Jacko

Said a colleague passing by ‘By the way, you do know that Michael Jackson died this morning, right? ‘

I didn’t know. I am shocked. I spend a few minutes trying to figure out why I suddenly felt so sad. I haven’t heard his songs for ages. It’s the passing of an era I guess. Moreover, MJ seemed ageless, not time bound. The sweet faced young boy, with ‘Don’t Stop Till you Get Enough’, is replaced over time with a strange mutating creature, and his songs are cleverer than his personal life. Michael Jackson moved from music to mime, from a beloved boy rock star to a strange clown-liquid faced person in a time bubble. Bubbles the Chimpanzee, pet Llama, amusement park and all.

I sat up nights watching the iconic Thriller videos when I was a teenager, and the music is still in my head. I watched him with Paul Mc Cartney with the incredibly sweet, teasing duet ‘ The Girl is Mine ‘ as well as the darker ' The Way you Make me Feel’ with its sadistic overtones. And the poignant ballad ‘One Day in Your Life’ which was a favorite of (surprisingly !) my mother’s . ‘We are the World’ was another. In the incredible ‘Black and White’, where one face ironically merged with another, she looked with increasing dismay at the rapidly changing landscape of his color and nose . ‘He is such a handsome boy, why is he doing all this to himself’, she would ask me. I shrugged- his plastic surgery was his vanity and a joke, and I never thought about the fear and fragility that may have motivated him. When was he 50? I recall this ageless wizard when I was in school and college, at work and in growing older. But he was always Peter Pan. In Never never land perhaps, but never a number.

He was a genius, clearly one in a lifetime born, used to fame and the spotlights right from a 5 year old. Clearly meant for spangles, spotlight and then stardust. Who can forget his songs, that signature vocal hiccup, his path breaking entertainment on MTV, those eye-popping dance moves , which went from dazzling and fresh to strangely robotic and cruel , but no less brilliant nevertheless. I remember that incredibly sweet, almost shy, little boy smile and that high falsetto voice, that progressed to the peculiar lip gash smirk and the Michael-I’m-Barbie face. One day he became the sad clown under the circus top, and while other clowns rode their bicycles over him, or pretend-hit him with a paddle, he blinked and cried , but we all still laughed and clapped at his antics.

We owned Michael, and he did us justice. He lived his life in front of our eyes and his world tours and live shows demonstrated his unsurpassed ability to entertain. He became increasingly eccentric as he grew in that glass bubble, and we watched him distantly amused and enchanted at the same time. I admit I wanted Never Never Land too, but I am not sure about either the nose or the time capsule. Increasingly his isolation, wild spending, and later child abuse charges, and clearly eccentric star status lent him the mystery that finally degenerated into the tawdry.

Apparently when the news of his death flashed, the ‘volcanic’ nature of the searches were such that Google was inundated and Twitter and Wikipedia did briefly crash.

This iconic, delusional, flawed yet gifted pop star lived his life in the glare of 80 million eyes. There was nowhere to hide, even in the most painful of times.

The spotlights stripped him naked and shriveled.

He lived, he loved, he fell apart, and pulled himself together, he grew , he shrunk, he performed, and he paled , he sang his heart out , and then he withered .
He tottered, rose, and fell in our gaze.

Many times.

He was a soap opera unto himself , and I wondered if he knew that when he woke up in pain that day in LA , thought about his graying, flawed life, injected himself with Demerol that afternoon, suffered a cardiac arrest and died. Even his death was Reality TV at its best.

His daughter Paris broke down at the Memorial for her Daddy, the best Daddy in the world, and suddenly the kaleidoscope shifted for me. The voyeurism and the TRP’s became real, personal, and a bit too much. I turned off the TV. I had forgotten that he was also a person, and not just an entertainer. I forgot that even if we all felt like we owned him, as he lived his life and times in front of us; he actually belonged to a chosen few. Those who loved him and lived with him. The real Michael , however tortured - Daddy , Brother , Son , Friend .

He moved voluntarily from the music stage on to a mounting board, this brilliant, dazzling butterfly . As one of those gawping 80 million who were captivated by his talent, read his antics with increasing perplexity , poked at his scabs, stood on judgment , and still loved his music, its sad to let go this fragile, fluttering butterfly impaled on a pin.

RIP, Michael.