independent and unofficial
Prince fan community
Welcome! Sign up or enter username and password to remember me
Forum jump
Forums > Music: Non-Prince > the slow murder of michael jackson
« Previous topic  Next topic »
Page 1 of 3 123>
  New topic   Printable     (Log in to 'subscribe' to this topic)
Author

Tweet     Share

Message
Thread started 04/19/04 3:19am

riverdean7

the slow murder of michael jackson

THE SLOW MURDER OF MICHAEL JACKSON:
Fear And The Sexiness Of The Undead

by Polar Levine for popCULTmedia, February 16, 2004

John Ashcroft’s thirst for capital punishment aside, America’s thirst for death as catharsis and entertainment still hasn’t gotten around to FOX’s inserting live executions into its reality TV lineup. For the moment we’ll have to be satisfied with the much slower @#%$ hunt. I believe the media is chasing a very unbalanced and vulnerable man to suicide to be followed by a year-long explosion of Michael Jackson tributes, posthumous music releases, bioPix, merchandise and -- when all has been said and sold -- soul-searching questions about our own culpability in our victim’s demise. I’ll be amazed if Jackson reaches his fiftieth birthday.

I’d say, “go get him” if I were aware of any serious evidence of child molestation. As a dad of a young kid I take a hard stand on pedophilia. But as far as I’m concerned a 45-year-old man sleeping in the same bed with a child, adult or any other mammal is not the same as having sex. Like having a Bud is not the same as being an alcoholic. Like being a Muslim is not the same as being a terrorist. No specific evidence of sex with children has been publicly disclosed. For that matter I’m not sure Michael Jackson has a history of sex with any human, animal or vegetable. His true crime is being weird. More specifically, his true crime is being weird in precisely the same way that our pop culture is weird -- but he’s a few years ahead of the curve.

Alleged pedophilia aside, let’s look at his weird activity. His obsession with his looks coupled with his surgical alterations reflect the same obsessions and alterations found in much of our mainstream youth-worshipping society. Compulsive shopping sprees reflect America’s extreme style of consumerism where buying unnecessary stuff is a mode of entertainment and shopping ourselves into debt has become not just a mundane activity, but our patriotic duty. His over-the-top new age Hallmark rhetoric reflects our own taste for draping doilies in the form of kitsch and sentimentality over our anxiety and terror.

Michael Jackson has lived an extreme life and he acts out his culturally-derived fears and anxieties in an extreme version of the way millions of Americans act out. We’re living in a hothouse of media-projected fear. The entertainment/infotainment industry derives much of its cash flow from the violence it amuses us with in movies, video games, tv dramas and the news. The nightly perpwalk has been a staple of local news broadcasts for decades and the droning headlines and newsmag features on serial killers, pedophiles, terrorists, muggers, scam artists, epidemics and countless possibilities for injuries are as regular as cornflakes. Michael Moore’s ‘Bowling For Columbine’ brings this fear factor chillingly to light.

No study seems to conclusively link this steady diet of violence to a violent society, so it’s hard for people to consciously attempt a movement to put on the brakes. I believe we’ve been focusing all these studies on the wrong question. People may not be more likely to kill as a result of this diet of non-stop media violence but it certainly leads to a pervasive culture of free-floating fear.

This unconscious blanket of fear gets played out in a variety of ways, often in rituals adopted by different subcultures. When fear is free-floating, as opposed to based on a specific real threat, we feel compelled to detach from life to some degree to ease the pressure. Drugs are the most obvious escape. But there are other equally destructive roads out of reality. Entertainment bingeing is epidemic: watching tv, playing computer and video games, recreational shopping. The comforting certainty of fundamentalism -- theological, political or philosophical -- has a powerful attraction. The cult of beauty and sexiness, like money, is the requisite currency of happiness. It attracts love, riches and the eternal happy ending. The hipster set has discovered the reality-buffering qualities of extreme irony as though wrapping our fears in graphic dark humor punctuated by a blasé “whatever” will say “BOO!!” and make all those scary issues of mortality, nonprettiness and decrepitude flee from consciousness. Every day we receive information and instructions from prerecorded voices -- the chit chat of the “undead.”

Our fear and loathing of Michael Jackson is the fear and loathing of our own attraction to the road he’s taken. We’re predisposed by instinct to recoil at the recognition of our own death trip. Jackson is being crucified for the sins of our cult of artifice and detatchment.

Michael Jackson has been living in public since he was ten. He’s the prototype for ‘The Truman Show.’ Imagine going through puberty and adolescence in front of a fleet of cameras. The world gets to see, hear and comment on our sexual awakening and cluelessness, on our bodies going bonkers: zits, voice changing (a singer’s voice), too fat, too skinny, nose too big, not nice enough, not down enough, too politically conscious for Young America, too soft for the streets, too black, too white. Too much responsibility. Not enough fun.

The Jackson 5 hit the charts during the chaos of the anti-war movement and the militant phase of the civil rights movement. Michael was too young and too driven by the commercial demands of his family and his mentor/employer Berry Gordy to tap into the political/philosphical side of youth culture -- a rare sliver of time when young people had goals deeper than fun and status. His major breakthrough occurred in the 80’s as a solo artist during the Reagan era when our lingering humiliation over Watergate and America’s first military defeat sought relief in nostalgia for the certainties of the 50’s. Coupled with the birth of MTV, materialism replaced social consciousness as the reigning aesthetic of youth culture. Artiface and acquisition, vogueing and coke, polyester motorcycle jackets and business suits. Fashion models became superstars just because they were pretty, corporate CEOs because they were rich, and Robin Leach because he publicly swooned over the rich and pretty for our amusement. Jackson was the most famous rich pretty person on earth.

The pressure to stay young and pretty, coupled with the onset of his alleged skin condition (vitiligo, which causes irregularly shaped white blotches on the skin), must have put this hopelessly exposed and fragile man-child into an ongoing dull roar of panic. The extreme nature of his fame, visibility and the pressure to maintain the winning formula in a formula-bound youth culture must have been crushing to a person who had known nothing but pop music success.

The call to surgically derived youth had been answered long before Michael Jackson got to it. But Jackson, unlike his nipped and tucked predecessors, was introduced to the scalpel at a time when the technology of virtual youth offered transformative potential that would have given Mary Shelly the creeps. And few humans of any age had Michael Jackson’s enormous wealth with which to indulge surgery to such monstrous ends. Only in horror stories of the “undead” were these transformations previously contemplated: ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Island Of Dr. Moreau’ and zombie flicks like ‘Dawn of The Dead.’

The enormity of his talents has only been surpassed by the depths of his preventive isolation. His pathological drive to stay young for his adolescent market and his lack of intellectual curiosity and maturity precluded evolving into a “mature” artist like Al Green, Sting, Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, whose records are no longer guaranteed to sell multi-platinum but allow for longterm creative careers. The audience that grew up with Michael Jackson would certainly forgive him for aging along with them. He could have let the teeny boppers serve the teeny boppers. Instead he chose the reality-defying strategy of being a teenager for life. Steven Tyler proved that a popstar could remain a teenager in the head for life. Committing one’s body to this goal is a hard wall to bang and Jackson is a banged up old guy for trying.

Fear is a soul-twisting thing; but no fear is as distorting as a generalized fear of reality. The cult of fear and its antidote -- artifice -- leads to a dead end. Artiface is a facsimile of life -- the aesthetic of the “undead.” Death metal, fashion models posed and lit to look starved and devoid of consciousness, serial face-lifting that renders a person’s face a cadaverous mask, the Tarrantino fetish of graphic violence as comedy.

I have no aesthetic or principled objection to a bit of nip and tuck and a bucket of hair paint. But taken too far, the effect becomes self-defeating. A person who’s had a dozen face lifts looks more dead than vital. A face that’s been marinated in Botox looks more like a wax museum replica of a young person than a living one. The fact that we identify these deathly faces with youth and sexiness rather than sickness says much about our growing confusion over reality and artiface. The eroticism of deadness is everywhere. The punk era popularized the black lipstick and mascara look of a cadaver. A woman’s face with so much makeup as to obscure emotional expressiveness is generally associated with sexiness as is the dissipated manequin-chic that typifies so much fashion modeling. The exquisiteness of design and the fact that much of this aesthetic has a nudge-nudge-wink-wink aspect doesn’t lighten its weight in the overall cultural lexicon, particularly as it filters down to younger generations who are unaware of the original ironic allusions.

