The King Has Died; Long Live the King

Michael Jackson, for better or worse, was the embodiment of American culture and of the American society from the beginning of his career.

He was the emblem of the American dream: a meteoric rise to stardom from childhood onward, the iconography of Jackson as a chubby-cheeked kid from a less-than-optimal origin in suburban Chucago grew into suave superstar who created and defied trends and expectations in musical and racial culture and later grew into one of the most enigmatic personalities on the face of the globe, if not in the consciousness of the known universe.

Michael Jackson was the absolute figurehead for what it means to lose one's private life completely to the public sphere. He was the means through which American curiosity-culture galvanized itself and reinforced the legitimization of and addiction to vicariousness and inauthentic living. Jackson was the epitome of a forced and troubled childhood, victimized for ostensibly desiring normality, aggrandized for creating the image of the unattainable superstar. He bore witness to ethical injustices to keep his career intact and continuous, and this ethical calculus rotted away the definitions of right and wrong and eroded the ethical boundaries between perceived good and perceived evil. His life was never his own, truly, even in the most absurdly private moments of his life.

Michael Jackson defined pop culture for more than three decades, having moved from a uniting pop music force to a bewildering disappointment to a grotesque media freakshow subject that helped perpetuate -- rather than report upon -- Jackson's baptism within the waters of moral incongruity and absurd infamy. He supplied the world -- whether through his choice or choice made for him -- with the archetype for the quintessential pop music performer, from the arena set-up to lights to costuming to music videos to merchandising. He literally owned one of the largest cultural exports America had to offer in the form of Disney, but, like so many Americans, made a poor business decision and lost his world along with it.

Michael Jackson was the face of stolen youth, of unattainable dreams and hellish nightmares. He became the butt of millions of jokes and anecdotes as popular culture waited salivating for the next album or moral downfall -- at some point, the delineation between the two in his career was destroyed. Jackson was the face of American jurisprudence to the eye of the common citizen: perceived power and unimaginable wealth -- or its illusion -- automatically required Jackson be guilty of heinous acts or unthinkable deeds, while his fans or virtually anyone who ever heard a Michael Jackson song or made an allusion to "Thriller" continued breaking the speed limit, smoking pot, beating their children, or stealing key chains.

Jackson's legacy is unknown. The permanence and ubiquity of his life -- I hesitate to say private or public since they are essentially one in the same -- create this onus of necessity to understand his impact after death. The everpresence of the legacy of his career during his life practically underscored what it meant to identify as an American, and now that the Age of Plurality has set in, a monolithic figure like Jackson may never again occur.

Jackson was the corporealization of race and racial difference in this country. After the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s seemed to smooth the way for toleration of a race-uniting pop icon, the Jackson 5 attempted to bridge the gap -- unwittingly or not -- between white culture and black culture, yet as a pacifying measure, and not one of any real social dialogue or progress. Michael Jackson's solo career continued to create some unification, but was branded unprofound, inauthentic, and as a false façade of a representative of black culture to white, suburban, race-ignorant culture, and as a traitor to a mainline, politically-charged, dialectic-seeking portion of the African-American community. In any case, wealth and fame were his. Whether symbolically or verily, Jackson lost his blackness more and more as time grew on, yet never became anglicized: he became an outcast of race in the polarized wings of the American body politic, and lost favor with black community he was attempting to run from and lost support from the fearful, tentative white community his career seemed destined to grab hold to. He became raceless, at the cost of losing an identity, whether through chemical treatments or through being stuck in an era of struggle-followed-by-placation.

Michael Jackson became the embodiment of the confusion over what accounting there is or could be regarding gender. Far from a normal sexual-social life due to the inauthentic and non-normative path of his childhood and adulthood, he became a bizarre figure in marriage, an even more bizarre figure in divorce, an ill-suited father, and a tormented man-child, forced back into pre-adult states due to career and societal pressures and apparent questions of gender. The pitch of his voice changed -- going up more than an octave -- from 1989 to now. His medically-altered cleft chin and square jaw suggested masculinity, his collapsed, small nose and high cheekbones suggested femininity. Outlandish, idiosyncratic modes of dress covered any true intentions, and androgyny settled in about him over the span of numerous albums that rarely hinted at the gender or sexuality of love. Jackson was afraid of being male, afraid of being female, while still demanding of himself -- and being forced by the American public, implicitly -- to make a choice where choice is not an option.

Finally, Michael Jackson was the iconoclast of all American culture. It began before it knew it had legs and outran the remainder of the world. It created a halcyon image of itself that was never able to be duplicated, and presented a false image of itself to the world. It was forcefully created and held to impossible standards throughout and the creator of the culture, not the culture itself or the level of meaning within it, was scoured, picked apart, dissected, and left for dead by a hellacious mob of hypocrites. It traveled the world as an emissary of good will of some sort, followed by merchandising and subtle dissatisfaction, and as fame grew, the culture began to skew itself. The culture died an inauspicious death, simultaneously sudden and too soon yet well-timed, with massive questions about the longevity of the impact and imprint. So too is this Michael Jackson's life, a reflection of the culture that created and subsequently destroyed him, a talented, versatile, charismatic performer from Gary, Indiana, a ruddy, nondescript chubby-cheeked kid who had one hell of a voice, who became a sallow, ghostly whipping boy of American culture whose voice was already silenced before it slipped into the ether.