Michael Jackson Tributes

Just a place to collect some of the remembering, commentary, tributes, sights and sounds that have been going up.

The image to the right is titled “Michael Jackson” by Pierre Ethier. In stark black and white, the trademark smooth-criminal fedora sits alone on a flower covered floor. It seems a fitting elegy to the King of Pop even though it was posted last week — before his passing. Many had been missing Michael Jackson for years already.

I’ve excerpted just tiny bits from some of the below posts but you need to go visit them and read them in their entirety.

Please add your own links in the comments if you’ve seen other gems out there.

Reflections

Andrew Sullivan – Thinking About Michael

There are two things to say about him. He was a musical genius; and he was an abused child.

Jeff Chang – Morning’s End

Many of his most affecting performances were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past.

Brandon Soderberg – Michael Jackson, 1958-2009

A kind example of Jackson’s outre celebrity is the awesomely confident and personal but very out-of-place sketches found inside of Thriller. That a guy of his stature would even put these uncool sketches of cartoon him and cartoon McCartney battling over a girl, a kind of Daniel Johnston retelling of Thriller’s “The Girl Is Mine”, is illustrative of Jackson’s desire to express his vision in as many round-about and weird ways as possible: Turning into a cougar, grabbing his crotch, bleaching his skin, making paranoid pop masterpieces, releasing some oddly personal drawings to the world. These drawings feel like his work, specific and general, sincere and direct but mysterious and private too. I guess that’s all also a definition of mythic.

Mouse, Classical Geek Theatre – The Michael Jackson I Knew

Michael Jackson was weak and plainly addicted to painkillers, but he gave his best smiling performance every time he’d walk to court in front of those cameras. Even in the fog of addiction Michael’s business instinct understood the importance of saving face during those perp walks. But once inside, free from the spying eyes of television, he looked like any other person who wished he didn’t have to be in court that day.

Ta-Nehisi Coates – Remembering the Time

I remember when this came out, and all the kids who’d been lucky enough to stay up and see Friday Night Videos came to school bragging about it. You couldn’t get cable in Baltimore back then. Fools were like, “Yo, every time he took a step the stones would glow! And then when he went invisible the stones kept glowing!!” We thought Mike could save us all. We hadn’t heard BDP yet.

I chose this instead of the old joint because it makes me sad. Mike used to be beautiful. My sister Kelly just knew she was marrying him. And he danced so smooth and easy. I hate to think that what gave him that ability, was the same thing that ruined him. I remember watching this a few years back and thinking, “Goddamn, he’s still got it. Amazing.” Watch the end where he murders them b-boy style.

Hua Hsu – MJ R.I.P.

His distance made him an enigma: he was post-racial before anyone knew it; he was a vain, tragic hero; he suffered for our adoration. Or so we like to tell ourselves. Maybe he was just terminally lonely, maybe he actually was as ill as he claimed. But what is the allure of this narrative that we–fans, consumers, the media, American culture, etc–somehow destroyed Michael? What anxieties do we displace by projecting them onto his troubled face? I always think back to the interrogation scene from Three Kings. “What is the problem with Michael Jackson?” an Iraqi soldier asks a wayward American. “Your country make him chop up his face.” He did it to himself, the American protests, but his interrogator insists: “Michael Jackson is pop king of sick fucking country.” Maybe it is a “sick fucking country.” Maybe the idea of pop transcendence is deeply flawed. But we are truly the sick ones if we didn’t already know this, if we needed Michael Jackson to be our martyr. If we think we would trade it all for a world without Off the Wall or Thriller or “Butterflies.”

Mike Barthel – Michael Jackson

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.

Mark Richardson – Michael Jackson R.I.P.

Take away the music, and Michael Jackson’s life is just too sad to contemplate. Which is a very good argument for not taking away the music, ever.

Combat Jack – Michael Jackson – R.I.P. The King of Pop

DJ Sugabear kept shouting how Michael was back, and he was right. That video, simple as it looks now, kept us urban kids locked in, warned Hip Hop even, that it was too small to eff with Jackson’s talent. Little did I, did we know that “Billy Jean” was the harbinger for the tsunami that would be the Michael Jackson mania 2.0. As tough as I wanted to be, when me and some fellow students watched that famed “Motown 25″ special live in our dorm’s tv room, when Michael performed “Billy Jean” live for the first time, when nigga flipped how street dudes in New York were doing the moon walk, cat had me screaming out the “OHHH SHIT!” with the rest of them. This was the Reagen era in full swing, and damn if that performance didn’t feel like the Russians finally let fly a nuke.

Danyel Smith – Michael Jackson, The Greatest Star

Is the world grieving Michael Jackson, or mourning for a time when such earnest fandom was possible?

Music Mixes

T.R.O.Y. Blog presents Smooth Criminal on Beat Breaks, a mix of some classic Michael Jackson material with the rap classics that recycled them.

Trees for Breakfast digs up a 2004 mix by DJ Lt Dan called The King of What’s Poppin

Rhymefest speaks over at Fakeshore Drive calling Jackson, the King not just of Pop but of all Music. They’ve re-upped Rhymefest’s Man in the Mirror mix from late 2007 which I remember giving some spin when it came out.

DJ Jaycee put together this mix of early Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson The Soulful Years. Phonte just called it the “definitive MJ mixtape”

J.Period’s Michael Jackson Tribute

Videos

Three via Jay Smooth:

Jackson 5, “Walk on” Live on Tour in France 1972

Michael Jackson, James Brown and Prince On Stage Together

125th Street last night, fan’s tribute dance comes to an emotional end.