I’ve been reading and passing on MJ eulogies all morning.
But I think Trend captured below what it was like to be a child of the 80s and to grow up with Michael Jackson. My Twitter comment this morning was “I remember a world without the Internet. I don’t remember a world without Michael Jackson.”
And yet I’m shocked by how gobsmacked I am by this. I expect to be horrifically sad when Madonna dies–I have grown up in the shadow and image of Madonna in a much more obvious way than Michael Jackson. I have grown up a girl who flaunts all her contradictions, who despises sexual hypocrisy and who still, after all these years, loves to dance.
Last night I had coffee and then dinner with a new friend who grew up in England, and I was trying to explain to him what it was like, being American, being born in 1980 and suddenly, unexpectedly hearing that Michael Jackson is gone. I can’t.
I can’t explain why I didn’t own any Michael Jackson music but this morning I hit iTunes for the songs that I love (”Wanna Be Startin’ Something” in my headphones as I type) and am genuinely saddened.
John Nichols wrote a lovely post about Jackson’s activism and cultural relevance, and Natalia Antonova wrote like Trend about the impact of Jackson’s music. But this piece by Richard Kim goes to a darker place–and made me think.
I’ve already noted the things that I can say I’ve drawn from Madonna–it’s a clearer image for me. Michael Jackson? Before today I would’ve said nothing. Yet it’s obvious now, as these words spill out of me, that there has been an impact on me, on all of us. It’s a complicated one. The face we are left with of Jackson is not a pretty one. It’s an intensely problematic one–all the worst aspects of our society reflected back in the face of a celebrity whipping boy.
I write a lot about monsters. Michael Jackson was, in one sense, a monster. He blurred boundaries between black and white, child and adult, masculine and feminine (as Patricia Williams wrote back in 2005), and yesterday, life and death, as the reports from tabloids hit first and many of us didn’t want to believe, held out hope that it was just a salacious rumor, until the LA Times confirmed it for us.
People either disavow Michael loudly as a “freak” or choose to remember the music–which is, of course, what I’m doing now, cherrypicking my favorite tunes to play back. But if we really want to remember Michael Jackson, we will look into the dark places that he went, and look at the side of ourselves that wanted to have him as our freak. That didn’t want to admit that he was still a lot like us.
And yet. A little while back we did a series of music posts, proclaiming the best rock albums, best country albums, etc. We never did get around to a best pop albums list, largely because I couldn’t step away from Madonna and Michael to think of anyone else. This morning, listening to these songs with a new poignancy to every high crack of that voice, I still have to salute the best pop songs any of us have ever heard. The music will live on whether we self-examine or not. And that’s perhaps as it should be.
I used to be a rock writer on a much more regular basis. I got piles of promo CDs in the mail to review, and I was far more involved with the new music that came out.
These days, well, politics (and comics) take up much of my time, and communications theory takes up the rest. I don’t see nearly enough movies, and I miss that rush that comes with discovering a new band, the thrill of a truly great song.
I don’t have a top ten list for the year–I don’t think I even bought ten albums that came out this year. I revisited the past a good bit (hello, The Smiths binge), and I mixed the soundtrack to my life out of the music I already had.
I did pick up a few great records. TV on the Radio, “Dear Science” and Santogold’s self-titled record. Hell, I even liked Scarlett Johansson’s Tom Waits covers.
But I realized the other day that there’s really only one album that is truly associated with this year in my head.
The Hold Steady, “Stay Positive.”
Ironically, recommended to me by a friend whom I often criticize for being too negative, this record is a breath of uncynical love–the band’s MySpace page bills them as “a joyful noise” and it’s true. They’re completely devoid of obnoxious rock star posturing, even at their most anthemic (”Constructive Summer” was indeed the soundtrack to the best summer I’ve had in a really long time).
