Michael Jackson did WHAT?

[SinsOfEden]

Agreed. -nodnods-

[Dashenka]

I woke up this morning with the news that Michael Jackson had indeed died of a heartattack and although I didn't particularly agreed with his 'lifestyle' news like this always hits home hard.

He was indeed the King of Pop and he did great great things in his life. Many people hated him for the picture that was created by the media and I firmly believe it was that same media that brought him into so much financial trouble.

Anyway to make a long story short, no matter what you think of him or his music, a great musician had died.



True legends never die....

[Soran]

A sad day. I found out at 3am just before having a pm conversation with an E member.
I hope he finds the peace in death, that he sought so much for in life.

[jouzinka]

While I never was a big MJ fan, I always had to respect what he did for music. My thoughts, though, don't go along the line of 'great pop-music icon died.' I'm thinking about a dad, a son, a brother... fifty years is way too early for anyone to pass away.

For some reason I have always seen him as an overgrown little boy that never had the chance to have a childhood, yet was never allowed to grow up. For his talent ones 'abused' him (and yes, there I'm talking about his ambitious father) and others uncritically adored him, while there wasn't much in between. For some reason I can't explain I've always seen him as a person that was genial, brilliant in what he did, but also terribly, awfully alone.

R.I.P.

[Rhapsody]

Mike Ragogna put it fairly well in his blog over on the Huffington Post website:

Today's death of Michael Jackson accompanies the death of a little more of this country's innocence. And it's symbolic that his heart finally just gave out. Ultimately, the adult Michael was responsible for his own actions and will be remembered for them accordingly. But due to his abusive upbringing and unimaginable, disorienting success as an artist, he probably just couldn't handle his life in any practical way. All we know now is that he suffered from something, and his passing is tragic because it happened at the bottom of a downward spiral, his never really being able to redeem himself in the eyes of the public -- something we seem to require before a forgiveness and acceptance back into the flock. Beyond the reams of his documented eccentricities, Michael Jackson was a huge talent who'll be missed, and he was one of our better, kinder kids whose life and story spun out of control, those seeds probably planted in his misplaced childhood. Just a thought -- shouldn't we have been our disturbed brother's keeper when it was obvious he really, really needed one?

[MusicNeverDies]

I hope he faked his death and went somewhere to finish out his life in peace.

I do too. I loved his music, and I hope the "Wacko Jacko", ect, stops finally. If I hear any bad MJ is dead jokes in the next week someones losing a tooth.

[Will]

I do too. I loved his music, and I hope the "Wacko Jacko", ect, stops finally. If I hear any bad MJ is dead jokes in the next week someones losing a tooth.

It's been pretty bad already.   I'm with you, though.

On a lighter note, I was so inundated with Thriller yesterday that I can't get it out of my head AT ALL.  I feel like clapping over my head every five minutes now. >.<

[OneOfAKiind]

While I never was a big MJ fan, I always had to respect what he did for music. My thoughts, though, don't go along the line of 'great pop-music icon died.' I'm thinking about a dad, a son, a brother... fifty years is way too early for anyone to pass away.

that is exactly what my mother said this morning, and it's true. regardless of what you thought of the man, he was still somebody to someone, like you said, a father, a son, and a brother. I hate seeing so many facebook statuses reveling in his death, calling him a pervert and saying cruel things about him even in death. I've always been taught not to disrespect the dead, it truly saddens me when people do, no matter what he was accused of.

[Avi]

My thoughts on the subject are as follows:  MJ the Entertainer will absolutely be missed, and the pop music world lost one of its pioneers.  On the other hand, I won't miss all the to-do about what he did or didn't do, all the tabloid crap that plagued him for years.

[Silver]

There are no real words that can be said about Micheal Jackson and Farrah Fawcett but this article on msn causing you to pause for just a moment in time to just think.. Two lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day.

Two lost icons: For Generation X, a really bad day
June 25, 2009, 9:03 PM EST

(AP) -- A record-shattering vinyl album and its moonwalking maestro. A paper poster of a golden-haired beauty in a one-piece swimsuit that was gossamer and clingy in all the right places.

It all seems so quaint now, the fragmented dream memories of a fleeting micro-era that began with words like "bicentennial" and "pet rock" and ended with MTV, Atari and absurdly thin cans of super-hold mousse.

