“He Was My Childhood”: Michael Jackson Dies, Nostalgia Thrives

As soon as the news of Michael Jackson’s death broke, it was clear that the ensuing fuss would be about much more than one man. It was a chance to look back at the singular moment in history he reigned over—the glory days when the music supposedly mattered and was (apparently) a rallying cry for unity. In the week since, there’s been a deluge of tributes, personal essays, cultural post mortems, charticles, playlists, and confessions, a seemingly inexhaustible stream of people dredging up memories that, while intensely personal and specific, also feel distinctly familiar.

To some extent, this kind of thing happens whenever a famous person dies, especially one linked so closely to a particular time and style. But it’s hard to imagine such an outpouring of nostalgia for any other musician (and while it feels really morbid to try, I guess we can all count on Bob Dylan…?). Over the past week, some people have seemed oddly thankful that they long ago got rid of their Michael Jackson albums, because it meant they could embrace the frenzy and buy them all over again, getting swept up in the mania that made his music so special in the first place. It seemed like we were all excited to have not just a chance, but a kind of directive, to look back.

In memorializing Michael Jackson, a host of writers and critics have delved back into the ’70s and ’80s to get their bearings. Some have carefully noted that the Jackson era actually ended awhile ago, the man having morphed into a bizarre spectacle that became hard to reconcile with his brilliant early work. Others seemed strangely seduced by the idea that Jackson’s death represented the sudden, shocking end of an era.

Commentators and various talking heads were moved to make sweeping, grandiose statements. Tim Arango, reporting for the New York Times about people gathering in Times Square following the news, pointed out that Jackson’s death wasn’t exactly “a moment like ‘The Kiss in Times Square,’ memorialized by the photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt in 1945 after the Japanese surrendered to end World War II”—but obviously thought it was worth alluding to anyway. A common refrain deigned June 25th “the day that pop music died,” and plenty of witnesses spoke to Jackson’s matchlessness. Tommy Mottola told the Times that “No one has ever done what he did in his time — and no one will ever do what he did after his time,” while Anderson Cooper reminded viewers that “Michael Jackson did things that seemed like they hadn’t been done before.” “It was otherworldly,” chimed in former MTV News correspondent John Norris. “It’s hard to even talk in 2009 about what the era of the superstar was like.”

Really, it hasn’t been so hard to talk about, since that’s all everyone has been doing: describing what fame meant then and now, theorizing about the origins of every musical development that made Michael-Jackson-the-phenomenon possible, and tackling every detail of his life—from his small town roots, to his abusive father, to his insane dance moves, to his pet chimp, to his glittering costumes, not to mention that he turned out to be the most fascinating case study for every issue related to race and sex anyone could dream of—and trying to explain what ultimately led to his downfall. Our major preoccupation has been to attempt exactly what Norris thought (rather shortsightedly) would be so difficult: reviving this mythical “era of the superstar” in specific, heroic terms, focusing a massive amount of attention and energy on a bygone time, and giving/getting a refresher course in why it’s worth recalling in the first place. This meant spending a lot of time comparing Jackson’s heyday to the way we live now, and the implication became that where we are today is somehow less honest, less bold and inventive—and a lot less fun.

Whether or not that’s true is beside the point. This is, increasingly, the way we give a person his due.

For Carrie Brownstein, writing on her excellent blog, Monitor Mix, at NPR, the audio technology of ’80s is an indelible part of her memory of listening to these songs: “For many of us of a certain age, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the album,” she writes. “The music contained therein wasn’t relegated to the turntables we played it on. (These were our first turntables, usually part of some crappy combination stereo system that featured dual cassette players, a giant roving stereo dial and cheap speakers barely better than megaphones.)” And the songs on that record were formative in a broad, very real sense: “[T]hey taught us our dance moves, gave us a sense of style and transformed what we saw on television and in the movies.” They provided an identity kids could try on, a pace to move to. Many of us, Brownstein continued later, have “never known a world without Michael Jackson.”

Others testified to a magical time when music brought people together. “Weeping for Michael, we are also mourning the musical monoculture—the passing of a time when we could imagine that the whole country, the whole planet, was listening to the same song,” wrote Slate’s Jody Rosen. “An entire pop generation has come of age without Jackson—but not without Jackson-ism….Historians will look back on the last quarter-century as the period in which R&B became the defining American music, and this is Jackson’s achievement more than anyone’s.” At Salon, Michaelangelo Matos opined that “Michael Jackson is the final pop star of seeming consequence to everyone — not just people who don’t normally care about music, but people who don’t care about culture, period,” adding that “the question of what’s-next [is] now punctuated with what-will-never-be-again.” And the Village Voice’s Rob Harvilla solemnly conceded, “Thriller is/was ungodly huge in a way that doesn’t exist anymore, period.”

“Thriller was perhaps the last moment when hit pop music for people beyond tween-age could be so basically innocent and unprobing of the individual soul,” John McWorter argued in a particularly astute appraisal at the New Republic. “Winning over a cross-section spectrum of American call-in voters today requires a certain faceless, generic quality that does not translate into stardom in the real-world market of niches and attitude.” Since Jackson was never in danger of being bland, he had long been “on his way to becoming a nostalgia act.”

And David Hadju channeled Michael Bay when he argued that Jackson “is very much a figure of the Eighties,” specifically, that very Eighties action figure: the Transformer, “a commercial object of juvenilia designed to enact miraculous transformations from humble living form to one of all-powerful robotic magnificence.” So is it just a coincidence that the second movie inspired by that very toy was released the day before Jackson died, and raked in enough money to (hypothetically) cover all his debts? Conspiracy theories, anyone?

Photos by kumar303, Sjors Provoost