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Michael Jackson's suicide reveals the sad reality of his own personal and human irrelevance. Or in an obtuse way, the self-destruction of a Hollywood and pop-god, demonstrates the negative relevance of MJ's career. Michael Jackson's life was a Hollywood driven fantasy with all the superficiality that such a life exudes. It was a tragedy and one in which Hollywood and its various parasites took a human and destroyed it. The sum total would reflect well in a Shakespearean melo-drama - much dancing and singing and much ado about not that much. Pity Jackson the deformed man, not Jackson the pop culture dancing and singing puppet.
There is little about MJ which is interesting – outside of his strange personality. Contrary to those holding vigil, listening to old MJ songs, or lamenting the passage of 'one of the great entertainers' of all time, MJ's total corpus of work is and was, rather incredibly constrained. He was in some sense, a dancing and singing slave. It is only the pop-culture fascination with all things singing and dancing – and all things light and superficial – which allowed a person like MJ to become famous and then to kill himself.
Yet few care to surmise that it was Hollywood which created, fed, and managed MJ and which of course killed him.
Jackson's voice was feminine and largely annoying. His vocals like his mind never matured. His lyrics were mostly banal and without larger meaning – the epitome of pop culture psychosis. The dancing was somewhat innovative but over time became largely fatuous and with the crotch grabbing it became an illustration of sexual deviancy and exhibitionism. Sexual deviancies are best left in private.
He made a lot of money and somehow became a bankrupt. A sure sign of an incompetent. He tortured his face and body with surgery trying to transform his biological being into something it was not. A sure sign of someone with a mental health issue. His personality was likewise deformed and immature. Jackson had no spiritual base, no mental depth, and no profundity outside of dancing, crotch grabbing and whining in a high voice. His entire career was without purpose.
Like Munroe and Elvis, Jackson became a slave to the industry he thought he led. He was a pawn not a King of pop culture. His message had no votive and no higher motive. Did he deal with deep themes and personal struggles ? Was he a man for freedom, self introspection, or humanism ? Did he balance his life within a framework of moral, physical and mental parameters and codes ? Did he endeavor to impart a higher metaphysical art in his work ?
Of course not. He sang some catchy tunes, with more than a few of them terrible and repetitive. There was no need in his mind or that of his handlers for a life mired in concrete spirituality or purpose. MJ was a god, and abetted by the corruption of Hollywood, MJ became simply a rampaging narcissist with no higher purpose. Crowds, adulation, fame and living only to be famous. This is Hollywood's export to the world – an utter vacuousness of living and of life. MJ is Hollywood's logical outcome – a life and a talent used and thrown away, all to the beat of a pop culture of emptiness and irrelevance.
MJ's death is feted by Hollywood as a period of mourning, but not for MJ. It is a wake for Hollywood and what Hollywood represents. MJ is simply the vehicle of Hollywood's own self absorption and narcissism. MJ as such never existed, he was a creation by others, for the benefit of others, to project a culture which is more obscene than cultural, onto others. MJ's suicide is Hollywood's murder. A man without character is not much of a man.
And MJ never grew up - hence his fascination some of it sexual, some of it not, with children. A sure sign of a troubled psychology.
As Shakespeare's Borachio so aptly commented in Much Ado about Nothing: “Thou knowest that the fashion of a doublet, or a hat, or a cloak is nothing to a man.”
Or one should know that a sequin glove, military jacket and a deformed face, even if surrounded by fame and money, does not a man make.
MJ killed by pop culture. But not many will make the connection between his death and the emptiness of what they worship.
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