Monday, July 6, 2009

The Miseducation of Michael Jackson

40 out of 50: The number of years Michael Jackson spent on earth as a public figure. 5: The (likely) number of years he remembered before becoming a star.

Then life changed. He was a poor kid from Gary, Indiana who suddenly had every thing a kid could want. Why did he have it? Because he was young and talented. Unlike most kids, charismatic youth didn’t merely get Michael his way; it allowed him to make a more than comfortable living in which people showered him with fanatic adulation. For Michael Jackson, idyllic childhood memories include working full time as the charismatic boy frontman of a band everyone loved.

But there were traumas as well. Some of the most significant include the fading of the Jackson Five, being told he was no longer the youthful star people once knew (and this doesn’t begin to take into account the affect his father had on his life). As he developed and aged within youth, he felt the sting of premature mortality otherwise known as adolescence. He stopped being cute and developed acne. Gone was the cute youngster. In his place was a young man going through an awkward phase. In life as he knew it, he had grown old and unloved.

And before he had a chance to live among us mortals, to go through the unique growing pains many child stars experience, Off The Wall happened and he was once again a superstar, handsome and loved. I think it’s this moment, just before he re-entered the stratosphere he decided: I’ll never experience anything like adolescence again. And here, Michael Jackson’s maturation was arrested forever.

He would cease to age. He would join the Lost Boys and reject biology, turning the aging process into a permutation of youth. In his mind, he’d allowed youth to slip from his grasp once and, in what can only be described as irony, was too old and wise to allow that to happen again.

Michael was addicted to youth. It wasn’t just the commodity he traded in his whole career; it was the fount from which he found salvation. In the youth embodied by children, “youth” as Michael understood it, there was love and there was truth. Like any addict, Michael craved it excessively. Does that mean he didn’t care about kids? Hardly, I think Michael was a genuine champion for children, but in that caring seemed to be an impulse that could only be described as covetous. And that, coupled with a mind that chooses to identify with the youth of a child and a body over whom the mind does not matter, led to increasingly bizarre–and possibly criminal–behavior.

It’s not enough to say Michael “missed out” on his youth. No; it was co-opted by individuals in the pursuit of profit. Early on he would learn the lesson that defined his life: Youth sells. As he aged–in many respects, it’s hard to say he “matured”–the prime directive was maintaining a youthful appeal accented by a dose of sex and, at times, righteous indignation. That prime directive will forever accent the darker regions of his legend.

Despite maturing magnificently as an artist, despite being on a short list of people known the world over, I doubt Michael Jackson ever escaped the shadow of little Michael and the Jackson Five. Millions of fans and millions of dollars could not return him to what he once was: Young.

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