Never land.
Jun. 26th, 2009 12:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus(First published on Click Opera March 13th, 2005.)
One of the reasons the Michael Jackson trial is so unfortunate is that the world of Either-Or will pass judgment on a creature of Yet-Also. The world of clear, unambiguous categories will pass judgment on someone who flies Peter-Pan-like over the binaries that confine and define the rest of us.
When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we're looking at the future of our species. Michael is a creature from a future in which we've all become more feminine, more consumerist, more postmodern, more artificial, more self-constructed and self-mediating, more playful, caring and talented than we are today. But it's hard to use those adjectives, because they're Either-Or adjectives and he's from the world of Yet-Also, a world I believe we will all come to live in if we're lucky, a world where there is no more authenticity-by-default-through-brute-necessity and no more "human nature". A world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation.
Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we'll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He's what we'll become only if we're lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for -- the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous -- we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy -- war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us -- we end up deriding dandyism and deviance. And Jackson is the ultimate dandy and the ultimate deviant. He can fly across our Either-Or binaries, and never land. It's debateable whether he's the king of pop, but he's undoubtedly the king of Yet-Also.
Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory.
There's one way in which Michael Jackson is not Yet-Also though. He's not famous yet also ordinary. Almost all the other stars in the world, the stars of Either-Or world, anyway, make an exception to Either-Or's categorical thinking in this one instance: given the choice between being either famous or ordinary, they all insist they're both. It's the one instance in which hardline Either-Ors will accept a Yet-Also answer. It's an answer they like because it fills the positions of talent with the representatives of the untalented. It affirms them as they currently are rather than challenging them to become something else. They want affirmation, not aspiration. They don't want their artists and celebrities to embody the values of worlds they don't understand. Ambiguous worlds, future worlds. They want to walk, not moonwalk, and they want their stars to walk too.
And so our creature of Never-Land will be judged by the creatures of Never-Fly. They will almost certainly throw him into jail. Their desire to see him as grounded, categorised and unfree as they themselves are is overwhelming. The grounded, situated, unfree creatures of Either-Or are baying for the clipping of fairy wings. Knives, hatchets and scissors glint in Neverland. There's an assembly of torch-bearing witchfinders. Peter Pan must be ushered back from fiction to reality, from the air to the ground. Back into a race, back into a gender, back into a confined clarity. Assuming he doesn't commit suicide, as he threatens in Martin Bashir's documentary, by jumping from a balcony, Jackson will be ushered away from the fuzzy subtle flicker states of our future, back to the solid states of our past and present. Either-Or will have its triumph over Yet-Also. Yet it will also, unknowingly, "triumph" over its own better future.
Also possibly relevant: The Tragedie of Michael Jackson, King of Pop (2002)
One of the reasons the Michael Jackson trial is so unfortunate is that the world of Either-Or will pass judgment on a creature of Yet-Also. The world of clear, unambiguous categories will pass judgment on someone who flies Peter-Pan-like over the binaries that confine and define the rest of us.
When we look at Michael Jackson, I believe we're looking at the future of our species. Michael is a creature from a future in which we've all become more feminine, more consumerist, more postmodern, more artificial, more self-constructed and self-mediating, more playful, caring and talented than we are today. But it's hard to use those adjectives, because they're Either-Or adjectives and he's from the world of Yet-Also, a world I believe we will all come to live in if we're lucky, a world where there is no more authenticity-by-default-through-brute-necessity and no more "human nature". A world of pure synthesis, pure self-creation.
Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we'll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He's what we'll become only if we're lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for -- the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous -- we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy -- war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us -- we end up deriding dandyism and deviance. And Jackson is the ultimate dandy and the ultimate deviant. He can fly across our Either-Or binaries, and never land. It's debateable whether he's the king of pop, but he's undoubtedly the king of Yet-Also.