If all of us could afford the excesses of Michael Jackson, how abnormal would he then be? Could I go that far and not know it? That’s the scary question we ask ourselves when we rubberneck our tv every time he appears. It’s our own cult of necrophilia that causes the air to vibrate when we see that face and hear that voice recite the Peter Pan platitudes in a woozy soprano. We’re terrified but can’t look away. His music is now merely an asterisk on his resumé. Removing him is the only way out of our discomforting addiction to sensational coverage of his ever-evolving creepiness. And pedophilia is the silver bullet.

Last year I watched the BBC documentary on Jackson. It was a truly repellant experience. The only thing more horrifying was the parade of coverage and commentary that revealed a bizarre giddiness in its malice. Whom did he murder? Whose life savings did he scam? Whose job did he outsource?

Why are so many people so sure he’s a pedophile despite the absence of any reported clear evidence? Would we so readily believe Oprah or Derek Jeter to be guilty of pedophilia? We believe what we’re comfortable believing. And we want to believe Michael Jackson is guilty. We want to believe that it’s impossible for an adult to lie in bed with a child or adolescent without any sexual activity or motivations.

Is it possible that a young kid with cancer who’s been told by the medical authorities that he’ll soon die has moments of sheer terror? That he’s had his youth stolen from him and is alone in the world while other people float outside in a festival of normalcy? Could he have wanted his sympathetic famous benefactor to lie next to him and maybe even rock him to sleep? Is it possible that Michael Jackson knows exactly who this kid is and wants to give him some peace?

I have no way of knowing what Jackson did or didn’t do. I do know that our slow collective public murder of this man is one of the ugliest non-military media spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. If we’re not ashamed, then we truly are the undead.

Polar Levine
Editor, popCULTmedia.com

www.polarity1.com/bla1704.html
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #1 posted 04/19/04 5:08am

TheRealFiness

dem a bleeeeeach... dem a bleach up dem skin... dem a bleeeeeach...
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #2 posted 04/19/04 6:32am

agentmonday

TheRealFiness said:

dem a bleeeeeach... dem a bleach up dem skin... dem a bleeeeeach...



2 points 4 u. Aren't u clever?
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #3 posted 04/19/04 6:44am

TheRealFiness

agentmonday said:

TheRealFiness said:

dem a bleeeeeach... dem a bleach up dem skin... dem a bleeeeeach...



2 points 4 u. Aren't u clever?



are ya havin a bad day?...i'll pray that your days become better smile
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #4 posted 04/19/04 6:48am

agentmonday

TheRealFiness said:

agentmonday said:




2 points 4 u. Aren't u clever?



are ya havin a bad day?...i'll pray that your days become better smile



Actually it's been great. Thank you for caring.
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #5 posted 04/19/04 6:48am

agentmonday

Only damper being that u take too long to make ur'e crappy replies, and i have to go to sleep now.
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #6 posted 04/19/04 8:15am

Luv4oneanotha

riverdean7 said:

THE SLOW MURDER OF MICHAEL JACKSON:
Fear And The Sexiness Of The Undead

by Polar Levine for popCULTmedia, February 16, 2004

John Ashcroft’s thirst for capital punishment aside, America’s thirst for death as catharsis and entertainment still hasn’t gotten around to FOX’s inserting live executions into its reality TV lineup. For the moment we’ll have to be satisfied with the much slower @#%$ hunt. I believe the media is chasing a very unbalanced and vulnerable man to suicide to be followed by a year-long explosion of Michael Jackson tributes, posthumous music releases, bioPix, merchandise and -- when all has been said and sold -- soul-searching questions about our own culpability in our victim’s demise. I’ll be amazed if Jackson reaches his fiftieth birthday.

I’d say, “go get him” if I were aware of any serious evidence of child molestation. As a dad of a young kid I take a hard stand on pedophilia. But as far as I’m concerned a 45-year-old man sleeping in the same bed with a child, adult or any other mammal is not the same as having sex. Like having a Bud is not the same as being an alcoholic. Like being a Muslim is not the same as being a terrorist. No specific evidence of sex with children has been publicly disclosed. For that matter I’m not sure Michael Jackson has a history of sex with any human, animal or vegetable. His true crime is being weird. More specifically, his true crime is being weird in precisely the same way that our pop culture is weird -- but he’s a few years ahead of the curve.

Alleged pedophilia aside, let’s look at his weird activity. His obsession with his looks coupled with his surgical alterations reflect the same obsessions and alterations found in much of our mainstream youth-worshipping society. Compulsive shopping sprees reflect America’s extreme style of consumerism where buying unnecessary stuff is a mode of entertainment and shopping ourselves into debt has become not just a mundane activity, but our patriotic duty. His over-the-top new age Hallmark rhetoric reflects our own taste for draping doilies in the form of kitsch and sentimentality over our anxiety and terror.

Michael Jackson has lived an extreme life and he acts out his culturally-derived fears and anxieties in an extreme version of the way millions of Americans act out. We’re living in a hothouse of media-projected fear. The entertainment/infotainment industry derives much of its cash flow from the violence it amuses us with in movies, video games, tv dramas and the news. The nightly perpwalk has been a staple of local news broadcasts for decades and the droning headlines and newsmag features on serial killers, pedophiles, terrorists, muggers, scam artists, epidemics and countless possibilities for injuries are as regular as cornflakes. Michael Moore’s ‘Bowling For Columbine’ brings this fear factor chillingly to light.

No study seems to conclusively link this steady diet of violence to a violent society, so it’s hard for people to consciously attempt a movement to put on the brakes. I believe we’ve been focusing all these studies on the wrong question. People may not be more likely to kill as a result of this diet of non-stop media violence but it certainly leads to a pervasive culture of free-floating fear.

This unconscious blanket of fear gets played out in a variety of ways, often in rituals adopted by different subcultures. When fear is free-floating, as opposed to based on a specific real threat, we feel compelled to detach from life to some degree to ease the pressure. Drugs are the most obvious escape. But there are other equally destructive roads out of reality. Entertainment bingeing is epidemic: watching tv, playing computer and video games, recreational shopping. The comforting certainty of fundamentalism -- theological, political or philosophical -- has a powerful attraction. The cult of beauty and sexiness, like money, is the requisite currency of happiness. It attracts love, riches and the eternal happy ending. The hipster set has discovered the reality-buffering qualities of extreme irony as though wrapping our fears in graphic dark humor punctuated by a blasé “whatever” will say “BOO!!” and make all those scary issues of mortality, nonprettiness and decrepitude flee from consciousness. Every day we receive information and instructions from prerecorded voices -- the chit chat of the “undead.”

Our fear and loathing of Michael Jackson is the fear and loathing of our own attraction to the road he’s taken. We’re predisposed by instinct to recoil at the recognition of our own death trip. Jackson is being crucified for the sins of our cult of artifice and detatchment.

Michael Jackson has been living in public since he was ten. He’s the prototype for ‘The Truman Show.’ Imagine going through puberty and adolescence in front of a fleet of cameras. The world gets to see, hear and comment on our sexual awakening and cluelessness, on our bodies going bonkers: zits, voice changing (a singer’s voice), too fat, too skinny, nose too big, not nice enough, not down enough, too politically conscious for Young America, too soft for the streets, too black, too white. Too much responsibility. Not enough fun.