The man-child named Michael Jackson and the luminous girl known as Farrah Fawcett-Majors jumped into our consciousness at a plastic moment in American culture — a time when the celebrity juggernaut we know today was still in diapers. When they departed Thursday, just a few hours and a few miles apart, they left an entire generation — a very strange generation indeed — without two of its defining figures.

"These people were on our lunchboxes," said Gary Giovannetti, 38, a manager at HBO who grew up on Long Island awash in Farrah and MJ iconography. "This," he said, "is the moment when Generation X realizes they're grown up."

It was a long time coming. Cynical, disaffected, rife with ADD, lost between Boomers and millennials and sandwiched between Vietnam and the war on terror, Gen X has always been an oddity. It was the product of a transitional age when we were still putting people on celebrity pedestals but only starting to make an industry out of dragging them down.

Its memorable moments were diffuse and confusing — the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt, the dawn of AIDS, the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger. It had no protest movement, no opponent to unite it, none of the things that typically shape the ill-defined beast we call an American generation.

These were the people who sent to the top of the charts a song called "We Don't Need Another Hero," then figured out how to churn them out wholesale, launching the celebrity obsession that is now an accepted part of American cultural fabric.

And that was personified nowhere better than in the two people who died Thursday.

She was, perhaps, the last in a line that began with Betty Grable in World War II — the bathing beauty who seemed kissed by the sun and exuded a potent combination of innocence and sexuality.

But her "Charlie's Angels" jiggle-show image presaged another world entirely. It was the one that would come to be dominated first by Brooke and her Calvins and ultimately, as the hunger grew tawdrier, by American Apparel ads and the celebrity sex videos of Pamela Anderson and Paris Hilton.

She struggled for credibility after the poster and the Angels. She got it in 1984 with a dramatic turn as an abused wife in "The Burning Bed." But her last stand — a documentary about the cancer that killed her — was tainted by her run-ins with insatiable paparazzi and tabloids.

He was another thing entirely — perhaps the most recognizable face in the world, even more so than the Pope or Barack Obama. His musical genius and energy seemed boundless for a time. They were rivaled only by his quirks, which consumed him.

He had a bumpy, extraordinarily public childhood. Then he spent an off-the-wall lifetime trying to get it back, erecting a ranch named after the fantasy land of Peter Pan and inviting children to share his life and his bed — with results that some said drifted into the criminal.

He caught fire in a Pepsi commercial. He shrouded his children in full-body coverings and dangled one over a balcony to show his fans below. His fabled multiple plastic surgeries turned him into someone almost unrecognizable. Nose sunk into face, cheekbones became caricature, ebony drifted into ivory.

Yet through it all, even when the years of his quirks outstripped the years of his glory, he remained one of the planet's most popular figures, selling out shows wherever he went. "Icon," the Rev. Al Sharpton said, was "only a fraction of what he was." But icon was, of course, what he always acted as if he wanted to be.

Today, celebrities aren't merely created for our consumption. Audiences are passive no longer. We demand a part in creating our icons: Jon and Kate Gosselin and their ilk might as well be publicly held companies, and we all insist upon buying a few shares. Farrah and Michael Jackson were other — above us, maybe, or apart from us. Now, when we crown new icons, we want them to BE us.

"We want everything right now, and there's a blurring of reality. When does the celebrity world stop and our world begin?" said Penni Pier, an associate professor of communications at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa.

When Farrah gazed at us in her swimsuit and, a single moment in history later, MJ dared us to moonwalk, they commanded giant audiences. The world had not yet become fragmented into the microcommunities that exist today. We liked them or we hated them, but we shared the experience just as Walter Cronkite told us each night that "that's the way it is."

Today, when Lindsay Lohan Twitters pictures of herself to her legions of followers, the notion that a paper poster bought in a shopping-mall Spencer Gifts could change the celebrity game seems rustic. And the vinyl version of "Thriller," redolent of raw materials and production lines, is a ghost in the virtual world of iTunes — a world that the generation after X negotiates with the fluidity of natives.

In the 1990s, members of Generation X would often laugh in bars about how the time of the Boomers was passing — about how the quaintness and naivete that made up the 1960s was, finally, a grave being danced on by Kurt Cobain. Today, members of that same generation sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings of pop.

A sexy poster upon a boy's wall in which a young woman grins wholesomely. A record album called "Thriller" and its attendant music videos, built upon the notion that sexiness came in the frisson of hints and suggestions rather than in cutting directly to the big reveal.

