration prevented his living in any kind of normal society. The creativity ebbed away day by day. He became a parody of himself. It is time now to forget all that and salute the miraculous boy who will triumph over death as Dionysos did, becoming immortal through his art…” Germaine Greer
“… If ever there was an illustration of the adage that celebrity destroys what it touches, Jackson was it. Highly sensitive and impressionable, he was unsuited to fame – ironic, given that his became one of the most recognised faces in the world. Despite loving the razzle-dazzle of performance – even his off-duty wardrobe, with its epauletted jackets, looked like stagewear – he was crushed by the pressure of maintaining a cherubic public persona. He probably would have been happiest working behind the scenes, in the mode of his collaborator and mentor, Quincy Jones, producer of the 50m-selling Thriller…” Guardian obituary
“… Such were his legal fees and the lavish lifestyle he developed that even the hundreds of millions that allowed him to outbid Paul McCartney for the Beatles’ back catalogue proved insufficient. He all but lost his Neverland ranch, and withdrew – frequently hiding behind a mask on the occasions when he did appear in public, a shield against fame which only made him more newsworthy…” Guardian editorial
“… Michael Jackson came to be synonymous with transformation — ultimately, with an eerie stasis that comes from seeking transformation all the time. The alchemy of change worked longer and better for him — through the ’80s and into the early ’90s — than it has for almost any other artist. And yet somehow all the changes always take us back to the album in which Michael Jackson grew up…” New York Times editorial
“… This compromise with reality gradually became unsustainable. He went to strange lengths to preserve it. Unbounded privilege became another toxic force in his undoing. What began as idiosyncrasy, shyness, and vulnerability was ravaged by obsessions over health, paranoia over security, and an isolation that grew more and more unhealthy…” Deepak Chopra’s tribute in The Huffington Post
“… For more than an hour, TMZ was essentially the only outlet claiming that Mr. Jackson was dead. Television and newspaper journalists read the TMZ report but largely held off on repeating it, for fear of making a mistake. Still, the bulletin traversed the Web with remarkable speed, creating a stark divide: on the Internet Mr. Jackson was dead, and on TV he was still alive…” New York Times
“… In the 50 years that Michael Jackson lived, the rules of journalism have gone from wait-and-see to show-and-wait. Journalism was once grandly said to be the first draft of history. We’ve now moved to a world in which gossip is the first draft of journalism…” Mark Lawson in The Guardian
