Friday Not-So-Funtime: Michael Jackson, "Scream"

Dear readers: I began this week with the intention of presenting a Friday Funtime of GLBT Pride, songs from artists who have been courageously open about their sexual identities and still musically successful. The past day's events led me to rethink this. Hey - it'll allow me to shine specific spotlights on anthems like Bronski Beat's "Why" and Erasure's "Always" on future dates.

So with that, I turn the page over to my dear friend Dave*. He and I both graduated college right around the time "Scream," the antagonistic song Michael Jackson recorded with his sister Janet, hit the airwaves and video screens. It made it only to #5 in June 1995, but "Scream" represented much more for Michael: an unreturnable breaking point. Its message, both aural and visual, was clear: I'm in my fantasy world now; leave me the fuck alone. D* and I, in a difficult to explain fascination, over a long stretch of time pondered separately and together what might become of a Michael so thoroughly divorced from reality and so ongoingly divorced from his own skin. There never seemed a possible happy ending. It seemed likely things would end badly, but not suddenly and certainly not now.

And yet here we are. And here's D*'s contemplation on a modern tragedy.

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I saw a movie about industrial processes once. The operator took a disk of sheet steel, hard, solid, resilient. He put in a steam press and pulled a lever. The press came down and crumpled that shiny steel like it was tissue paper.

Michael Jackson's life always reminded me of that.

The man never had a self; he never had time to make one. From the time he was 10, a media spotlight shone on him, never letting up, getting brighter and brighter until the early '80s, when he was featured in practically every media outlet on Earth. He could do no wrong. Billions of people slavered over him. And then, over the course of the late '80s, they put him in a mirror. All the attention was there, but suddenly he could do no right. There has to be a second half to every Behind the Music; society demands one. And everything we love one day, we grew sick of and hate the next.

The story of Michael Jackson is the story of how our society works, a crucial one to any future historian who wishes to understand our era. And it will probably never be told. It's funny, really: whoever was willing to be honest about the fact of MJ's life (which are almost certainly more bizarre and disturbing that we know) would make a fortune, but no one will spill, out of fear or loyalty or just fatigue. Those who are most willing to talk are those who probably know the least. Sometimes it seems like there are no more secrets, but often it's the most superficial things that are revealed, providing a more impenetrable mask to the truth.

Mask. His face was a mask. What was he trying to make himself into? There's a phrase: "He's trying to be someone he isn't." I think Michael Jackson was trying to be someone he was. He was always trying to live up to his own divine image.

It's hard to have sympathy for celebrities, and rightly so. Yeah, it's hard, but the hardness is cushioned by a thick, spongy layer of money. It's only in the extreme examples, like Jackson, that the true nature of the beast shines forth. We pay these people to be spiritually vivisected, and we all gather around the operating table to ooh and ahh at the fine kidneys and lungs, to criticize a malformed liver or a disappointing pancreas, to dismiss the gonads as the same-old-same-old. The lucky ones get sewn up again, but God help the ones we really find interesting. And outside in the hall there's a line around the block of new victims.

Lord, please show Michael Joseph Jackson more mercy than we did.