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Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Michael Jackson - The Prince of PopIt's been way too much ... of course.
It couldn't
be any other way, I'm afraid. It brought out mostly the worst in many - certainly in my pathetic industry of News (not!)
- but there were surprises. One of the ironic outgrowths of our collective media engorgement is that we must, or can,
pick and choose our poison, as well as our enlightenment. As I tell my students, we have no choice but to become our
own gatekeepers in the endless flood of data which, decoded, becomes information.
So, I woke this morning in the
relative information wasteland of Bulgaria, got my coffee, turned on CNN at 9am. Miraculously, the morning after the
Memorial Spectacle, the lead story only went for 12 minutes ... before moving on to the other _____ guy - Mr. Obama.
After a week of stunning, annoying excess, I finally got just a little more than I needed. Sure, there were still the
idiotic moments -- "as the coffin leaves the Staples Center we have our last look at ..." (not a chance!!!),
CNN resisted reminding us again that "(he) only can die once" (again, not a chance!!!) -- but while the
purported social impact was way overdone, the individual impact was not.
Okay, I admit ... like so many, I was
transported ... not so much to the person of Michael Jackson, nor his music, nor his marvelous dancing, and certainly not
to his fame or actions of the last two decades, but to the times he represented in his early years.
They were so good, when I was a teen and young adult, and the experience of music was so important ...
whether the shock of my parents that I wanted to go to a James Brown concert in Denver in the early 60's, my collection of
Motown albums, the joy of sock hops and street dances where I could dance the twist or the boogaloo (sp?) or the skate or
the surfer stomp, the ecstasy of the first Beatles concert at Red Rocks outside of Denver, regular nights at the Peppermint Lounge
in SF listening to Big Brother & the Holding Company (and their cool lead singer, Janis Joplin), hanging in the panhandle of
Golden Gate Park to the tunes of the Airplane or the Dead or Creedence, or later as a DJ in Vietnam annoying the leadership
by playing Country Joe's "FISH Cheer" or Freda Payne's version of Pink Floyd's "Bring the Boys Home."
Oh, what a time it was! Music with melodies, story-lines, and magical performances. Yeah, Barry Gordy
was almost right last night - Michael Jackson was probably one of the greatest performers of all time.
But watching Jimi Hendrix or Eric Clapton work their guitars, in much different ways, at the Winter Garden, or Janis assaulting
the mic in "Ball and Chain," or Ten Years After's Alvin Lee and his manic "I'm Comin' Home" ... or even
something as prosaic as following Paul Simon re-making himself every decade or so, a musical talent, like McCartney, who leaves
MJ in the dust.
Still, I revere my copy of Motown's 25th at the Apollo, and there was a tear or two when Paris
spoke at the end, and earlier when Mariah Carey choked a little as she sang. But I think it's more generic
than Michael. We actually cared back then (or as my son says, rolling his eyes, "back in the day");
we believed in the pain and angst reflected in the music; we revelled in our compassion, as naive as it was
perceived by others, then and now; and so it was the apparent authenticity of some of the emotion from last
night that moved me. I'm appalled that I might quote anybody from Fox News, much less Shepard Smith, but I do think
he summed it up well with, "there were days when on the cover of The New York Post, he was just ‘Wacko Jacko.’
But today, just moments ago, his daughter reminded us all he was also, Daddy.”
Even though ABC News' Charlie
Gibson was perhaps half-right when, in an apparent attempt to bring some gravitas (or maybe, fact) to the excess, he said,
"People have gone back to the music,” he was downright insightful when he added, "“It’s as if
the last 10 or 15 years didn’t happen.” [Thanks to Allessandra Stanley of the NY Times.]
As Ms.
Stanley, earlier in her Times report, perhaps inadvertantly summed up:
"Even
on mute, the tribute mattered: as the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, showed in 1997,
communal sorrow is moving, public frenzy is alarming, but the two together make for irresistible television."
Anyway, thanks for the memories.
1:18 pm eest
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