Michael Jackson
In 1977, Elvis died. It was an anticlimatic moment, and an anticlimactic death. Long past his prime, and even past a comeback that failed to cohere into some sort of second-act respectability, his death left many things unresolved, a fact attested to by all the posthumous sightings. What was unresolved isn’t exactly clear: there were secrets yet to come out, true, a drug habit that could’ve been kicked, all right, and an embrace of schmaltz that could be rejected. But all seem like unlikely outcomes. It was just an unexpected place to cut off the arc, like someone realized they’d run out of ideas five years back and couldn’t think of anywhere else to take it. Elvis was written into a corner. But he died just when the changes he’d wrought were, according to popular legend anyway, at their moribund peak. 1977 was the year that dinosaur rock was theoretically killed by punk, the supposed “year zero.” Taste killed him, maybe, thinking if it cut out the living embodiment of lazy, bloated, self-satisfied rock the body would die off, too.
Which is basically the situation we have here with MJ. This is an unsatisfying resolution: there was no successful comeback, no redemption, no elder statesman period, not even a blaze of glory to go out on, just a middle-aged heart attack. But at the same time, we are in some sort of end times of all he represents. The world of celebrity journalism and gossip seems to have hit rock bottom, self-sustaining on a steady diet of nothing, running on the fumes of a system totally contained within their walls and unconnected with any sort of exterior fame. Megafame itself is mostly dead, a few old stars aside. Maybe this is a kind of year zero, too. Maybe something else will come along. Maybe it’s politics. God help us all.
