Michael Jackson memoriam

I saw K-Punk's essay on Michael Jackson and decided I would go ahead with the one that had been forming in my head as I walked through endless supermarket corridors the last couple weeks.

I am basically too young to know Jackson's efflorescence. I wasn't alive, or at least not aware, when he was doing his best work. I do remember when the video for "Black or White" came out because it was touted as a semi-event (I was too young to be critical, much less cynical) and was in a way self-fulfilling--the mass mobilization of cultural capital is something, even if it is promoting a lost object. In the case of MJ this was all the more so. His reclusion was something like that of another masterpiece in black and white, Citizen Kane, and the fact of him stepping away from his lugubrious throne was enough to catch attention. But more than that, the video for B&W was pushed as cutting edge digital manipulation (the wikipedia page says that it was previously used only in films such as Terminator). MJ might not have been at the forefront of "music" with Dangerous, but he was still at the crest of some other wave. It was not clear then whether his video was breaking ground in sheer expenditure ("the expense of spirit in a waste of shame") or in technological innovation, and this ambiguity haunts all aspects of the Jackson legacy.

The part of this haunting interesting to me here is how his death has given him and his music new life, a social presence that I believe was being held back by the fact of his personal vitality. I mean "vitality" as the simple fact of living. Life was a negative value, a predicate that diminished him. The same could be said I suppose of any pinnacle celebrity (Elvis is the obvious example, Hitler the other), and really of any of us. But by "life" in this context I don't mean all the messy details that drag us down and sully us with their swarming demands, or the King's beer belly, garish costumes illuminated by historical hindsight, and other indignities of aging in the limelight, I mean "life" as a factical condition. In the way that life would diminish a ghost.

In the last few weeks Jackson's music has become omnipresent on the radio. A weight has been lifted: the child molestation charges, the generally off-putting weirdness of late Jackson, has been paid in blood-gold and the preferred parts of his corpus can be separated from the offal. If he challenged convention by becoming a cyborg, we can now dissassemble him, like the deathless-dead body in Pynchon's V. without disgust or sentiment at the abjection of the human body. The mourning is festal, a wake: thank god, the airways breathe, we can stop qualifying our love of MJ and his music. It's a shame he is dead, but he is so much more alive now. He hasn't been this sonically omnipresent in decades. If anything, he's younger than ever.

The turning point for this rejuvenation is clearly his death. What else could have exonerated him from his history? What Jackson had put forward was a vision of deathlessness--not just in his own facial mask, the Neverland Ranch, media-circus rumors, the myth of the frozen king, and all the other ways he seemed to ascend from corporality to a digital heaven--but of cultural capital as unexpendable. (I am using "expenditure" here in the sense of a discharge of wealth that is not recouped dialectically as it is in the investment). No matter how much money Jackson wasted on personal fantasies--and he is well known to be massively in debt--he had attained an unimpeachable place in cultural and especially musical history that could always turn its own mythic expenditure to profit. This is the point at which restricted economy touches general economy in a schematic sense; MJ gave this bloodless formula very real historical dimensions. The initial, modernist question--can a person of vast wealth forestall death indefinitely a la Howard Hughes--has passed its zenith and has reformulated itself: can such a person die? With the archival, financial, and media technologies that allowed "Michael Jackson" to exist, the answer is no.