The Jackson 5 hit the charts during the chaos of the anti-war movement and the militant phase of the civil rights movement. Michael was too young and too driven by the commercial demands of his family and his mentor/employer Berry Gordy to tap into the political/philosphical side of youth culture -- a rare sliver of time when young people had goals deeper than fun and status. His major breakthrough occurred in the 80’s as a solo artist during the Reagan era when our lingering humiliation over Watergate and America’s first military defeat sought relief in nostalgia for the certainties of the 50’s. Coupled with the birth of MTV, materialism replaced social consciousness as the reigning aesthetic of youth culture. Artiface and acquisition, vogueing and coke, polyester motorcycle jackets and business suits. Fashion models became superstars just because they were pretty, corporate CEOs because they were rich, and Robin Leach because he publicly swooned over the rich and pretty for our amusement. Jackson was the most famous rich pretty person on earth.

The pressure to stay young and pretty, coupled with the onset of his alleged skin condition (vitiligo, which causes irregularly shaped white blotches on the skin), must have put this hopelessly exposed and fragile man-child into an ongoing dull roar of panic. The extreme nature of his fame, visibility and the pressure to maintain the winning formula in a formula-bound youth culture must have been crushing to a person who had known nothing but pop music success.

The call to surgically derived youth had been answered long before Michael Jackson got to it. But Jackson, unlike his nipped and tucked predecessors, was introduced to the scalpel at a time when the technology of virtual youth offered transformative potential that would have given Mary Shelly the creeps. And few humans of any age had Michael Jackson’s enormous wealth with which to indulge surgery to such monstrous ends. Only in horror stories of the “undead” were these transformations previously contemplated: ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Island Of Dr. Moreau’ and zombie flicks like ‘Dawn of The Dead.’

The enormity of his talents has only been surpassed by the depths of his preventive isolation. His pathological drive to stay young for his adolescent market and his lack of intellectual curiosity and maturity precluded evolving into a “mature” artist like Al Green, Sting, Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, whose records are no longer guaranteed to sell multi-platinum but allow for longterm creative careers. The audience that grew up with Michael Jackson would certainly forgive him for aging along with them. He could have let the teeny boppers serve the teeny boppers. Instead he chose the reality-defying strategy of being a teenager for life. Steven Tyler proved that a popstar could remain a teenager in the head for life. Committing one’s body to this goal is a hard wall to bang and Jackson is a banged up old guy for trying.

Fear is a soul-twisting thing; but no fear is as distorting as a generalized fear of reality. The cult of fear and its antidote -- artifice -- leads to a dead end. Artiface is a facsimile of life -- the aesthetic of the “undead.” Death metal, fashion models posed and lit to look starved and devoid of consciousness, serial face-lifting that renders a person’s face a cadaverous mask, the Tarrantino fetish of graphic violence as comedy.

I have no aesthetic or principled objection to a bit of nip and tuck and a bucket of hair paint. But taken too far, the effect becomes self-defeating. A person who’s had a dozen face lifts looks more dead than vital. A face that’s been marinated in Botox looks more like a wax museum replica of a young person than a living one. The fact that we identify these deathly faces with youth and sexiness rather than sickness says much about our growing confusion over reality and artiface. The eroticism of deadness is everywhere. The punk era popularized the black lipstick and mascara look of a cadaver. A woman’s face with so much makeup as to obscure emotional expressiveness is generally associated with sexiness as is the dissipated manequin-chic that typifies so much fashion modeling. The exquisiteness of design and the fact that much of this aesthetic has a nudge-nudge-wink-wink aspect doesn’t lighten its weight in the overall cultural lexicon, particularly as it filters down to younger generations who are unaware of the original ironic allusions.

If all of us could afford the excesses of Michael Jackson, how abnormal would he then be? Could I go that far and not know it? That’s the scary question we ask ourselves when we rubberneck our tv every time he appears. It’s our own cult of necrophilia that causes the air to vibrate when we see that face and hear that voice recite the Peter Pan platitudes in a woozy soprano. We’re terrified but can’t look away. His music is now merely an asterisk on his resumé. Removing him is the only way out of our discomforting addiction to sensational coverage of his ever-evolving creepiness. And pedophilia is the silver bullet.

Last year I watched the BBC documentary on Jackson. It was a truly repellant experience. The only thing more horrifying was the parade of coverage and commentary that revealed a bizarre giddiness in its malice. Whom did he murder? Whose life savings did he scam? Whose job did he outsource?

Why are so many people so sure he’s a pedophile despite the absence of any reported clear evidence? Would we so readily believe Oprah or Derek Jeter to be guilty of pedophilia? We believe what we’re comfortable believing. And we want to believe Michael Jackson is guilty. We want to believe that it’s impossible for an adult to lie in bed with a child or adolescent without any sexual activity or motivations.

Is it possible that a young kid with cancer who’s been told by the medical authorities that he’ll soon die has moments of sheer terror? That he’s had his youth stolen from him and is alone in the world while other people float outside in a festival of normalcy? Could he have wanted his sympathetic famous benefactor to lie next to him and maybe even rock him to sleep? Is it possible that Michael Jackson knows exactly who this kid is and wants to give him some peace?

I have no way of knowing what Jackson did or didn’t do. I do know that our slow collective public murder of this man is one of the ugliest non-military media spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. If we’re not ashamed, then we truly are the undead.

Polar Levine
Editor, popCULTmedia.com

www.polarity1.com/bla1704.html

Finally someone with sense
shyt when i was 9 i use to sleep in the best friend of my mother's bed when i use to sleep over his house when my mom was workin
i was scared of sleepin alone
he didn't molest me lol
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #7 posted 04/19/04 8:15am

Luv4oneanotha

riverdean7 said:

THE SLOW MURDER OF MICHAEL JACKSON:
Fear And The Sexiness Of The Undead

by Polar Levine for popCULTmedia, February 16, 2004

John Ashcroft’s thirst for capital punishment aside, America’s thirst for death as catharsis and entertainment still hasn’t gotten around to FOX’s inserting live executions into its reality TV lineup. For the moment we’ll have to be satisfied with the much slower @#%$ hunt. I believe the media is chasing a very unbalanced and vulnerable man to suicide to be followed by a year-long explosion of Michael Jackson tributes, posthumous music releases, bioPix, merchandise and -- when all has been said and sold -- soul-searching questions about our own culpability in our victim’s demise. I’ll be amazed if Jackson reaches his fiftieth birthday.

I’d say, “go get him” if I were aware of any serious evidence of child molestation. As a dad of a young kid I take a hard stand on pedophilia. But as far as I’m concerned a 45-year-old man sleeping in the same bed with a child, adult or any other mammal is not the same as having sex. Like having a Bud is not the same as being an alcoholic. Like being a Muslim is not the same as being a terrorist. No specific evidence of sex with children has been publicly disclosed. For that matter I’m not sure Michael Jackson has a history of sex with any human, animal or vegetable. His true crime is being weird. More specifically, his true crime is being weird in precisely the same way that our pop culture is weird -- but he’s a few years ahead of the curve.

Alleged pedophilia aside, let’s look at his weird activity. His obsession with his looks coupled with his surgical alterations reflect the same obsessions and alterations found in much of our mainstream youth-worshipping society. Compulsive shopping sprees reflect America’s extreme style of consumerism where buying unnecessary stuff is a mode of entertainment and shopping ourselves into debt has become not just a mundane activity, but our patriotic duty. His over-the-top new age Hallmark rhetoric reflects our own taste for draping doilies in the form of kitsch and sentimentality over our anxiety and terror.

Michael Jackson has lived an extreme life and he acts out his culturally-derived fears and anxieties in an extreme version of the way millions of Americans act out. We’re living in a hothouse of media-projected fear. The entertainment/infotainment industry derives much of its cash flow from the violence it amuses us with in movies, video games, tv dramas and the news. The nightly perpwalk has been a staple of local news broadcasts for decades and the droning headlines and newsmag features on serial killers, pedophiles, terrorists, muggers, scam artists, epidemics and countless possibilities for injuries are as regular as cornflakes. Michael Moore’s ‘Bowling For Columbine’ brings this fear factor chillingly to light.

No study seems to conclusively link this steady diet of violence to a violent society, so it’s hard for people to consciously attempt a movement to put on the brakes. I believe we’ve been focusing all these studies on the wrong question. People may not be more likely to kill as a result of this diet of non-stop media violence but it certainly leads to a pervasive culture of free-floating fear.