Consider all the extraordinary ways in which Michael Jackson is Yet-Also. He's black yet also white. He's adult yet also a child. He's male yet also female. He's gay yet also straight. He has children, yet he's also never fucked their mothers. He's wearing a mask, yet he's also showing his real self. He's walking yet also sliding. He's guilty yet also innocent. He's American yet also global. He's sexual yet also sexless. He's immensely rich yet also bankrupt. He's Judy Garland yet also Andy Warhol. He's real yet also synthetic. He's crazy yet also sane, human yet also robot, from the present yet also from the future. He declares his songs heavensent, and yet he also constructs them himself. He's the luckiest man in the world yet the unluckiest. His work is play. He's bad, yet also good. He's blessed yet also cursed. He's alive, but only in theory.
There's one way in which Michael Jackson is not Yet-Also though. He's not famous yet also ordinary. Almost all the other stars in the world, the stars of Either-Or world, anyway, make an exception to Either-Or's categorical thinking in this one instance: given the choice between being either famous or ordinary, they all insist they're both. It's the one instance in which hardline Either-Ors will accept a Yet-Also answer. It's an answer they like because it fills the positions of talent with the representatives of the untalented. It affirms them as they currently are rather than challenging them to become something else. They want affirmation, not aspiration. They don't want their artists and celebrities to embody the values of worlds they don't understand. Ambiguous worlds, future worlds. They want to walk, not moonwalk, and they want their stars to walk too.
And so our creature of Never-Land will be judged by the creatures of Never-Fly. They will almost certainly throw him into jail. Their desire to see him as grounded, categorised and unfree as they themselves are is overwhelming. The grounded, situated, unfree creatures of Either-Or are baying for the clipping of fairy wings. Knives, hatchets and scissors glint in Neverland. There's an assembly of torch-bearing witchfinders. Peter Pan must be ushered back from fiction to reality, from the air to the ground. Back into a race, back into a gender, back into a confined clarity. Assuming he doesn't commit suicide, as he threatens in Martin Bashir's documentary, by jumping from a balcony, Jackson will be ushered away from the fuzzy subtle flicker states of our future, back to the solid states of our past and present. Either-Or will have its triumph over Yet-Also. Yet it will also, unknowingly, "triumph" over its own better future.
Also possibly relevant: The Tragedie of Michael Jackson, King of Pop (2002)
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 11:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 11:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 11:57 pm (UTC)Enter some GRAVEDIGGAZ, with shovels, led by the RZA.
RZA: (Picking up skull)
Alas, poor Michael! I knew him, Shabazz!
A fellow of infinite jest, most dangerous crotch
The brain counselor, track fertilizer, the murdalizer
I never heard a wiser, I rue the day
For he once had the body of a Lexus Coupe!
SHABAZZ:
I musta looked upon his poster a thousand times
Musta sung his songs and rhymed his rhymes
And now how abhorred in my imagination it is!
My gorge rims at it! What kind of sick shit is
That? Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft -- but nobody call me faggot
I'm as normal as my man Ned Raggett
'To be or not to be?' Fuck it
Death comes to all, can't no man duck it
GRYM REAPER:
You was the Grymmest -- where be your gibes now?
Your gambols? your songs? your thrillers and gore
That were wont to set the MTV awards on a roar?
Not one now, to mock your own grinning?
Where be your boys, your monkeys and women?
You fucked up chicken, now you just got fried
It was self-inflicted regicide
MASTA ASE:
Lost was the king in his golden cage
But there was no way out of the death race
The skull we kiss was once a face
Hear the eulogy of Masta Ase!
PRINCE RAKEEM / RYZARECTOR:
Yeah, more graves to dig. Goodbye
There's no need to cry...
... cause we all die
(Exeunt)
CURTAIN
Just as the audience is rising to leave, a small pile of dust at the front of the stage starts spinning as if animated by a tiny twister, elongates itself, and turns into a headless figure in a skeleton body stocking. THE FIGURE delves behind the curtain and returns with the discarded skull. In a slow, ghoulish mime, THE FIGURE places the skull atop its shoulders, straightens it like a mask and, to rapt attention and pindrop silence, starts snapping its skeletal fingers.
