Michael Jackson died today. I am reminded of finding out that he had been severely burned while filming a Pepsi commercial. It was 1984, I was nine, and in the car with my father on the way to the old Home Depot in College Park, GA, when I heard the news on the radio. I remember being affected by this news far more profoundly than any other news I have ever gotten. I became obsessed with Michael Jackson.
I kept imagining that he was in the room with me: I had to look in my closet, could not sleep with the closet door open. I would look behind curtains when entering a room and had to open the shower curtain immediately upon entering the bathroom to make sure he wasn’t there.
Like so many others, I had found so much power and beauty in his Thriller album, a power that carried so much weight because I owned so few records at the time. I found in those songs a part of who I wanted to be, or at least who I could dream to be. Michael’s accident was the first time in my life I had confronted a very mortal event happening to someone I had idolized.
It is odd that this experience made me feel he was present with me, even physically around me. I was afraid of that presence, I think because I felt that if something so horrific could happen to Michael Jackson, something could happen to my dreams as well.
I always especially liked the infectious beat of “Wanna Be Starting Somethin’,” and only recently have decided that “Human Nature” to be one of my favorite pop songs of all time. Years later I had many adolescent fantasies of crushes on classmates listening to “The Way You Make Me Feel,” imagining myself the suave singer and dancer expressing my love and lust for someone.
And just as at nine I idolized Michael Jackson to the point of unhealthy obsession, I cannot imagine what life becomes like when millions of people are similarly obsessed, when so many people feel so intensely connected to you, inspired by you and feel some kind of ownership of you. It must be, ironically, a very lonely place. And for Michael, especially since he achieved that state at so early an age, and continued there for the rest of his life.
His eccentricities I sympathized with, his interactions with young boys I agonized over with disgust and pain. His inability to relate to the world as others did made me sad more than anything. But his life as a real person really has never had meaning for me– it is his music that has held power over me for so long.