This unconscious blanket of fear gets played out in a variety of ways, often in rituals adopted by different subcultures. When fear is free-floating, as opposed to based on a specific real threat, we feel compelled to detach from life to some degree to ease the pressure. Drugs are the most obvious escape. But there are other equally destructive roads out of reality. Entertainment bingeing is epidemic: watching tv, playing computer and video games, recreational shopping. The comforting certainty of fundamentalism -- theological, political or philosophical -- has a powerful attraction. The cult of beauty and sexiness, like money, is the requisite currency of happiness. It attracts love, riches and the eternal happy ending. The hipster set has discovered the reality-buffering qualities of extreme irony as though wrapping our fears in graphic dark humor punctuated by a blasé “whatever” will say “BOO!!” and make all those scary issues of mortality, nonprettiness and decrepitude flee from consciousness. Every day we receive information and instructions from prerecorded voices -- the chit chat of the “undead.”

Our fear and loathing of Michael Jackson is the fear and loathing of our own attraction to the road he’s taken. We’re predisposed by instinct to recoil at the recognition of our own death trip. Jackson is being crucified for the sins of our cult of artifice and detatchment.

Michael Jackson has been living in public since he was ten. He’s the prototype for ‘The Truman Show.’ Imagine going through puberty and adolescence in front of a fleet of cameras. The world gets to see, hear and comment on our sexual awakening and cluelessness, on our bodies going bonkers: zits, voice changing (a singer’s voice), too fat, too skinny, nose too big, not nice enough, not down enough, too politically conscious for Young America, too soft for the streets, too black, too white. Too much responsibility. Not enough fun.

The Jackson 5 hit the charts during the chaos of the anti-war movement and the militant phase of the civil rights movement. Michael was too young and too driven by the commercial demands of his family and his mentor/employer Berry Gordy to tap into the political/philosphical side of youth culture -- a rare sliver of time when young people had goals deeper than fun and status. His major breakthrough occurred in the 80’s as a solo artist during the Reagan era when our lingering humiliation over Watergate and America’s first military defeat sought relief in nostalgia for the certainties of the 50’s. Coupled with the birth of MTV, materialism replaced social consciousness as the reigning aesthetic of youth culture. Artiface and acquisition, vogueing and coke, polyester motorcycle jackets and business suits. Fashion models became superstars just because they were pretty, corporate CEOs because they were rich, and Robin Leach because he publicly swooned over the rich and pretty for our amusement. Jackson was the most famous rich pretty person on earth.

The pressure to stay young and pretty, coupled with the onset of his alleged skin condition (vitiligo, which causes irregularly shaped white blotches on the skin), must have put this hopelessly exposed and fragile man-child into an ongoing dull roar of panic. The extreme nature of his fame, visibility and the pressure to maintain the winning formula in a formula-bound youth culture must have been crushing to a person who had known nothing but pop music success.

The call to surgically derived youth had been answered long before Michael Jackson got to it. But Jackson, unlike his nipped and tucked predecessors, was introduced to the scalpel at a time when the technology of virtual youth offered transformative potential that would have given Mary Shelly the creeps. And few humans of any age had Michael Jackson’s enormous wealth with which to indulge surgery to such monstrous ends. Only in horror stories of the “undead” were these transformations previously contemplated: ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Island Of Dr. Moreau’ and zombie flicks like ‘Dawn of The Dead.’

The enormity of his talents has only been surpassed by the depths of his preventive isolation. His pathological drive to stay young for his adolescent market and his lack of intellectual curiosity and maturity precluded evolving into a “mature” artist like Al Green, Sting, Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, whose records are no longer guaranteed to sell multi-platinum but allow for longterm creative careers. The audience that grew up with Michael Jackson would certainly forgive him for aging along with them. He could have let the teeny boppers serve the teeny boppers. Instead he chose the reality-defying strategy of being a teenager for life. Steven Tyler proved that a popstar could remain a teenager in the head for life. Committing one’s body to this goal is a hard wall to bang and Jackson is a banged up old guy for trying.

Fear is a soul-twisting thing; but no fear is as distorting as a generalized fear of reality. The cult of fear and its antidote -- artifice -- leads to a dead end. Artiface is a facsimile of life -- the aesthetic of the “undead.” Death metal, fashion models posed and lit to look starved and devoid of consciousness, serial face-lifting that renders a person’s face a cadaverous mask, the Tarrantino fetish of graphic violence as comedy.

I have no aesthetic or principled objection to a bit of nip and tuck and a bucket of hair paint. But taken too far, the effect becomes self-defeating. A person who’s had a dozen face lifts looks more dead than vital. A face that’s been marinated in Botox looks more like a wax museum replica of a young person than a living one. The fact that we identify these deathly faces with youth and sexiness rather than sickness says much about our growing confusion over reality and artiface. The eroticism of deadness is everywhere. The punk era popularized the black lipstick and mascara look of a cadaver. A woman’s face with so much makeup as to obscure emotional expressiveness is generally associated with sexiness as is the dissipated manequin-chic that typifies so much fashion modeling. The exquisiteness of design and the fact that much of this aesthetic has a nudge-nudge-wink-wink aspect doesn’t lighten its weight in the overall cultural lexicon, particularly as it filters down to younger generations who are unaware of the original ironic allusions.

If all of us could afford the excesses of Michael Jackson, how abnormal would he then be? Could I go that far and not know it? That’s the scary question we ask ourselves when we rubberneck our tv every time he appears. It’s our own cult of necrophilia that causes the air to vibrate when we see that face and hear that voice recite the Peter Pan platitudes in a woozy soprano. We’re terrified but can’t look away. His music is now merely an asterisk on his resumé. Removing him is the only way out of our discomforting addiction to sensational coverage of his ever-evolving creepiness. And pedophilia is the silver bullet.

Last year I watched the BBC documentary on Jackson. It was a truly repellant experience. The only thing more horrifying was the parade of coverage and commentary that revealed a bizarre giddiness in its malice. Whom did he murder? Whose life savings did he scam? Whose job did he outsource?

Why are so many people so sure he’s a pedophile despite the absence of any reported clear evidence? Would we so readily believe Oprah or Derek Jeter to be guilty of pedophilia? We believe what we’re comfortable believing. And we want to believe Michael Jackson is guilty. We want to believe that it’s impossible for an adult to lie in bed with a child or adolescent without any sexual activity or motivations.

Is it possible that a young kid with cancer who’s been told by the medical authorities that he’ll soon die has moments of sheer terror? That he’s had his youth stolen from him and is alone in the world while other people float outside in a festival of normalcy? Could he have wanted his sympathetic famous benefactor to lie next to him and maybe even rock him to sleep? Is it possible that Michael Jackson knows exactly who this kid is and wants to give him some peace?

I have no way of knowing what Jackson did or didn’t do. I do know that our slow collective public murder of this man is one of the ugliest non-military media spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. If we’re not ashamed, then we truly are the undead.

Polar Levine
Editor, popCULTmedia.com

www.polarity1.com/bla1704.html

Finally someone with sense
shyt when i was 9 i use to sleep in the best friend of my mother's bed when i use to sleep over his house when my mom was workin
i was scared of sleepin alone
he didn't molest me lol
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #8 posted 04/19/04 8:17am

Luv4oneanotha

riverdean7 said:

THE SLOW MURDER OF MICHAEL JACKSON:
Fear And The Sexiness Of The Undead

by Polar Levine for popCULTmedia, February 16, 2004

John Ashcroft’s thirst for capital punishment aside, America’s thirst for death as catharsis and entertainment still hasn’t gotten around to FOX’s inserting live executions into its reality TV lineup. For the moment we’ll have to be satisfied with the much slower @#%$ hunt. I believe the media is chasing a very unbalanced and vulnerable man to suicide to be followed by a year-long explosion of Michael Jackson tributes, posthumous music releases, bioPix, merchandise and -- when all has been said and sold -- soul-searching questions about our own culpability in our victim’s demise. I’ll be amazed if Jackson reaches his fiftieth birthday.