A flashbomb explodes and a huge bassline erupts from concealed speakers. THE FIGURE clutches its thrusting pelvic girdle, releases a bloodcurdling whoop then, powered by a tiny jetpack, shoots up to the Royal Circle box, grabs Iman from a thunderstruck David Bowie, and, dragging her behind him, soars towards a small open skylight in the roof of the theatre. The two fleeing silhouettes, visible for some minutes against a huge full moon, resemble nothing so much as Peter Pan and Tinkerbell.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-25 11:59 pm (UTC)2. Soulless and unable to forget himself
3. Drowned in crass obsessions - magic, money, childhood, humdrum self-mythology
4. Hired 50 producers and hundreds of musicians to hide the fact that he couldn't write a song
5. Influenced Five Star - bypassed almost all the interesting musical advances of his age
Oh why go on.. the blokes from Blancmange had as much claim to be 'icons' IMHO
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 12:19 am (UTC)He was too bombastic and opulent for dandyism.
I was hoping for a triumphant return to form, however unlikely. He was an incredible performer.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 12:21 am (UTC)In the future, we will all do our best work before we hit puberty, and spend our lives hating our genitals for ruining us.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 01:00 am (UTC)no.
Date: 2009-06-26 01:16 am (UTC)Momus, I disagree with your take on Jackson, in sheerly esthetic terms that I might have to think for awhile about before attempting a proper expression of. On the other hand, I'm glad to have the chance to read this take of yours; as usual, incredibly insightful, original, and provocative. But no. Jackson is a hideous necrophalous something or other. Like a Pizza-Hut burning down in a small brutal Sasketchwan town on a grimy hazy day, all those tumescent exotic toxic fumes in air.. it could be pretty I suppose if you are in a mood for kitch and decadence and were smoking lots of crack.
Your appropriation of all of these wonderful concepts Yet-Also, hybrid-race, hybrid-sexuality, and then making Jackson the posterboy for them seems to me a disservice to the good concepts and not much help to Jackson himself. It's a glorification of pain and disease and abuse and the hideous labyrinths of crap congealed and conglomerated outside of Hollywood. Bad bad!!! Not good.
Fucking jeeezus.
I may need to alter edit or add to this comment later. I hope you all can make some sense of it. I tried.
*footnote
Date: 2009-06-26 01:55 am (UTC)That's all extremely un-precice but maybe something of the idea... I actually never use the term or really have much interest in these cults but have been reading recently a lot of CoIntelpro history and whatnot, and this kind of cult life is actually really big in AmeroAnglo society. So FritoLay on the surface, so tacky & kinky underneath.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 01:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 02:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 02:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 02:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 02:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 03:28 am (UTC)Thank you, and goodnight!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 04:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 04:44 am (UTC)All I can say is that as a child of the 80s, his music was some of the first to become my favourite. I don't know anyone around my age who wasn't into Michael Jackson as a kid. I still love his 80's stuff, it's superb.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 05:20 am (UTC)His personality was just as fascinating as his art, in fact it was part of it.
Pet monkeys, creepy theme parks, dressing as an arab woman to evade the paps, making your kids wear vails and masks, extreme plastic surgery, asexual androgyny, skin diseases blurring the boundaries between race, his gentle feminine voice, mental illness spanning decades...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 05:47 am (UTC)That was true at one time, but with Jackson it got to the point where it eclipsed his work.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 06:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 07:13 am (UTC)Actually I do have a distant memory of really liking 'We Are The World' when it first came out (the day after my 6th birthday), but since then I've never had the experience of understanding the appeal of any of his music on any level.
Yet I feel somehow very intrigued by and sympathetic to him. The essay above covers that better than anything else I could say about him.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 07:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 07:33 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-26 07:41 am (UTC)