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June 28, 2009
Michael Jackson, who emerged from the Motown soul sound, may be dead but he is resurrected by the media. He is now everywhere, just like the 1980s when he was singing and dancing--- the time of the disco Off the Wall (1979) and Thriller (1982) and the subsequent television appearances and live tours. This is celebrity culture and a media circus has surrounded Jackson in our commodity-mediascape.
Morten Moreland
As Paul Morley says in The Observer:
death had allowed the myth of Jackson to surge into life, and his career got the focused injection of publicity he had recently been unable to generate consistently without dangerous self-sacrifice. The 24-hour news channels couldn't believe their luck, all this archive, tension, scandal, revelation, mourning, scorning and gossip. Jackson played a massive, needy part in shaping an entertainment universe which now largely consists of constant gossip about the antics and eccentricities of damaged celebrities, and his death was confirmation that the presentation of round-the-clock news certainly when it comes to popular culture is little more than formally presented, gravely delivered, hastily assembled tittle tattle.
Jackson had become a physical wreck, was deeply in debt from spending more than he earn, and probably incapable of the comeback he had planned a marathon of marathon 50 shows in London in order to clear his debts.
As K-Punk points out the extensive marketing of the corporate star machine and the video clips (especially the movie-like Thriller video), which helped to transform visual culture has ensured that Michael Jackson the legend is a spectacle.
It has also has shaped the way we think about identity and popular culture. Annalee Newitz observes:
Among the many things about Jackson that caught the public's imagination in the 1990s was the way he turned his body into a kind of science fiction story. He became an enhanced human, using plastic surgery and pharmaceuticals to change his face and seemingly his race as well. He became whiter than most white people, and his pale bandaged skin became his trademark. Jackson was a post-human celebrity...
In Reagan's America Jackson flees his blackness by wanting to become white--- a line of flight that is a response to the everyday racism of American culture and society. This becoming-white is what I find so haunting because the man who made black music mainstream shunned his own black appearance.This becoming-white is also tragic, since Jackson became in Steven Schapiro's words "a kind of grotesque parody of whiteness, a zombiefied, living-dead simulation of whiteness."
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