Michael Jackson had better than average talents as a dancer. He didn’t have much of a voice. He was mostly a mimic, aping a gangster in one of his most marketed vids, not hard to do. He grew up a performer in a performing family, and his mimicry began to transform fairly soon into hype and PR. Did he have a style? No more than most energetic performers, especially those who appeared on frenetic MTV and after. But his most famous style became physical self transformation, which took grotesque forms, perhaps responding unconsciously to racial stereotypes and his attempt to undo them by plastic means, like Asian girls who have their epicanthic eye folds "westernized."  He appealed in most ways to growing Pop Vulgarity and not much else. 

Admiration for his smug Pop sentimentality became more and more central to the grotesquerie of his self-presentation, and of the cult that grew during his trial for child abuse. My guess is that he fawned on children as a way of trying to retain the childhood he never grew out of. The wild following throughout his life was took the form of tasteless insensitivity, confusing Disneyworld’s presentation of childhood with the more complex nature of children. Such gloppy images of childhood promoted by both Disney and MJ show an inability to grasp adults as well as children. Nothing could be further from Wordsworth's spiritualization of the child. Pop adoration, mindless and tinseled, is now debased even more because of Jackson. 

Maybe I could be faulted for not paying much attention to him. Some would too vigorously say that his talent and energy were extraordinary. I doubt it. Circus performers are often charismatic as well as physically talented but we don't have memorial extravaganzas for them with huge posters for signing. All such phenomena, in varying degrees of worship and culthood, are somewhat interesting in what they tell us about popular tastes, but usually not much. On the contrary, I think of Muhammed Ali whom I've always liked, probably because he had an ironic debunking edge even as he allowed himself to be exploited. Ali had something that didn’t just inflate and pass from our attention with a speed that amazes as much as success. Princess Diana was a phenomenon composed of beauty and mindlessly charming gestures and speech. She probably represented to many a glamorous royalty more story-book like than the bland family she married into.

MJ’s charisma was of a much weirder variety -- creepy, syrupy adoration of kids, the bodily changes, the attempt to obliterate his blackness, which he denied, but I deny the denial. His Pop followers glommed onto his trial and his pathetic denials. Pathetic, not tragic.

David Zucker