Yesterday seemed surreal.
While it was anticipated that Farrah Fawcett would pass, she died yesterday morning of anal cancer. I was out and about yesterday afternoon, interviewing my friend Laura on her experiences in the 70-80's punk scene, and I got a text from another friend that Michael Jackson was dead. I raced home to put on CNN to see what happened.
Shit. That's what I texted as a response to my friend, and that's what I thought. Then I finished working on my Blogher post, which was due.
I was never a big fan, so I'm not even going to front, or wax poetic about his life, his career, his legacy. Here's what I added to my Blogher post:
I was never a huge fan, post the Jackson 5 - My favorite song is "Ben" which always brings tears to my eyes. I actually disliked the man immensely, because as a little black girl I, like probably many others, fantasized about marrying one of the brothers. They were the perfect men, in a 9 year-old's eyes. But when the plastic surgery and the skin lightening appeared, and much later, the allegations of sexual abuse of young boys, that childhood fantasy seemed distorted. I felt betrayed, as I imagine other black girls did. As a kid when the white boys my age called me an animal and never gave me the time of day, it was the images of Jackson boys and the fantasy that there were boys that one day, might like us - were destroyed.
He was a talented man, and a very disturbed man. It's unfortunate that his life was cut short.
I will say - as I said to a friend last night - that I think WE killed him.
If he had never become the mega super-star, what would he be? If he had not been born into such a dysfunctional, abusive, greedy family, how would he be? I am watching a retrospective on his career and I'm shaking my butt to "Wanna Be Starting Something" and it takes me back to my eleven year-old self, rollerskating and dancing to the music, so proud that someone who looked like me - afro, big nose and lips - was on the top of the charts. But as I wrote last night, when he changed his features, it changed me. It hurt me, because back then I desperately needed to believe that people who looked like me could actually be something in life, that despite all the naysayers, that we could be something.
I think that WE killed him because we put him on a pedestal, forgetting that he was a real person with real issues. He, I believe was a pedophile and maybe without the fame and fortune (and hangers-on licking his boots) he would have gotten the help that he so desperately needed. His fame blinded us, making us ignore or dismiss that fact that he was severely fucked- up. The whole thing is so sad, but what stays with me the most is that now his family and hangers-on will now attempt to take every dime he had left - which wasn't much, as I hear.
I hope people learn from this unfortunate incident - that our heroes are people too. I think that today, I have forgiven him for changing his skin color and his features, as now that I'm older I know a bit more about self-loathing. He simply had the money to do what a lot of people might wished they could have done. But I will never forgive him for the lives he destroyed, the children that will always be damaged from his selfish actions. I just can't do it. But I do hope that wherever he is, he finds some peace.
At last.
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