I’d say, “go get him” if I were aware of any serious evidence of child molestation. As a dad of a young kid I take a hard stand on pedophilia. But as far as I’m concerned a 45-year-old man sleeping in the same bed with a child, adult or any other mammal is not the same as having sex. Like having a Bud is not the same as being an alcoholic. Like being a Muslim is not the same as being a terrorist. No specific evidence of sex with children has been publicly disclosed. For that matter I’m not sure Michael Jackson has a history of sex with any human, animal or vegetable. His true crime is being weird. More specifically, his true crime is being weird in precisely the same way that our pop culture is weird -- but he’s a few years ahead of the curve.

Alleged pedophilia aside, let’s look at his weird activity. His obsession with his looks coupled with his surgical alterations reflect the same obsessions and alterations found in much of our mainstream youth-worshipping society. Compulsive shopping sprees reflect America’s extreme style of consumerism where buying unnecessary stuff is a mode of entertainment and shopping ourselves into debt has become not just a mundane activity, but our patriotic duty. His over-the-top new age Hallmark rhetoric reflects our own taste for draping doilies in the form of kitsch and sentimentality over our anxiety and terror.

Michael Jackson has lived an extreme life and he acts out his culturally-derived fears and anxieties in an extreme version of the way millions of Americans act out. We’re living in a hothouse of media-projected fear. The entertainment/infotainment industry derives much of its cash flow from the violence it amuses us with in movies, video games, tv dramas and the news. The nightly perpwalk has been a staple of local news broadcasts for decades and the droning headlines and newsmag features on serial killers, pedophiles, terrorists, muggers, scam artists, epidemics and countless possibilities for injuries are as regular as cornflakes. Michael Moore’s ‘Bowling For Columbine’ brings this fear factor chillingly to light.

No study seems to conclusively link this steady diet of violence to a violent society, so it’s hard for people to consciously attempt a movement to put on the brakes. I believe we’ve been focusing all these studies on the wrong question. People may not be more likely to kill as a result of this diet of non-stop media violence but it certainly leads to a pervasive culture of free-floating fear.

This unconscious blanket of fear gets played out in a variety of ways, often in rituals adopted by different subcultures. When fear is free-floating, as opposed to based on a specific real threat, we feel compelled to detach from life to some degree to ease the pressure. Drugs are the most obvious escape. But there are other equally destructive roads out of reality. Entertainment bingeing is epidemic: watching tv, playing computer and video games, recreational shopping. The comforting certainty of fundamentalism -- theological, political or philosophical -- has a powerful attraction. The cult of beauty and sexiness, like money, is the requisite currency of happiness. It attracts love, riches and the eternal happy ending. The hipster set has discovered the reality-buffering qualities of extreme irony as though wrapping our fears in graphic dark humor punctuated by a blasé “whatever” will say “BOO!!” and make all those scary issues of mortality, nonprettiness and decrepitude flee from consciousness. Every day we receive information and instructions from prerecorded voices -- the chit chat of the “undead.”

Our fear and loathing of Michael Jackson is the fear and loathing of our own attraction to the road he’s taken. We’re predisposed by instinct to recoil at the recognition of our own death trip. Jackson is being crucified for the sins of our cult of artifice and detatchment.

Michael Jackson has been living in public since he was ten. He’s the prototype for ‘The Truman Show.’ Imagine going through puberty and adolescence in front of a fleet of cameras. The world gets to see, hear and comment on our sexual awakening and cluelessness, on our bodies going bonkers: zits, voice changing (a singer’s voice), too fat, too skinny, nose too big, not nice enough, not down enough, too politically conscious for Young America, too soft for the streets, too black, too white. Too much responsibility. Not enough fun.

The Jackson 5 hit the charts during the chaos of the anti-war movement and the militant phase of the civil rights movement. Michael was too young and too driven by the commercial demands of his family and his mentor/employer Berry Gordy to tap into the political/philosphical side of youth culture -- a rare sliver of time when young people had goals deeper than fun and status. His major breakthrough occurred in the 80’s as a solo artist during the Reagan era when our lingering humiliation over Watergate and America’s first military defeat sought relief in nostalgia for the certainties of the 50’s. Coupled with the birth of MTV, materialism replaced social consciousness as the reigning aesthetic of youth culture. Artiface and acquisition, vogueing and coke, polyester motorcycle jackets and business suits. Fashion models became superstars just because they were pretty, corporate CEOs because they were rich, and Robin Leach because he publicly swooned over the rich and pretty for our amusement. Jackson was the most famous rich pretty person on earth.

The pressure to stay young and pretty, coupled with the onset of his alleged skin condition (vitiligo, which causes irregularly shaped white blotches on the skin), must have put this hopelessly exposed and fragile man-child into an ongoing dull roar of panic. The extreme nature of his fame, visibility and the pressure to maintain the winning formula in a formula-bound youth culture must have been crushing to a person who had known nothing but pop music success.

The call to surgically derived youth had been answered long before Michael Jackson got to it. But Jackson, unlike his nipped and tucked predecessors, was introduced to the scalpel at a time when the technology of virtual youth offered transformative potential that would have given Mary Shelly the creeps. And few humans of any age had Michael Jackson’s enormous wealth with which to indulge surgery to such monstrous ends. Only in horror stories of the “undead” were these transformations previously contemplated: ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Island Of Dr. Moreau’ and zombie flicks like ‘Dawn of The Dead.’

The enormity of his talents has only been surpassed by the depths of his preventive isolation. His pathological drive to stay young for his adolescent market and his lack of intellectual curiosity and maturity precluded evolving into a “mature” artist like Al Green, Sting, Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, whose records are no longer guaranteed to sell multi-platinum but allow for longterm creative careers. The audience that grew up with Michael Jackson would certainly forgive him for aging along with them. He could have let the teeny boppers serve the teeny boppers. Instead he chose the reality-defying strategy of being a teenager for life. Steven Tyler proved that a popstar could remain a teenager in the head for life. Committing one’s body to this goal is a hard wall to bang and Jackson is a banged up old guy for trying.

Fear is a soul-twisting thing; but no fear is as distorting as a generalized fear of reality. The cult of fear and its antidote -- artifice -- leads to a dead end. Artiface is a facsimile of life -- the aesthetic of the “undead.” Death metal, fashion models posed and lit to look starved and devoid of consciousness, serial face-lifting that renders a person’s face a cadaverous mask, the Tarrantino fetish of graphic violence as comedy.

I have no aesthetic or principled objection to a bit of nip and tuck and a bucket of hair paint. But taken too far, the effect becomes self-defeating. A person who’s had a dozen face lifts looks more dead than vital. A face that’s been marinated in Botox looks more like a wax museum replica of a young person than a living one. The fact that we identify these deathly faces with youth and sexiness rather than sickness says much about our growing confusion over reality and artiface. The eroticism of deadness is everywhere. The punk era popularized the black lipstick and mascara look of a cadaver. A woman’s face with so much makeup as to obscure emotional expressiveness is generally associated with sexiness as is the dissipated manequin-chic that typifies so much fashion modeling. The exquisiteness of design and the fact that much of this aesthetic has a nudge-nudge-wink-wink aspect doesn’t lighten its weight in the overall cultural lexicon, particularly as it filters down to younger generations who are unaware of the original ironic allusions.

If all of us could afford the excesses of Michael Jackson, how abnormal would he then be? Could I go that far and not know it? That’s the scary question we ask ourselves when we rubberneck our tv every time he appears. It’s our own cult of necrophilia that causes the air to vibrate when we see that face and hear that voice recite the Peter Pan platitudes in a woozy soprano. We’re terrified but can’t look away. His music is now merely an asterisk on his resumé. Removing him is the only way out of our discomforting addiction to sensational coverage of his ever-evolving creepiness. And pedophilia is the silver bullet.

Last year I watched the BBC documentary on Jackson. It was a truly repellant experience. The only thing more horrifying was the parade of coverage and commentary that revealed a bizarre giddiness in its malice. Whom did he murder? Whose life savings did he scam? Whose job did he outsource?

