The boy in the bubble, the man in the mirror
Not since the death of Elvis has the passing of a music legend so gripped the world. As fans and detractors alike struggle to come to grips with the sad, strange end of Michael Jackson we assess his legacy – as musician, celebrity and enduring icon and talk to some of the people who knew and understood him best.
Peter Murphy, 03 Jul 2009
To the vast majority of the bazillion or so people who bought Thriller or danced to ‘Billie Jean’, Michael Jackson wasn’t quite real. He was more a combination of sine waves, a hologram, an avatar, and in his later days, an object of ridicule and a caution. For those of us too long in the tooth and with better things to do than affect residual or abstract grief for a distant star, it was tempting to react to reports of the 50-year-old’s death from a heart attack last Thursday – on the eve of a mammoth sell-out comeback tour – with the detachment of the professional obit writer whose first response is to calculate word count and column inches. We’re affected sure, but through a gauze, like witnessing the tragic end of the flawed hero in a film. We might shake our heads or tut-tut or even shed a tear, but we get to walk away pretty much unscathed.
So if MJ was to us Joe Soaps some sort of shared hallucination, an Afro-American idoru, we have to ask ourselves why his passing has made so many of us feel sad and... strange. Maybe because the way Jackson’s yarn played out is not just the oldest one in the book: your off-the-rack Icarus myth, a yawnsome but still cautionary tale about the fraudulent illusion of fame or celebrity or whatever you want to call it – it’s also the latest manifestation of the Tantalus-and-Narcissus complex that leads pop aspirants down a primrose path and ends up in a slurry pit. A recurring cultural sickness that begins with I wanna be somebody and ends with I vant to be alone.
“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true/ Or is it something worse?” sang that other ‘80s MTV and stadium icon Bruce Springsteen. But what if a dream is both a lie and something worse even if it does come true? Consider Jackson’s case history, the damaged child become spoiled adult, the boy in the bubble (or the boy and the Bubbles) who grew up (or didn’t grow up) to become a man-child afflicted with an even worse scourge than an unhappy childhood: fame.
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