Chaely Sleeps Forever

barthel:

In 1977, Elvis died.  It was an anticlimatic moment, and an anticlimactic death.  Long past his prime, and even past a comeback that failed to cohere into some sort of second-act respectability, his death left many things unresolved, a fact attested to by all the posthumous sightings.  What was unresolved isn’t exactly clear: there were secrets yet to come out, true, a drug habit that could’ve been kicked, all right, and an embrace of schmaltz that could be rejected.  But all seem like unlikely outcomes.  It was just an unexpected place to cut off the arc, like someone realized they’d run out of ideas five years back and couldn’t think of anywhere else to take it.  Elvis was written into a corner.  But he died just when the changes he’d wrought were, according to popular legend anyway, at their moribund peak.  1977 was the year that dinosaur rock was theoretically killed by punk, the supposed “year zero.”  Taste killed him, maybe, thinking if it cut out the living embodiment of lazy, bloated, self-satisfied rock the body would die off, too.

Which is basically the situation we have here with MJ.  This is an unsatisfying resolution: there was no successful comeback, no redemption, no elder statesman period, not even a blaze of glory to go out on, just a middle-aged heart attack.  But at the same time, we are in some sort of end times of all he represents.  The world of celebrity journalism and gossip seems to have hit rock bottom, self-sustaining on a steady diet of nothing, running on the fumes of a system totally contained within their walls and unconnected with any sort of exterior fame.  Megafame itself is mostly dead, a few old stars aside.  Maybe this is a kind of year zero, too.  Maybe something else will come along.  Maybe it’s politics.  God help us all.

When I turned on the TV last night the first thing I heard was “the King of Pop is dead, tonight, after going into cardiac arrest…”  All I could think was that I felt sad, but I couldn’t think of a single unselfish reason to feel bad that he was gone.  That is not the right response to the death of a cultural icon.

Farrah Fawcett’s passing made me feel sad for her.  She loved life.  She didn’t want to die.  She had things to live for and reasons why she would rather have stayed on Earth a little longer.  Did Michael?

I dug around in my brain for a reason to be sad for his passing, but never came up with anything.  I kept going back to the idea that he was probably never truly happy a single day in his life.  Suddenly his death felt more like the end of a lifelong prison sentence than the end of a life of fame and glory.

He made a lot of money but it wasn’t his own.  He was always in debt to someone and didn’t have the maturity to deal with his finances properly.  He had a lot of people around him and adoring fans everywhere he looked, but I don’t think he ever really knew or understood what love was about in a personal sense.  He was a prisoner of his own circumstances.  Circumstances that I’m inclined to believe he only “chose” because it was the only lifestyle he ever knew & the only thing that made him feel important to anyone.

The poor man never had a chance to be anything but a machine built to entertain the drooling masses.  Sure he was an incredible performer and did some amazing things for music, but his life was so tragic that I just can’t really mourn his passing.

So I say thank goodness that he’s free from the monstrosity that his life had become.  Thank goodness that he’s free from enduring the public scrutiny, shame, and accusations that followed him wherever he went.  Thank goodness he can finally stop flipping between hiding from the public and begging it for acceptance.

I hope that people see that our obsession with tragedy and fame is what turns these brave & talented people into helpless pawns.  I hope people realize that we helped cause his demise by loving Michael Jackson the celebrity and not caring at all about Michael Jackson as a person.  I hope that in the future people learn to leave celebrities alone so their only hope for an escape isn’t an untimely death.