Briefly… Michael Jackson
June 29th, 2009This column has been syndicated from my column at www.starpulse.com
Tony Kornheiser said of Michael Jackson’s passing, “In my lifetime there were three great icons… Frank Sinatra, there’s Elvis Presley, and there’s Michael Jackson.”
Since Michael Jackson’s untimely passing this week, there have been a slew of TV and radio personalities lamenting on the loss of this generation’s greatest entertainers, and it seems as though most voices with the power of offering opinion/editorial don’t want to count Jackson’s post-Bad legacy in his greatness. And since so much as been said about his Thriller era (beyond covered), and his days as the wunderkind singer of the Jackson Five, it’s almost a shame how easy it has been for the media to discount the fact that Jackson was great for his entire life, and not just some fifteen year span from the mid-sixties through mid-eighties.
How easy it is to forget, for instance, that when Dangerous dropped in 1991 it was essentially going to be the Thriller of that decade. It was the fastest selling record of his entire career. Yes, Thriller was his greatest album; yes Dangerous was a commercial beast that somehow got panned years later for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with music. This is an album that spent more weeks in the Billboard 200 than Bad. “Black or White” was his greatest hit since “Billie Jean”. The album gave him one of (if not) the greatest music video premiers of all time when the song premiered at the end of a Simpsons episode. And his halftime performance at the halftime show of Superbowl XXVII was the first and only time the ratings of the halftime show were greater than the ratings for the game itself.
How easy it is to forget that his concert in Bucharest, Romania to support the Dangerous Tour in 1992 was not only a huge deal worldwide, it cost (according to the NY Times) almost $20 million dollars just to broadcast it. The consensus is that it was one of the finest moments in his career (and is now available on DVD).
How easy it is to forget the amount of interest in Jackson through to court trials, his one on one interview with Oprah and Diane Sawyer for 20/20 in which he sits down and discusses his much speculated marriage then to Lisa Marie Presley. In the twilight of his career, he was still a huge deal when he made special appearances on MTV’s Video Music awards. The now-lost London residency that he was to take up at the O2 Arena on the heels of the success of similar stints by Prince and Led Zeppelin sold out instantly. More shows were reportedly being scheduled to accommodate demand.
For those people under 25, this is the Michael Jackson that they will have grown up with, not the “ABC” or “Man in the Mirror” Jackson, but so much in his life during these years kept the media in such a slant towards him that the only Jackson they really know is the “Wacko-Jacko” coined and personified by the National Inquirer. There are so many young people (and some older people) out there who are quick to say in his passing that the man was a genius, but that the genius was 66-82 Michael. There is so much evidence out there to suggest otherwise; just look at the Chris Browns and Justin Timberlakes of the world. Beethoven never stopped being a genius, and neither did Michael Jackson. Because if he was truly a genius, which he absolutely, positively was, then maybe people simply need to be reminded of what they think they already know. Because they have no idea.