Why are so many people so sure he’s a pedophile despite the absence of any reported clear evidence? Would we so readily believe Oprah or Derek Jeter to be guilty of pedophilia? We believe what we’re comfortable believing. And we want to believe Michael Jackson is guilty. We want to believe that it’s impossible for an adult to lie in bed with a child or adolescent without any sexual activity or motivations.

Is it possible that a young kid with cancer who’s been told by the medical authorities that he’ll soon die has moments of sheer terror? That he’s had his youth stolen from him and is alone in the world while other people float outside in a festival of normalcy? Could he have wanted his sympathetic famous benefactor to lie next to him and maybe even rock him to sleep? Is it possible that Michael Jackson knows exactly who this kid is and wants to give him some peace?

I have no way of knowing what Jackson did or didn’t do. I do know that our slow collective public murder of this man is one of the ugliest non-military media spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. If we’re not ashamed, then we truly are the undead.

Polar Levine
Editor, popCULTmedia.com

www.polarity1.com/bla1704.html

finally some1 with sense
slept in my moms Bestfriends bed he use to sleep next to me cause i was scared of sleepin alone..
aint a big deal
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #9 posted 04/19/04 8:22am

VoicesCarry

Luv4oneanotha said:

riverdean7 said:

THE SLOW MURDER OF MICHAEL JACKSON:
Fear And The Sexiness Of The Undead

by Polar Levine for popCULTmedia, February 16, 2004

John Ashcroft’s thirst for capital punishment aside, America’s thirst for death as catharsis and entertainment still hasn’t gotten around to FOX’s inserting live executions into its reality TV lineup. For the moment we’ll have to be satisfied with the much slower @#%$ hunt. I believe the media is chasing a very unbalanced and vulnerable man to suicide to be followed by a year-long explosion of Michael Jackson tributes, posthumous music releases, bioPix, merchandise and -- when all has been said and sold -- soul-searching questions about our own culpability in our victim’s demise. I’ll be amazed if Jackson reaches his fiftieth birthday.

I’d say, “go get him” if I were aware of any serious evidence of child molestation. As a dad of a young kid I take a hard stand on pedophilia. But as far as I’m concerned a 45-year-old man sleeping in the same bed with a child, adult or any other mammal is not the same as having sex. Like having a Bud is not the same as being an alcoholic. Like being a Muslim is not the same as being a terrorist. No specific evidence of sex with children has been publicly disclosed. For that matter I’m not sure Michael Jackson has a history of sex with any human, animal or vegetable. His true crime is being weird. More specifically, his true crime is being weird in precisely the same way that our pop culture is weird -- but he’s a few years ahead of the curve.

Alleged pedophilia aside, let’s look at his weird activity. His obsession with his looks coupled with his surgical alterations reflect the same obsessions and alterations found in much of our mainstream youth-worshipping society. Compulsive shopping sprees reflect America’s extreme style of consumerism where buying unnecessary stuff is a mode of entertainment and shopping ourselves into debt has become not just a mundane activity, but our patriotic duty. His over-the-top new age Hallmark rhetoric reflects our own taste for draping doilies in the form of kitsch and sentimentality over our anxiety and terror.

Michael Jackson has lived an extreme life and he acts out his culturally-derived fears and anxieties in an extreme version of the way millions of Americans act out. We’re living in a hothouse of media-projected fear. The entertainment/infotainment industry derives much of its cash flow from the violence it amuses us with in movies, video games, tv dramas and the news. The nightly perpwalk has been a staple of local news broadcasts for decades and the droning headlines and newsmag features on serial killers, pedophiles, terrorists, muggers, scam artists, epidemics and countless possibilities for injuries are as regular as cornflakes. Michael Moore’s ‘Bowling For Columbine’ brings this fear factor chillingly to light.

No study seems to conclusively link this steady diet of violence to a violent society, so it’s hard for people to consciously attempt a movement to put on the brakes. I believe we’ve been focusing all these studies on the wrong question. People may not be more likely to kill as a result of this diet of non-stop media violence but it certainly leads to a pervasive culture of free-floating fear.

This unconscious blanket of fear gets played out in a variety of ways, often in rituals adopted by different subcultures. When fear is free-floating, as opposed to based on a specific real threat, we feel compelled to detach from life to some degree to ease the pressure. Drugs are the most obvious escape. But there are other equally destructive roads out of reality. Entertainment bingeing is epidemic: watching tv, playing computer and video games, recreational shopping. The comforting certainty of fundamentalism -- theological, political or philosophical -- has a powerful attraction. The cult of beauty and sexiness, like money, is the requisite currency of happiness. It attracts love, riches and the eternal happy ending. The hipster set has discovered the reality-buffering qualities of extreme irony as though wrapping our fears in graphic dark humor punctuated by a blasé “whatever” will say “BOO!!” and make all those scary issues of mortality, nonprettiness and decrepitude flee from consciousness. Every day we receive information and instructions from prerecorded voices -- the chit chat of the “undead.”

Our fear and loathing of Michael Jackson is the fear and loathing of our own attraction to the road he’s taken. We’re predisposed by instinct to recoil at the recognition of our own death trip. Jackson is being crucified for the sins of our cult of artifice and detatchment.

Michael Jackson has been living in public since he was ten. He’s the prototype for ‘The Truman Show.’ Imagine going through puberty and adolescence in front of a fleet of cameras. The world gets to see, hear and comment on our sexual awakening and cluelessness, on our bodies going bonkers: zits, voice changing (a singer’s voice), too fat, too skinny, nose too big, not nice enough, not down enough, too politically conscious for Young America, too soft for the streets, too black, too white. Too much responsibility. Not enough fun.

The Jackson 5 hit the charts during the chaos of the anti-war movement and the militant phase of the civil rights movement. Michael was too young and too driven by the commercial demands of his family and his mentor/employer Berry Gordy to tap into the political/philosphical side of youth culture -- a rare sliver of time when young people had goals deeper than fun and status. His major breakthrough occurred in the 80’s as a solo artist during the Reagan era when our lingering humiliation over Watergate and America’s first military defeat sought relief in nostalgia for the certainties of the 50’s. Coupled with the birth of MTV, materialism replaced social consciousness as the reigning aesthetic of youth culture. Artiface and acquisition, vogueing and coke, polyester motorcycle jackets and business suits. Fashion models became superstars just because they were pretty, corporate CEOs because they were rich, and Robin Leach because he publicly swooned over the rich and pretty for our amusement. Jackson was the most famous rich pretty person on earth.

The pressure to stay young and pretty, coupled with the onset of his alleged skin condition (vitiligo, which causes irregularly shaped white blotches on the skin), must have put this hopelessly exposed and fragile man-child into an ongoing dull roar of panic. The extreme nature of his fame, visibility and the pressure to maintain the winning formula in a formula-bound youth culture must have been crushing to a person who had known nothing but pop music success.

The call to surgically derived youth had been answered long before Michael Jackson got to it. But Jackson, unlike his nipped and tucked predecessors, was introduced to the scalpel at a time when the technology of virtual youth offered transformative potential that would have given Mary Shelly the creeps. And few humans of any age had Michael Jackson’s enormous wealth with which to indulge surgery to such monstrous ends. Only in horror stories of the “undead” were these transformations previously contemplated: ‘Frankenstein,’ ‘The Island Of Dr. Moreau’ and zombie flicks like ‘Dawn of The Dead.’

The enormity of his talents has only been surpassed by the depths of his preventive isolation. His pathological drive to stay young for his adolescent market and his lack of intellectual curiosity and maturity precluded evolving into a “mature” artist like Al Green, Sting, Mick Jagger and Robert Plant, whose records are no longer guaranteed to sell multi-platinum but allow for longterm creative careers. The audience that grew up with Michael Jackson would certainly forgive him for aging along with them. He could have let the teeny boppers serve the teeny boppers. Instead he chose the reality-defying strategy of being a teenager for life. Steven Tyler proved that a popstar could remain a teenager in the head for life. Committing one’s body to this goal is a hard wall to bang and Jackson is a banged up old guy for trying.

