The Ghost at the Michael Jackson Trial

I never thought I’d hear any creepier self-recorded testimony to Michael Jackson’s painkiller addiction than that song “Morphine” he did for his ’97 EP Blood on the Dance Floor. (The relevant lyrics begin at 2:50.) But just yesterday, there was Jackson’s posthumous prosecuting attorney, flaunting a surreptitious recording Dr. Charles Murray had made on his iPhone (later discovered by investigators), of Jackson mumbling all but incoherently while on that eternal drip to nowhere. (The relevant lyrics begin at 1:17.) It’s a profoundly disturbing document–more disturbing, in its way, than even those photos of Jackson dead on his gurney. The photos are all static aftermath, the conclusion foregone. But the recording is death in motion, Jackson’s obsolescence made manifest by the degraded instrument of his own artistic expression. After the attorney got done playing back that bootleg, the courtroom seemed like it had seen a ghost, when really it had only heard one.