The King is Dead

06.29.09

For the majority of my years at Lexington Elementary School, I had three heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Michael Jackson. David Bowie was also a hero of mine, seeing as he was both a rock star and the Goblin King (see the 1986 movie Labyrinth), and I looked up to my dad, as well as to Apple Computer inventor Steve Wozniak. Yet Michael Jackson outshone all of these men, as the absolute pinnacle of coolness and as the biggest role model for myself and my friends. Before Kurt Cobain, before Tupac, before Marilyn Manson, before Eminem, Michael Jackson towered above the competition as the alpha male of popular music and as the most infamous icon of the music world.

I remember one time I was in the car with my mother on her 30th birthday, August 29th, 1988. I was seven years old. Michael Jackson came on the radio and I started rocking out in the passenger seat. I don’t recall which song it was, but they followed it with two more Michael Jackson songs and I was going nuts. After the epic three song marathon, the DJ came on and said that it was Michael Jackson’s birthday, and that he was turning 30, just like my mom.

“Did you hear that, mom?” I exclaimed. “Michael Jackson is the EXACT SAME AGE AS YOU!” To me, this was amazingly cool.

Later that year, around Halloween, I remember watching the making of the Thriller video on TV. It showed how they made the special effects, and the layers and layers of latex makeup they put on MJ to transform him into a creature. The fact that he got to be both a were-cat and a zombie in the same music video was a kid’s dream come true. I vowed to myself that someday I would be a rock star, so that I too would be able to transform into monsters in my music videos.

When Sasha Cichowski brought her cassette tape of Michael Jackson’s Bad to school, I pored over the lyrics and liner notes. The clothes he was wearing on the cover of the tape, as well as in the Bad video, seemed like the most awesome clothes a man could have. Everything was silver spikes and black leather, and the outfit was incredibly intricate. I was sure that, if I had those clothes, I would be the coolest kid at school beyond any doubt, and all the girls would like me. As it stood, I was resigned to SCU t-shirts given to me by my parents, and hand-me-downs from my mother’s younger brothers.

When we had school dances in Room 1, we always moonwalked, and I was actually pretty good at it at age 10. On weekends I spent as much time as I could at my friend Phil Schuyler’s house, in part because he had Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker on VHS, which to me was one of the most epic movies ever made. I would always make Phil rewind the bits where Michael transformed into a cartoon rabbit, as well as the gangster Smooth Criminal speakeasy scene. The video made it seem like Michael Jackson had magical powers, like Santa Claus, or Jesus. I loved that tape. It was strange, and a bit scary, but hypnotic.

When MC Hammer challenged MJ to a dance off, we talked about it for a week during recess, hoping with our fingers crossed that Michael would accept the challenge. Had he done so, it would’ve been one of the COOLEST THINGS EVER. My friends and I idolized Michael Jackson. No other artist captivated us to the same degree that Michael did. He represented the ultimate dream: we all wanted to be him. We all wanted to be a zombie, a gigantic robot, a gang leader, a mobster, a cartoon rabbit, a rock star, the King of Pop. We all wanted our own amusement park. He was living out our dreams.

But beyond the great songs, beyond the incredible music videos, beyond the cool outfits, beyond the Moonwalker VHS, there was one reason why Michael Jackson remained cooler than MC Hammer, Kriss Kross, or Vanilla Ice: Michael Jackson had his own arcade game. And this was quite possibly the greatest thing a person could achieve.

No other artist had their own arcade game. This was years before Aerosmith came out with Revolution X. It was an awesome game, to boot. Michael Jackson's Moonwalker was the coolest video game in the entire arcade, rivaled only in popularity by the Simpsons game, which was also incredibly epic. Each level of Moonwalker featured a different Michael Jackson song, and you and two friends played as three different Michael Jacksons in a white, red, and black suit respectively. You got to bust dance moves as special attacks, throw your fedora at enemies, and power up into robot form when you rescued Bubbles the chimp. The game was completely incredible, and the soundtrack was unbeatable. It was like living the Smooth Criminal video firsthand, with your buddies helping you out. We kept the quarters flowing, and danced our enemies to death.

However, nothing gold can stay, and soon our hero became tarnished as we grew older and strange information emerged about him. I remember looking through a magazine in the bathroom while my mom was watching the Ron Perlman / Linda Hamilton Beauty and the Beast TV show in the living room, and I discovered before and after photos of MJ, pictured first as a black man, and second as a white alien. Needless to say, it raised an eyebrow, and I’ve had a phobia of plastic surgery ever since.

As time went on, it became increasingly difficult for us to maintain our ignorance of the fact that MJ was, by all accounts, a raging pederast. We tried not to think about it too much, we tried not to believe it, so that we could be free to enjoy the Remember the Time music video premiere Sunday night after the Simpsons. After all, the video also featured Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson, two more of our heroes, as well as David Bowie’s wife Iman. But MJ’s growing creepiness soon became something that we could no longer ignore, much like the fact that Santa Claus wasn’t real. By the close of fifth grade, our hero had become a mutant in our eyes, and not the cool kind of mutant either. The cheesy cassette tapes of my childhood were replaced by my first two CDs: Nirvana’s Nevermind and Metallica’s black album. Michael Jackson was no longer cool.

To be honest, I felt betrayed. Finding out that your hero is a pedophile is a pretty rough thing for a kid to learn. I coped, and still cope, with these feelings of betrayal by making child molestation jokes at Michael’s expense.

Despite his ignominious fall, Michael Jackson remains an inspiration to me, both as an artist and as a pop icon. It’s probably for the best that he’s dead now: this way we can gloss over his weirdness and pedophilia, and focus instead on his legendary work.

Rest in peace, Michael. Thanks for the memories. And when I die, there’s a decent chance the obituary will read “Fell to his death while moonwalking in the shower, with Billie Jean blaring from his computer nearby.”