I. Man of War: A mild-mannered, vague uptempo anti-war ballad.
People sob in the streets when celebrities "die" and then FaceBook and Twitter electrify, everyone presumably determined to make sure everyone knows they're sad, devastated, coolly ambient, or totally beyond the celebrity culture and wishing everyone would get over it because they didn't KNOW them, after all...I mean, that's what I do. I hear something sad and my first response is to form an opinion quick, and it had better be a good one so everyone can assume I'm either simpatico or not with the wave, so I'm funny, so I'm employable, so I'm a huge fan. I like to believe this is just the culture's fault and not my actual need for attention going to town on tragedy, especially because my status updates are as much for myself as they are for everyone else I know. I want to have things like death and heroes set in stone; they are the rules I am governed by as a person who tends to glorify romantic, fatalistic popular lifestyles and rock n' roll and pop gods and goddesses. I need to know I loved something intangible, that I I can be made to feel deep things through art, and that I have a real capacity for a general kind of grief.
This is why I hate those people who pretend that the deaths of celebrities don't affect them at all. For one, this is assuming you have to individually know everyone who has ever died to feel sympathy for something and this strikes me as inhuman--and another, pretending you are above the current of popular music and television and movies is just stupid even if you happen to live in the woods. It seems silly to some but this, commercialist or not, is the reality of our Culture, it is the air we breathe and the soda we drink. And of all things to reject in our oxygen, why reject the ability to feel unity with strangers in Arkansas over someone who, sure, you never spoke to, but I'm sure you have myriad memories associated with? "I Want You Back" was the first song I ever HEARD, in the sense that it was the first song on the first CD I ever received on my first own stereo when I was first old enough to take ownership over anything I liked. I would crank that shit on individual repeat for days, I'm not kidding, days, and while I don't necessarily HAVE to thank Michael Jackson for days spent jumping on a bed or dance parties in high school or ex-boyfriends' inspirations or inexplicable moments of car-ride bliss, I could. I should thank someone, considering I don't believe in God. I know I didn't make everything myself--after all, I failed Precalculus twice. Couldn't make you a paper crane so cannot take full credit for making what surely also became a part of other peoples' memories.
Sidetracking.
All of Side One, I think about the MNBC documentary with Anne Curry. This must have been whipped up at top speed, in a frenzied newsroom. In Harlem, two women standing behind the camera already brandished T-Shirts that they must have made in bulk at like 5:45, maybe, bearing "RIPs" and "We Love Yous". They're thinking about Off The Wall, probably. Anne Curry's pretty pre-occupied with the most tragic, enigmatic human descent I've ever seen profiled: not one person who has spoken so far has been able to give any real insight into the kind of person this man was who sang my favorite song so well. Did people love him intimately? (As in, not because of his music?) Why, most of all, I'm asking as I watch him go from Bad to Dangerous: this went unchecked, this happened at all, this is what they mean when they say the line between genius and insanity is thin, it's surreal. I'm sad because I think of this living literal shell of a person, a shell maybe even while he was making really fucking good music, and all of these fans willing to send white doves into the air at his child molestation trial they're so enamored but unable to tell you, for instance, what his real laugh sounds like, when he's caught offguard by something hilarious. I sound like a raving groupie most likely--but that's painfully tragic, the living part. That's what you notice when someone dies, but that's what sticks: some kind of sticky, dark form of useless regret and a thousand unanswerable questions hovering in the air like a swarm of angry mosquitoes.
II. Jump for Joy!: What can only be described as a lighthearted romp
My cousin Lauren used to love the Michael Jackson of Beat It: at six, she would boogie down in front of family reunions and swish her little butt back and forth, and we used to provoke her with harrowing allusions to his many misdemeanors but she would defend her pale idol to the bone, to the point of screaming. Aunts would have to tell us to quit it, to concede that maybe he wasn't a child molester, just so Lauren could get some peace of mind; probably useless reprimands, because we were just being obnoxious and she was a more vigilant fighter anyways. She died two years later in a car crash and of course I've always thought of her fierce expression and waggling hips, the serious devotion, every time I hear MJ on the radio or something. I am not crying about her now--I am not crying at all. Since these associations my MJ adoration persisted into a brief uncontrollable desire to learn the Thriller dance (fulfilled last summer, bitches), but of course this is something that lingers also. Now I'm forced to break down the literal make-up of this music, now on Goin' Places, a more mediocre production from a talented set: is there a formula somewhere in this melody that begs perpetuation? Is this shit, has he been successfully double-martyrized somehow in the timeline of my life? Where do music and memory fuse? Really, I'm talking I suppose about textbook reality and personal perception, but once again I don't see a difference.
My selection is limited. I idly (that's a lie: rapidly) head to eBay to hunt for Off The Wall on vinyl, sneering at my own cliche and the escalating-before-my-eyes prices. Why am I doing this? I Want You Back and Beat It and Thriller clamor for attention on the discotheque of my medulla but I buy Off The Wall and Thriller, I listen to Goin' Places. I bet no other fan anywhere is listening to Goin' Places. That's not why I'm doing it. I just like it: and that is all, I just LIKE it. Goin' Places is the National Anthem of my Island. The thing about missing people after they're gone, or missing times in your life that passed before you understand what they were, or missing times in your life that are happening while you are missing them, or missing people in love, or missing a person you never met, or being a missing person, is that you want to be able to explain them and commemorate them and speak about them drolly at parties or move on, carrying them with you always. You blast it loud and you should not have to try. You should not have to think. This is what I believe: it should all be feeling, and it should all be about you being allowed to languish in the agony of everything you wanted to eulogize but never got to, every passing pain you need brought up for a moment. We are strapped to mortality while they transcend, and when the documentaries end what will have died a little in me, been commemorated and put to rest, are memories. Things to make you cry now, perhaps just a bit more than before. It's like...a changeover. New emotional property. And it is in a way about You The Man for the World, running totally parallel to You The Icon for The Me.
Does this make sense? I hope not. I will have become predictable to myself. And once my emotional range has been widened and resucitated, regrouped and rehabilitated, what will be left for me is the adult ache, the ironic, adoring fever, and "Goin Places".
RIP Michael Jackson. I hope so deeply that you are happy now.
RIP Farrah Fawcett.
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