Fear is a soul-twisting thing; but no fear is as distorting as a generalized fear of reality. The cult of fear and its antidote -- artifice -- leads to a dead end. Artiface is a facsimile of life -- the aesthetic of the “undead.” Death metal, fashion models posed and lit to look starved and devoid of consciousness, serial face-lifting that renders a person’s face a cadaverous mask, the Tarrantino fetish of graphic violence as comedy.

I have no aesthetic or principled objection to a bit of nip and tuck and a bucket of hair paint. But taken too far, the effect becomes self-defeating. A person who’s had a dozen face lifts looks more dead than vital. A face that’s been marinated in Botox looks more like a wax museum replica of a young person than a living one. The fact that we identify these deathly faces with youth and sexiness rather than sickness says much about our growing confusion over reality and artiface. The eroticism of deadness is everywhere. The punk era popularized the black lipstick and mascara look of a cadaver. A woman’s face with so much makeup as to obscure emotional expressiveness is generally associated with sexiness as is the dissipated manequin-chic that typifies so much fashion modeling. The exquisiteness of design and the fact that much of this aesthetic has a nudge-nudge-wink-wink aspect doesn’t lighten its weight in the overall cultural lexicon, particularly as it filters down to younger generations who are unaware of the original ironic allusions.

If all of us could afford the excesses of Michael Jackson, how abnormal would he then be? Could I go that far and not know it? That’s the scary question we ask ourselves when we rubberneck our tv every time he appears. It’s our own cult of necrophilia that causes the air to vibrate when we see that face and hear that voice recite the Peter Pan platitudes in a woozy soprano. We’re terrified but can’t look away. His music is now merely an asterisk on his resumé. Removing him is the only way out of our discomforting addiction to sensational coverage of his ever-evolving creepiness. And pedophilia is the silver bullet.

Last year I watched the BBC documentary on Jackson. It was a truly repellant experience. The only thing more horrifying was the parade of coverage and commentary that revealed a bizarre giddiness in its malice. Whom did he murder? Whose life savings did he scam? Whose job did he outsource?

Why are so many people so sure he’s a pedophile despite the absence of any reported clear evidence? Would we so readily believe Oprah or Derek Jeter to be guilty of pedophilia? We believe what we’re comfortable believing. And we want to believe Michael Jackson is guilty. We want to believe that it’s impossible for an adult to lie in bed with a child or adolescent without any sexual activity or motivations.

Is it possible that a young kid with cancer who’s been told by the medical authorities that he’ll soon die has moments of sheer terror? That he’s had his youth stolen from him and is alone in the world while other people float outside in a festival of normalcy? Could he have wanted his sympathetic famous benefactor to lie next to him and maybe even rock him to sleep? Is it possible that Michael Jackson knows exactly who this kid is and wants to give him some peace?

I have no way of knowing what Jackson did or didn’t do. I do know that our slow collective public murder of this man is one of the ugliest non-military media spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. If we’re not ashamed, then we truly are the undead.

Polar Levine
Editor, popCULTmedia.com

www.polarity1.com/bla1704.html

finally some1 with sense
slept in my moms Bestfriends bed he use to sleep next to me cause i was scared of sleepin alone..
aint a big deal


You were so elated you had to post it 3 times lol
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #10 posted 04/19/04 10:57am

Luv4oneanotha

VoicesCarry said:

Luv4oneanotha said:


finally some1 with sense
slept in my moms Bestfriends bed he use to sleep next to me cause i was scared of sleepin alone..
aint a big deal


You were so elated you had to post it 3 times lol

sorry bout that
Damn that itchy trigger finger !
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #11 posted 04/19/04 11:23am

Marrk

avatar

That, i found very interesting. sadly there are people who WANT him to be guilty. I know one, infact she's bet me £20 he's going to jail. I'll happily take my winnings when he's proved innocent. No amount of Pro-Michael articles will shift her stance, she won't even read them. Her minds made up purely on all the negative media that Michael cannot combat at this moment. Very sad really, this salivating thirst for blood among people.
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #12 posted 04/19/04 5:14pm

Luv4oneanotha

Marrk said:

That, i found very interesting. sadly there are people who WANT him to be guilty. I know one, infact she's bet me £20 he's going to jail. I'll happily take my winnings when he's proved innocent. No amount of Pro-Michael articles will shift her stance, she won't even read them. Her minds made up purely on all the negative media that Michael cannot combat at this moment. Very sad really, this salivating thirst for blood among people.

you should have bet more money! lolol
Word on the grape Vine
Grand Jury is not satisfy yet again with the D.A.'s Case...
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #13 posted 04/19/04 7:26pm

serveitupfrank
ie

avatar

Thanks for posting. I really enjoyed reading that article.

Thanks again.

Serveitupfrank*
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #14 posted 04/19/04 7:31pm

namepeace

riverdean7 said:

I’ll be amazed if Jackson reaches his fiftieth birthday.


I have been saying this for the last ten years to anyone who'd listen. But not for the reasons the Editor suggests (tho I admit I have to re-read this).

Michael Jackson made a conscious decision to destroy his body slowly and has apparently declined to seek professional help for his mental and emotional problems. He has been killing himself slowly for years.

Make no mistake. He is a grown man who carefully calculated his path to superstardom over 2 decades ago. He has played the main role in destroying himself.
Good night, sweet Prince | 7 June 1958 - 21 April 2016

Props will be withheld until the showing and proving has commenced. -- Aaron McGruder
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #15 posted 04/19/04 7:46pm

ThreadBare

The author's simplistic approach to summing up Michael Jackson is awfully convenient. In order for his premise to hold water, Jackson must again be received as a victim, someone unable to be an adult or take responsibility for his actions.

But, i wonder why -- in his viewing of the documentary footage and his regard for the gleeful malice he so exhaustively decries -- he apparently had not reaction to the blatant lies Michael Jackson told about his continual transformation through plastic surgery.

You see, a lot of the skepticism people have for Jackson is a result of his obvious actions and his constant LYING about them. How are people to believe a man's claims to ignorance, when he won't even come clean about obvious alterations to his face? One plastic surgeon interviewed by a news program, looked at the different stages in Jackson's evolution, said it has taken "dozens" of surgeries to change that radically. If Jackson came out one day and said, "You know, I always hated the way I looked and I knew I wouldn't be happy until I looked like Elizabeth Taylor," most folks would be like: "Finally! I think he's innocent of these horrible allegations!"

But, nooooo! MJ has a history (pardon the pun) of saying: "I just had 2 operations, and that was to my nose. Once, because I'd broken it. They helped me breathe better. Don't believe those tabloids. It's bee-eh-yuss..."
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #16 posted 04/20/04 6:50am

DavidEye

The most frustrating thing about Michael Jackson is that HE doesn't think there's anything wrong with him.This guy lives in his own world.He thinks it's perfectly normal for a black man to bleach his skin,have multiple surgeries to alter his appearance,and have "sleepovers" with young children.In his view,this is all normal,positive behavior and the rest of us are fools for believing otherwise.While I will always be a fan of Michael's music ,I no longer respect him.He's so far out of touch with reality,it ain't even funny anymore.
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #17 posted 04/20/04 7:11am

BlueNote

avatar

DavidEye said:

The most frustrating thing about Michael Jackson is that HE doesn't think there's anything wrong with him.This guy lives in his own world.He thinks it's perfectly normal for a black man to bleach his skin,have multiple surgeries to alter his appearance,and have "sleepovers" with young children.In his view,this is all normal,positive behavior and the rest of us are fools for believing otherwise.While I will always be a fan of Michael's music ,I no longer respect him.He's so far out of touch with reality,it ain't even funny anymore.


What exactly is wrong?

BlueNote
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #18 posted 04/20/04 7:12am

CookieMonster

Please, make this murder FAST.