I joked that this might be the first Obama-era album, but it’s really more than that for me. It’s my hopeful record–one I downloaded on a whim off eMusic and burned to a CD and listened to over and over again in the car until my sister and her boyfriend wanted to kill me. It’s got all the dreams of months spent split between the campaign trail, the university, and running around New York City in as little clothing as I could legally wear to keep the sweat to a minimum.
There’s as much Bruce Springsteen story-of-America love in this record as there is punk rock (”Raise a toast to saint Joe Strummer/I think he might have been our only decent teacher”). The songs are about love and loss and friends and beer, sex and nightclubs and getting older and the things that still matter no matter how much of the scene we outgrow. They’re loaded with deliciously specific details and beautifully universal lyrics that cut to the core and leave visuals that linger for days (”Now I’m not really sure we were lovers/Or if it was just some kind of car crash,” “If I cross myself when I come/Would you maybe believe me?”).
There’s an elegiac tone in this record, a bit of mourning for a lost youth, but at the same time an embrace of the things that really, deep-down-in-your-bones matter. And a way to look forward, get older, and actually do something with yourself.
Writing about rock can kill the pure joy of it, but sometimes it’s so good that I just have to spill all over the page about it. I don’t know if this is the best album that came out in 2008, but it’s the one that most embodies 2008 for me.
Yeah, I’m nominally Jewish, but Christmas is the one day a year my family shuts the damn business down and hangs out around the house eating breakfast at noon, drinking wine at 3:00, watching a big Hollywood movie, and then eating a huge dinner.
My co-blogger at Alterdestiny, Erik, pointed out that among many famous folks, Shane McGowan was born on December 25. That’s certainly another reason to drink today, so here you go: my favorite Christmas song.
Rules: - Choose a singer/band/group - Answer the following using ONLY titles of songs by that singer/band/group Band/Artist: X 1. Are you male or female? WHITE GIRL 2. Describe yourself. DEVIL DOLL 3. What do people feel when they’re around you? WE’RE HAVING MUCH MORE FUN 4. How would you describe your previous relationship? WHEN OUR LOVE PASSED OUT ON THE COUCH 5. Describe your current relationship. THE HAVE NOTS 6. Where would you want to be now? MOTEL ROOM IN MY BED 7. How do you feel about love? NAUSEA 8. What’s your life like? SEX AND DYING IN HIGH SOCIETY 9. What would you ask for if you had only one wish? COME BACK TO ME 10. Say something wise. THE WORLD’S A MESS IT’S IN MY KISS
But I’ve never been huge on major organized religious ceremonies. There’s nothing ecstatic about them. I prefer the ceremony, the bacchanal of a rock show.
And Nick Cave is high priest of my religion. He even dresses the part, in skinny black funereal suits that cling to his scarecrow’s frame, his white shirt unbuttoned, now with that faintly ridiculous mustache that can be seen even from the cheap seats.
He stalks the stage, high-kicks and gyrates, hips and legs in trousers stretched taut, gets grown men to shout “I love you Nick,” and laughs at them.
He plays all the great, dirty, sacrilegious, profane classics–”Deanna,” “Tupelo,” “Red Right Hand,” “Papa Won’t Leave You Henry,” and closes with possibly the filthiest track ever committed to CD: “Stagger Lee.” His chorus of black-suited backups with their clanging instruments howls along.
Nick is emblematic of one of my biggest beliefs about art: that it should be beautiful, strange, and frightening at times. That the messy is better than the perfect. The fuckups are more interesting than the stories that work out right.
“Only conflict is interesting” a thousand writing teachers have intoned, but it’s more than that. It’s that only a willingness to abandon oneself to the scary, the weird, the impossible, the heartbreaking is interesting. Is more than interesting.
So I love Nick Cave and Jean Genet, Mishima and Diane Arbus, Tom Waits and Lydia Lunch. I love crazy stories and things that fall apart. I think Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is the best love story ever committed to film, and I keep falling in love with the wrong guys.
But a great rock show leaves me feeling cleansed, focused, and happy.
