Friday, June 26, 2009 - Posts
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He has strangely colored skin, a legendarily dysfunctional family, and is perpetually 10 years old. No wonder Michael Jackson identified with Bart Simpson. On a DVD commentary track that's part of The Simpsons: The Complete Third Season box set, the show's executive producer, James L. Brooks, says he fielded a call from Jackson early in the show's run. "I love Bart," the King of Pop said. "I want to give Bart a No. 1 single."
Jackson delivered on his promise, ghostwriting the chart-topping "Do the Bartman." (OK, it only went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom; it wasn't released as a single in America.) The song came out in November 1990—a year before 11-year-old Macaulay Culkin starred in Jackson's "Black or White" video—and sounds as dated as every other two-decade-old, light-rap ditty voiced by a cartoon character. (Also see: "Opposites Attract.") "Do the Bartman" did, however, accomplish the feat of uniting two cultural icons. The most-memorable lyric: "If you can do the Bart, you're bad like Michael Jackson."
Around the same time Jackson launched Bart's singing career, he asked Simpsons creator Matt Groening whether he could be on the show. By 1992, when the M.J.-starring "Stark Raving Dad" aired as the third-season premiere, the show was transitioning from a T-shirt-selling fad (the "Eat My Shorts, Man!" era) to a work of pop art. Jackson's guest appearance, well before the era in which the likes of Helen Hunt and Lucy Lawless appeared on a weekly basis, marked him as part of the cultural vanguard.
The greatness of "Stark Raving Dad" has a lot more to do with the The Simpsons' writing staff than with Jackson's voice-over talents. (As with "Do the Bartman," M.J. insisted on keeping his name off the episode; he was billed as "John Jay Smith.") The show's scripters came up with a plot device far more ingenious than simply dropping the singer into Springfield, instead placing the singer's falsetto voice inside a 300-pound mental patient who believes he's Michael Jackson. On the DVD commentary, writer Al Jean says the script run-through at the singer's manager's house was "the most nerve-racking table read I've been to in my life." To Jackson's credit, he didn't flinch at being depicted as a crazy Caucasian. The only two notes he gave on the script: an appeal to replace Prince with Elvis in a joke about mentally unstable musicians, and a request for a scene in which he stays up all night writing a song with Bart.
Put aside Jackson's professed desire to spend the evening with a young (albeit two-dimensional) boy and it's impossible not to be charmed by "Lisa, It's Your Birthday." The minute-long song—written by Jackson but voiced by an imitator because, according to James L. Brooks, M.J. wanted to play "a joke on his brothers"—is one of the least-essential in the singer's catalog. It's also incredibly endearing, a sweet jingle written by a childlike adult for his favorite cartoon. That brief moment on The Simpsons feels like the perfect encapsulation of a life and a career. Michael Jackson: pop genius, forever young at heart, mental case.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 85: "who died yesterday." Though far down on the rankings, this search term pretty much sums up what comes before it. About two-thirds of the list has to do with Michael Jackson, RIP, from song lyrics to the method of death to long-standing associates. Poor Farrah Fawcett was quickly buried in the rankings—but for No. 3, her playboy images, and several misspellings of her name. A confusing addition to this picture is No. 35, "Jeff Goldblum dead," which resulted from Twitter-fed rumors generated by prank Web sites that the Jurassic Park actor had passed away. He has not.
No. 2: "maria belen chapur photos." Seems like people want to know whether South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's Argentine lover was worth destroying his career for. Although The State newspaper, which publicized the pair's steamy e-mails, kept her full name a secret, Latin American news sources tracked down the 43-year-old professional mother of two and tossed her to the wolves. The actual images are so far few and far between, but go ahead and see for yourself.
No. 14: "nancy benoit hustler pics." This isn't your typical porn-star photo search—a federal appeals court ruled yesterday that Hustler was wrong to print nude photos of Nancy Benoit, who two years ago was killed by her husband, professional wrestler Chris Benoit. The photos are from 20 years ago, and a suit filed by Nancy's family alleges that she asked the photographer destroy the images as soon as they were taken. A lower court originally ruled for the magazine in October 2008.
—Lydia DePillis
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Forgive me if I don’t linger on the man’s music.
Thriller was released on November 30, 1982, but it was an album of 1983. The label led with the single “This Girl Is Mine” before releasing “Billie Jean” on January 3. “Billie Jean” was an instant hit for Jackson, but full beatification and canonization was yet to come.
On March 25, 1983, NBC aired “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever,” featuring a reunion of the Jackson 5, a group the Peacock’s audience no doubt remembered fondly from AM radio play, variety hours, and Saturday morning cartoons. As their medley wound down, volume came up on the predatory beat of Billie Jean; and something new and else began to throb through both Jackson and the audience.