It's so 80's....
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #19 posted 04/20/04 7:27am

LightOfArt

DavidEye said:

The most frustrating thing about Michael Jackson is that HE doesn't think there's anything wrong with him.This guy lives in his own world.He thinks it's perfectly normal for a black man to bleach his skin,have multiple surgeries to alter his appearance,and have "sleepovers" with young children.In his view,this is all normal,positive behavior and the rest of us are fools for believing otherwise.While I will always be a fan of Michael's music ,I no longer respect him.He's so far out of touch with reality,it ain't even funny anymore.


HE DIDNT BLEACH HIS SKIN...ITS VITILIGO OR WHATEVR THE SHIT IS CALLED mad
BEFORE(see the white patches? He was covering them until they were all over his body)

AFTER
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #20 posted 04/20/04 7:42am

riverdean7

firstly i think the reason mj fibs about his surgeries is because he doesnt feel its anyones business and there not important issues to him the media lies about him all the time so he lies about his surgeries it dont worry me cause they have nothing to do with who he is
i dont recall him lying about important issues u know
and about the bleaching of the skin cmon dont be so ignorant cause its common knowledge he has a skin disease and ive seen pics of the discolouration myself so i know hes not lying
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #21 posted 04/20/04 8:44am

LightOfArt

riverdean7 said:

firstly i think the reason mj fibs about his surgeries is because he doesnt feel its anyones business and there not important issues to him the media lies about him all the time so he lies about his surgeries it dont worry me cause they have nothing to do with who he is
i dont recall him lying about important issues u know
and about the bleaching of the skin cmon dont be so ignorant cause its common knowledge he has a skin disease and ive seen pics of the discolouration myself so i know hes not lying


co-sign
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #22 posted 04/20/04 8:53am

otan

avatar

LightOfArt said:

riverdean7 said:

firstly i think the reason mj fibs about his surgeries is because he doesnt feel its anyones business and there not important issues to him the media lies about him all the time so he lies about his surgeries it dont worry me cause they have nothing to do with who he is
i dont recall him lying about important issues u know
and about the bleaching of the skin cmon dont be so ignorant cause its common knowledge he has a skin disease and ive seen pics of the discolouration myself so i know hes not lying


co-sign

yeah. and OJ's innocent too, right? all these hollywood victims up in here.
The Last Otan Track: www.funkmusician.com/what.mp3
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #23 posted 04/20/04 10:12am

BlueNote

avatar

otan said:

LightOfArt said:



co-sign

yeah. and OJ's innocent too, right? all these hollywood victims up in here.


So everybody is guilty, right? Or just the ones you don't like?

BlueNote
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #24 posted 04/20/04 10:31am

Cloudbuster

avatar

BlueNote said:

So everybody is guilty, right? Or just the ones you don't like?

BlueNote


wink
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #25 posted 04/20/04 10:36am

Marrk

avatar

BlueNote said:

otan said:


yeah. and OJ's innocent too, right? all these hollywood victims up in here.


So everybody is guilty, right? Or just the ones you don't like?

BlueNote



and X marks the spot!
clapping
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #26 posted 04/20/04 10:09pm

Luv4oneanotha

Speaking of the OJ Case
ive been studying into that it seems that the investigation was a plot to indic charges on OJ
the Police Investigation Overlooked Alot of evidence that would of lead to Oj's Innocents
the Actually Bloody Glove was the Only Credible Evidence but it wasn't good enough
its all a racial issues if you havent notice
the System is not colorblind
they can try to indict OJ with lack of evidence of Killing a WHITE WOMEN!
but they can't find any Suspects on who killed tupac?
Pac was killed in a LAS vegas Strip
in the middle of everything
you can get thousands of credible wittnesses
but ts irrelevant when it comes to a black man
the System has made so many mistakes over 500 cases overturned 300 innocent people sent to their deaths and the majority where of minority persuasion
you can try and indict OJ for killing his white wife but u cant tell me who killed biggie and 2pac
Nicole Simpson Cant rap
I WANT JUSTICE!
why did those motherfawkers who beat done rodney king get off?
cause their white
its just that damn good
let me tell you this
if Michael Jackson was a White man and was charged for molesting a Black boy
they wouldn't even bother given the case a thorough investigation
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #27 posted 04/20/04 10:18pm

ThreadBare

LightOfArt said:

riverdean7 said:

firstly i think the reason mj fibs about his surgeries is because he doesnt feel its anyones business and there not important issues to him the media lies about him all the time so he lies about his surgeries it dont worry me cause they have nothing to do with who he is
i dont recall him lying about important issues u know
and about the bleaching of the skin cmon dont be so ignorant cause its common knowledge he has a skin disease and ive seen pics of the discolouration myself so i know hes not lying


co-sign


Perhaps you two can explain to me then, what no other diehard MJ fan has been able to explain: How is it that offstage Michael, who loves to be around kids all the time but is decidedly asexual (he's Peter Pan, remember), can write and perform songs about adult, sexual relationships and add sexual choreography to his videos and concerts?

Offstage asexual unlike most other adults, which makes him the perfect companion for kids. It also is highly unlikely that he is the biological father of "his" children.)

Artistically very sexual and constantly groping female dancers (or himself)

Explain this dualistic alibi that MJ and his faithful flock have repeated for well over a decade, please.

Thanks.
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #28 posted 04/20/04 10:33pm

Luv4oneanotha

ThreadBare said:

LightOfArt said:



co-sign


Perhaps you two can explain to me then, what no other diehard MJ fan has been able to explain: How is it that offstage Michael, who loves to be around kids all the time but is decidedly asexual (he's Peter Pan, remember), can write and perform songs about adult, sexual relationships and add sexual choreography to his videos and concerts?

Offstage asexual unlike most other adults, which makes him the perfect companion for kids. It also is highly unlikely that he is the biological father of "his" children.)

Artistically very sexual and constantly groping female dancers (or himself)

Explain this dualistic alibi that MJ and his faithful flock have repeated for well over a decade, please.

Thanks.

1 word my friend PROPOGANDA
He was probably A-sexual a long time ago i think he's been active with females reportedly from friends of his neways since hes been married
MJ never really does write songs about Sexual Relationships
he usually just co-writes them
and thats for effect
and sexual choreography?
the Crotch Grabbing?
lolol i don't think thats sexual
Humping a floor (ahem Prince) is sexual
crotch grabbing is just something black guys do lol
I think thats a gimick he has plus dem white women love it when he grabs below the buckle
to be an Artist you have to be fluid, Sex Sells and he has to compete with that
the Majority of the Songs MJ writes alone are about heartbreak children and love
i can't say anything really "sexual"
i don't think it crosses his mind really, He's Wholesome
iIn the closet? maybe thats like the only one i cant think off that might have sexual overtones, somebody help me out!
now R.Kelly
thats a sexual guy lol
all of the songs he writes are about sex which xplains alot...
Btw im not a die hard fan lol that would be light
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Reply #29 posted 04/20/04 10:46pm

ThreadBare

I have to disagree with your suggestion that he doesn't write or sing about sexual relationships with women. Here are just a few of his songs. You're more familiar with his catalog than I, though, I'm sure:

In the Closet
Remember the Time
PYT
The Way You Make Me Feel
She Rocks My World
She Drives Me Wild
Can't Let Her Get Away
Give in to Me
billie jean
She's Out of My Life
Girl is Mine
Don't Stop Til You Get Enough
Dirty Diana
Butterflies

So, let me guess. When he sings about these relationships, it's all a euphemism to him, right? When sings about how a girl makes him feel and he starts doing pelvic thrusts and rubbin' on himself, it's a metaphor for having bitten into a York Peppermint Pattie.

The man sings about having mature, physical relationships with women. But he's asexual? So, he's acting? None of this makes sense or holds water. He has a sexual side, doesn't seem particularly natural with women and LOVES to be around children.

Again, please explain the disconnect.
  - E-mail - orgNote - Report post to moderator
Page 1 of 3 123>
  New topic   Printable     (Log in to 'subscribe' to this topic)
« Previous topic  Next topic »
Forums > Music: Non-Prince > the slow murder of michael jackson