That's right, Michael Jackson was, in fact, a human being. Talented? Yes. Tortured? Yes. Broken? Deeply. But he was, despite our desire to make him something more, fully and entirely human.
I have to disclose here that I have never been star struck. Even as a young girl I wasn't one to put posters of dreamy Teen-Beat guys on my walls or try to get back stage passes to shows. I love good music or art or movies (I even love bad music, or art or movies), but I have always seen "famous" people as the ones who happened to get seen. Walk through a subway or park in New York City or go to Rosie's Turn a piano bar in the Village where Broadway extras sing their hearts out between shifts waiting tables and tending bar and you'll find people who are as talented as those who have top 40 hits. Their songs and art are as captivating as any million-dollar-budget show. That said, Michael Jackson was an extraordinary talent - one that shaped generations - and fact that cannot be ignored.
But, as both the entertainment and the "hard news" stations focus on his death - wrangling and speculating about what will happen to Michael's kids and his fortune and what he did and did not do behind closed doors at the Neverland Ranch - the coverage has missed something that his sister Janet shared at the 2009 BET Awards Ceremony. Addressing the audience in what clearly appeared to be deep sorrow she said, "To you, Michael is an icon. To us, Michael is family and he will live forever in our hearts."
To you Michael is an Icon. The words made me pause and ask myself, "An Icon of what?" Icon is defined most simply as "an image or a representation" of something. What is that "something" that he represented for you? How has that informed your response to his life and his death? What happens when we view someone as less than human, treating them like a representation rather than a person?
Makes me wonder how anyone receiving that kind of attention could ever feel seen at all.
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Joan, Personally, I feel much like you do..well, almost exactly!
I myself have tried to figure out why, WHY?, has this hit me as hard as it seems to have..What I have come up with is this; that his music literally MOVES me..it brings me to a place that I can't seem to otherwise.
With his earlier music, that place would be at home in Queens with my brothers. In those years, it was just "us", a sibling 'clan', if you will, of 4, me as the eldest watching these two brothers just a smidge beneath me in age. The soft spoken mild manner of MJ was much like my brother that I lost just over a year ago. So, I have come to see that the earlier years of music bring me back to a special time in my life where I can hear and see my two brothers. Sometimes I have to turn off the radio or tv when I hear it as it is too profound and I may not be up to it emotionally when it comes on randomly as it does right now with the media.
The later years of music (80's) bring me to a place of being a very young single mother of two daughters. They are fond memories, yet a struggle to find my place in a world that seemed to be all couples. For the most part, it is all pleasant and happy and dancing, as music has been and still is an integral part of my spirit and has carried through with my children, one a dancer, one a guitarist.
So, icon to what?..good question, but I think that answer will be different for everyone. None of this media attention has surprised me too much, except when I saw the 'hard news" was covering it all as well. Then you realize that it is a business and I guess they must!lol.
On a more serious note, and in closing, I have to say that after losing 5 loved ones in a year and a half, two of them being a Mom and a brother, I continue as I still grief, to come up with the same thought...
For ME, It is all about WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND...that's it!
what do we leave behind..what good have we left in this world?
And I guess to that I can also think of MJ.
Thanks for your provocative post!
Leanne
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