In the end, finally, they stand as the relics of a generation — one that struggled to find its place and now, suddenly, while still young, one that must wonder if it is as passe as the paper and vinyl that its icons' most memorable moments were etched upon.

We don't need another hero? After this week, are we sure?

[Trieste]

For some reason I have always seen him as an overgrown little boy that never had the chance to have a childhood, yet was never allowed to grow up. For his talent ones 'abused' him (and yes, there I'm talking about his ambitious father) and others uncritically adored him, while there wasn't much in between. For some reason I can't explain I've always seen him as a person that was genial, brilliant in what he did, but also terribly, awfully alone.

I and my mother have long felt the same way, Jouz, especially that last part - although you have put it much more eloquently than I have been able to. Thank you.

[OneOfAKiind]

Silver, that article was brilliant.

[jouzinka]

... I hate seeing so many facebook statuses reveling in his death, calling him a pervert and saying cruel things about him even in death. ...

I find people these days pretty cruel (which they have always been) and mean, cowardly (which hasn't been always there)... I see it day by day, all around me, instead of helping someone who's lying helplessly on the ground (metaphorically or literally)... "let's kick him, while he can't fight back." And yes, of course, there's always this desire to parasite on the wave of attention his death (or anybody else's) gets. I find it sad too.

I and my mother have long felt the same way, Jouz, especially that last part - although you have put it much more eloquently than I have been able to. Thank you.

Of all the things to be thanked for, well... :-/ You're still welcome, though.

[OneOfAKiind]

I thought this was cool:

Mourning Around the World

The death of Peter Pan

[Bliss]

It's been pretty bad already.   I'm with you, though.

On a lighter note, I was so inundated with Thriller yesterday that I can't get it out of my head AT ALL.  I feel like clapping over my head every five minutes now. >.<

From LOLcats to Romantic comedies to many of our living rooms, the Thriller Dance is one of those iconic things that has bloomed beyond what its creator could have even imagined.

"Thriller" (original upload)

[SinsOfEden]

Wow...at that video.

o.o

[Will]

Not helping, Bliss!

Heh, nice video.

[Mathim]

I was surprised when I turned on the explorer and saw "Michael Jackson dies" on the yahoo news bubble.

Of course now this means that nobody needs to pay him or get his permission to make fun of him like MAD Magazine or South Park.

I don't really know what to say. Even though he was acquitted, I know I'm not the only one who thinks/knows/whatever that he did things to kids that shouldn't be done, especially as a kid who was put in that position myself when I was younger, and I'm sick of wealthy people getting away with all the crap they do. I don't think him dying was any kind of justice but I'm just glad it's over and the battle between him and people's opinions is put to rest along with him.

[Darkforged Dove]

I found out from a friend.

They asked me what I thought of him, and I said that what he really needs to do is have a friend willing to tell him to not do things that will cause him problems. I've always thought that his biggest problem was that he was surrounded by people that wanted to be his friend, no matter what, and thus always said "yes" to him.

I also said that he needs to get back to touring.

Then they told me he had died. What a week to start watching his youtube channel.

His music was great, and that's all that there is to it. His private life never deserved that much scrutiny. However so many people feel the need to fill themselves with celebrities lives. I prefer to fill my own void with things of my own creation, not other's lives.

[Rhapsody]

I also said that he needs to get back to touring.

Sadly, he was only two weeks away from what in all likelihood would have been his comeback tour.  O2 shows beginning in London, with plans for movies, albums and a three-year world tour springing off it.

[Serephino]

Honestly, I think he was mentally ill; though the cause may never be known.  I never did have a high opinion of him, and I do believe he was guilty of everything he was accused of.  However, he was human being, however odd.  Anyone who cheers his death needs to be taken out to a field and shot in my opinion.  I can understand those he victimized being happy, but people who never met the man... that's just sick.....

[Zakharra]

Death is the ultimate declaration of bankruptcy. >.>

Dying is going bankrupt?  0_o    Everyone dies.

[Will]

Dying is going bankrupt?  0_o    Everyone dies.

As in, dead people don't have to worry about bills. >.>

[Zakharra]

 There are laws that cover that if he doesn't have a will.

[Will]

There are laws that cover that if he doesn't have a will.

I think you're looking deeper into this than necessary.  We're not talking about Michael Jackson's estate, just Michael Jackson.  He will not be paying any bills anymore.  Because he's not alive.