reflecting on Michael Jackson
It’s been very interesting watching the reaction of people to the death of Michael Jackson this week. The world has clearly lost an incredible talent. I don’t think I realized the full scope of his (and his music’s) affect on people until I saw the aftermath of the news on Thursday. Bars all over New York have been playing more Michael Jackson than I’ve heard in the 8 years I lived here before. Cars driving around are blasting MJ. We listened to his music all day at the office on Friday.
When commenting on the role and power of US media/entertainment on international markets, I’ve often told the story of my first night in Tunis, the capital city of Tunisia, in October 2002. We had just finished dinner and were on a balcony overlooking a main boulevard. Shortly after dark, some men came out with a screen and a projector and began projecting Michael Jackson music videos – in the middle of the median. People streamed out from the surrounding storefronts and homes and began dancing in the street – to Michael Jackson.
This was my first time in a place like this – a place that could not have been any more foreign. And yet – here we were, watching people with whom I had almost nothing in common, dance through the streets to some of the very music I had grown up running around my house to, half a world away.
The power of distributed media/entertainment.
Many will spend these days debating the moral character of Michael Jackson – and I imagine history will temper most of these conversations. I’ve read a lot about him in the last few days, but I’m not sure anything struck me as much as this piece by Andrew Sullivan did (via @kydoh):
He was everything our culture worships; and yet he was obviously desperately unhappy, tortured, afraid and alone.
I grieve for him; but I also grieve for the culture that created and destroyed him. That culture is ours’ and it is a lethal and brutal one: with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.
I hope he has the peace now he never had in his life. And I pray that such genius will not be so abused again.
