The Man-on-the-Moon

I've seen more than one eulogy that quoted Jay-Z circa 2001: "Mike was a superhero when I was a kid." It rings true, not just in the trivial sense that he read comics avidly or the comical one of his mid-90s attempt to buy Marvel but with a central resonance. Michael was far beyond normal people as a performer yet desperately apart from them as anything else, emerging from a childhood trauma with both titanic powers and crippling vulnerabilities. He wasn't human. Or he was metahuman. Earlier this year I read that, in what must be the most poignant act of cosplay ever, he was auctioning off a life-size statue of himself dressed as Batman.

Anecdotes like that can subsume his extraordinary talent, and they shouldn't. At an age when most musicians are churning out chirpy kitsch and most other children are dozing through fifth grade, he sang one of pop's most perfect songs, a sonic equation for pure joy. Later, he led the integration of radio, the charts, whole mediums, along with the music they broadcast. He made Thriller, apotheosis and template. He could walk on the moon. Part of a post-consensus generation, I was born too late to witness the zenith of his hegemonic fame, but I feel a strange, fleeting pang for that dissipated cohesion all the same. Every public song I've heard these past few days is one of his, singing the mythical monoculture's last words at its own wake.

The post I wanted to write this week was going to be about Grant Morrison and Cameron Stewart's very Adorno, very funny comics project Seaguy. It's set in a amusement-park utopia that isn't, a Disneyfied world where the blissful comforts everyone's provided with by adorable, viscera-trailing Mickey Eye barely disguise their dissatisfied misery and routine exploitation. The magic kingdom is undergirded by wish-processing sweatshops and asylums full of numbed superheroes. It reminds me of the delusional man's extravagant simulacrum, but also the cruel bridling of that radiant boy. I don't mean to suggest that every group like the Jackson 5 is necessarily controlled by an abusive tyrant like Joe J. , or that their brutal backstory makes a single note of "I Want You Back" or "ABC" sound false. There are moments when love really is that simple and that easy, no further layers or ambiguities, nothing else worth saying. I just don't think Michael Jackson experienced very many of them.

On Facebook my friend Carl quoted John Darnielle: "there is no monster without somebody who made him that way." As he added, the maxim could be extended to allow social/historical forces in; sometimes the somebody is a something. The basic truth stands, though. To me Jackson's grim final decades resemble another Morrison creation, Quimper, the tragic Invisibles villain. Once a soothing visitor from a higher dimension, the otherworldly "little light" is dragged into our solid world by the authoritarian nemeses of the piece (who ultimately prove to be equally captive). They crush and corrode the friendly alien into a creepy, white-masked freak. He begins seeding his personality inside unwitting thralls...which is probably where the parallels end. But the King's twitchy imitations of everyday behaviour had their own sad monstrosity. At one point during the second Seaguy miniseries, a character says: "Mickey's everyone's friend and no one's." So was Michael.