The Man in the Mirror

Now that the dust has settled, I just want to weigh in on the passing of Michael Jackson. And it goes like this: Michael Jackson was a phenomenal pop song writer and artist. Some of my earliest memories of adoring music and performance were based on Michael Jackson’s work. As a kid, it also impacted my reflection on race relations, although I would not have characterized that way then. Simply put, I saw Michael as transcending race. He was a super human being. He was “above” race and when I lost myself in his music, it was anything but race that I was thinking about.

I’m not even going to get into the controversy that surrounded him later in life. Enough people raked him through the coals, as Americans seem wont to do with celebrities (and especially him). He put it best in his song “Leave Me Alone” … a cry for privacy that we Americans so cherish.

Here’s the controversial bit I will add: I’m disappointed in hypocrites who ridiculed Michael Jackson and later rallied around him in adoration. I’m going to generalize here a bit, but I knew people, black and white, who disparaged him while he was alive, then later jumped on the bandwagon to say what a great artist he was. Shame on them.

I always have and will continue to love his work and respect him as a person. If people listen to his music, they’ll hear the sound of a compassionate and soulful human being. I was touched to read what I think is perhaps one of the fairest accounts of Michael in GQ (hence the cover art here). I credit the author, John Jeremiah Sullivan for his fair account of Michael’s life. I encourage you to read it, if only to get to the final beautiful quote, which was from Michael himself:

“Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it’s not just random sound, that it’s music.”