An astonished Fred Astaire was in the home audience of 47 million—the most ever to watch a TV music special—and he was moved to phone up Jackson the next day. The two have similar body types: sylph-like elongations for limbs, responsive to every unlikely command. Astaire had seen what everyone had seen. The fedora, the spangled jacket, the slink, the moonwalk—in sum, the rebirth of the total superstar—but he also saw something else. “You’re an angry dancer,” he reportedly told Jackson over the phone.
The moment I heard he died I watched the Motown appearance on my iPhone. It is thrilling. It belongs to eternity. But it also belongs to something else. It belongs to 1983, an annus mirabilis, in its way, in American life; a year of economic recovery that, in addition to prosperity and the King of Pop, brought us Madonna, Oprah, Jay McInerney, Tom Cruise, Michael Milken, Vanity Fair, and the resurrection of Andy Warhol, downtown impresario behind the Limelight nightclub. Thus Jackson was a central figure in the re-creation of a viable American mainstream, a mainstream dominated by the larger-than-life, if you’re being polite—or credulous. I prefer the noun form of “grotesque.”
What Jackson made of himself must form part of any honest eulogy. Defendants wish to be found innocent of the charges. Jackson was no usual suspect. He wanted to be found innocent, through and through. Innocent of guile, of all bodily dross and urge. Innocent of adult experience. Instead he found himself, as he sequestered with the bones of the Elephant Man, merged physiognomy with Diana Ross, and bedded down with little boys, at some weird four corners of his own making, where the innocent and the sinister, the icon and the freak, all come together.
The falsetto speaking voice, the licorice eyes, hair steam ironed and Zambonied until it was straight. The skin—what? We still don’t know. Bleached? Blanched? Poached? The barely suppressed facial hair. Effacement, defacement, refacement, unfacement. What word could do justice to the creation, out of a perfectly normal human countenance, of the dilapidated faerie mask that MJ’s eventually became? It was as if the slightest concession to the normal human horizon would let in a besieging pain. To substitute for the childhood he never had, he picked, with uncanny accuracy, exactly those things that don’t substitute for an actual childhood. Amusement parks and toys—the placatory devices of the bad parent.
A genius; an angry dancer; a grotesque among grotesques. What to make of Jacksonian America, now that the King himself is dead? An immense and spectacular frenzy; an urgent celebration; the affect of triumph; at its center a derangement; beneath that, in all likelihood, nothing.
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To anyone who ever bought into the Michael Jackson mythos—for a decade, for an album, for the opening bars of "Billie Jean"—it's something of a cruel and cognitively dissonant indignity that TMZ.com was the coroner at his bedside, scribbling his death certificate. On one hand, we have the "king of pop"—a quaint, archaic title by 21st-century standards. On the other, we have the fiercely irreverent figurehead of the 21st-century gossip-industrial complex, for which there is no such thing as royalty, for which the emperor isn't just naked but naked in a bunch of pictures he was foolish enough to keep on his Sidekick. Michael Jackson famously erected a 30-foot statue of himself in 1995, and the tabloids speeded it along on its way to Ozymandias-style ruin. (At least Ozymandias never had to deal with rumors that his nose was falling off.)
But as tempting as it is to describe a parasitic, inverse relationship between Jackson and the tabloids—as his power and prominence waned, theirs grew exponentially—the coupling was more complex. Jackson didn't go so far as, say, Britney Spears and date a paparazzo, but he paved the way for her brand of tabloid symbiosis in other ways: developing a persecution complex and making antagonists real and imagined the subject of many of his songs; submitting to a Faustian arrangement in which the paparazzi would keep the flashbulbs popping as long as he kept the crazy coming. Jackson's vanity fed into and fed on the vicious news cycle. He never put out for the cameras as much as Spears did at her barefoot, panty-free best, but he never quite slipped the noose the way she seems to have done today, either, cleaning up her act and asserting a degree of control over the situation by turning it into postmodern theater. In part, Jackson's inability to handle the paps comes down to the fact that he was a much, much weirder person than Spears (and, for that matter, Elvis). The only way for him to clean up his act was to haul it to a remote island in the Middle East and do his best to go dark (no pun intended). But in part it's also because of the era he came up in, one that left him ill prepared for the one that followed and that was well on its way out by the time Spears hit the scene: an era in which all meaningful distinction between intense adulation and intense scorn hadn't yet collapsed, in which it wasn't yet written into the standard-issue pop-star contract that, in the end, however it plays out, TMZ gets the last word.
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