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I think the first album I ever bought was by the Jackson Five. It wasat a record store on Hillman and Kenmore Street in Youngstown, Ohio,
and I rushed home to jam to the bubble gum beat and the saccharine
sound of Michael Jackson.
Today, neither the store, the vinyl LPs, nor Michael Jackson exist.
Over the years Ive grown an accustomed to the absence of the
store: everything that surrounds it is gone too: the Arab grocery owned
by the notorious Rafiti brothers, Willie Maes Soul Kitchen, the body
shop whose rusted shapes once adorned the corner. Even Hillman Jr High
School, where young women endlessly debated who was the finest, Tito,
Michael or Marlon, is no longer there though the worn-and-torn brick
structure remains.
The LPs gave way to eight track tapes, cassettes, CDs and they to MP3s and I missed them not all that much.
I wonder, however, if I will ever get used to the absence of Michael Jackson.
Its not that I ever was a big Michael fan. I was always more of a funk
man myself and quickly grew to disdain, at least officially, the
Jackson sound. But the Jackson sound, honed in not too far away Gary
and later in Berry Gordy's Motown studio in Detroit, in many ways
defined me and my generation and several sets of other generations in
deep, profound and even troubling ways.
The music, like Stevie Wonder's, is almost omnipresent: always hummed,
within reach, the lyrics part of the bodys genetic memory. Michaels
style and stories are almost omnipotent, cross-cultural urban legends,
toying with the aspirations of hundreds of millions of working-class
poor black, brown and white youth, defining, teasing and tossing them
through the decades of Generation Me, Generation X and Generation Y as
jobs disappeared, towns collapsed and dreams fell in on themselves or
went up in the mist of all too many crack pipes.
And then there was the dark side: not so much in "Thriller," but in
stories of an over-ambitious and cruel father, an ambiguous identity, a
bleaching of personality, texture and tone, with surgeries and dyes and
fashions woven one wondered where: Paris, New York or the laboratories
of 1930s Germany? One watched in, yes, almost horror as a little boy
with round nose and full lips became transformed into what or whom?
Peter Pan? Diana Ross? Elizabeth Taylor? Who?
The rumors, surely some slander, and the charges bounded through the
years, with cash settlements settling nothing. Even the most hardened
stomachs retching with the notion of abused children and ruined lives.
Was this the price of wealth and fame: Oz and infamy, sunglasses, veils
and white gloves? And what lay below? Surely a great, even transcendent
artist and performer, a musical genius, but also the same black child
born into a Gary Indiana of unions and steel and fire and Smokey
Robinson; a proletarian child and pauper turned prince, who thought
perhaps for a price he could have it all.
But with Michael gone and Gary's mills all but closed and also Motown's
General Motors, Chrysler and maybe even Ford, I wonder at what price?
I remember hearing in Cape Town once how Michael had come and tried to
buy Table Mountain, staggered by its beauty by the sea and thinking
that he could own it, not only it the mountain but also perhaps its
beauty, perhaps also its dream.
How could he think that we would sell such a thing, our Table
Mountain? I was asked. I had no answer: only a pang of hurt and angst
not at Michael, never Michael, but at the illusionary pursuit of the
bourgeois dream.
As I mourn Michael, I mourn the Lost throughout the years, but also
relish and wonder at the Found. I also wonder what he was chasing.
Maybe Michael thought hed find it on a mountain. I hope he does. I say
with Baldwin: Go tell it on a mountain, Michael; Go tell it on a
mountain! But remember its not for sale.
Joe Sims is publisher of PoliticalAffairs.net. This was originally posted on http://www.pww.org website.
