You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Michael Jackson’ tag.
You just knew it was going to happen. Michael Jackson has been dead less than a week, and already there are rumors that he faked his death to escape the celebrity limelight.
At the risk of giving Derek Clontz more attention than he deserves, I turn your attention to his latest Web posting, which quotes “sources in a position to know” who say Jackson faked his death and is living in an undisclosed location, possibly in Eastern Europe.
For the record, another recent posting includes a purported picture of Elvis Presley visiting Graceland incognito. It appears “the King” also faked his death to escape the trials and pressures of superstardom.
Both of these fictions ignore a couple of key problems. First of all, there were dead bodies in both cases. If the dearly deceased weren’t Jackson or Presley, who were they? And how were those deaths arranged? Instead of coroner’s inquests, shouldn’t we be opening murder investigations?
What is it about our culture that insists on denying the demise of our pop idols? Are they so important to our psyches that we can’t imagine life without them?
For some people, sadly, this is the case. For others, like Clontz — a former “journalist” at “notable mainstream and mass-market newspapers, including Freedom Newspapers and Media General titles, GLOBE, Star, National Examiner, and The National Enquirer’s iconic Weekly World News” — the intent is to capitalize on our frailties in the same way those publications do: by treating fantasy as fact, the truth be damned.
If Jackson is now planning his “Back From the Dead” tour, as Clotz implies, I will be the first in line to buy a ticket. Truth is, there’s not even a ghost of a chance.
By the time he died, Michael Jackson had become a caricature of himself to many of us who once admired his artistic talents.
Michael Jackson
Gone was the musically precocious little boy hamming it up on stage as the centerpiece of the Jackson Five.
Gone was the billiance that marked his groundbreaking “Thriller.”
Gone, for all we could tell, was the gravity-defying dancer who moonwalked across the stage as if half man, half Martian.
Instead, what we had was a recluse whose relevance lay in the corner gathering dust, overshadowed by his constant shape-shifting and rumored personal life. For me and others, Michael Jackson’s raw creepiness finally displaced his considerable accomplishments as an artist.
Preparing for a comback tour, Jackson died today a relatively young man at age 50. Which makes his death doubly sad. Whatever my feelings about him on a personal level, there is no doubt that my generation has lost yet another musical icon — one who I fear will be remembered by a younger generation in the same way they will remember Paris Hilton.
