Jackson leaves fans feeling conflicted

Jackson leaves fans feeling conflicted
The groundbreaking pop music megastar loved by millions disappeared many years ago.
By TIMOTHY FINN
McClatchy Newspapers

KANSAS CITY, Kan. — As Los Angeles police investigated the circumstances of Michael Jackson's death, millions of fans all over the world have been mourning.

Jackson was 50 when he died, and he may have seemed immortal, but he has looked anything but for a long time.

His death is a shock, but it is beyond shocking. It's unfathomable. Jackson has been part of pop culture for more than 40 years – every decade since the 1960s. His talent was unsurpassed, his legacy is untouchable.

He became as beloved and idolized worldwide as any celebrity has ever been – the Beatles, Sinatra, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan. He owned the entire Beatles catalog and married Elvis' daughter.

He put Paul McCartney and Eddie Van Halen on the same album – the best-selling album in history. How much larger-than-life can you get?

Most commentators focused on his music career and how it transcended everything: age, race, ethnicity, economic class.

Several friends I talked to or texted, though, admitted to being a little confused by the sadness they felt when they'd heard he'd died. It was natural to feel conflicted about who he'd become over the past 10 or 15 years, as his behavior went from weird and erratic to illogical and reckless – nearly felonious. His fall from grace was slow and unseemly; and it started at such a rarefied peak that the difference between where he was at the top and where he ended up seems immeasurable.

Look at the cover of "Off the Wall." He is 21 and a portrait of charisma and glamour, like some latter-day Johnny Mathis or Nat King Cole: a young adult about to set the music world on fire. That album would have been the pinnacle of anyone else's career, except Jackson still had "Thriller" in him. He was 24 when that came out and already into his 13th year as a recording artist.

His music touched virtually everyone, especially anyone who watched MTV in its early days. He owned the 1980s. His songs are attached to billions of personal stories, and millions of those stories are being shared in every social network platform on the Web. Some of those start with qualifiers, like: "I know he wasn't perfect, but ...".

No, he wasn't. And we got to see it all unfold – a life that went public years before its adolescence and exploded into superstardom at warp speed. From the song "Childhood": "It's been my fate to compensate for the childhood I've never known ...".

His childhood, we have learned, was harsh and dysfunctional to say the least, thanks to a taskmaster father who ridiculed and controlled his sons as a means to his own wealth.

Once Michael was old enough and wealthy enough to take control of his own life, he tried to re-create the childhood he'd never known. And with no friends or genuine advisers to confide in or rein him in, he overcompensated and overindulged. Investing in the Beatles is one thing. Buying your own amusement park and zoo and calling it Neverland is another. It made him a caricature.

Let's face it: The MJ everyone is missing and mourning today disappeared a long time ago.

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