Jessica, though there were plenty of things to be creeped out by during the Michael Jackson memorial service yesterday, for me Paris Jackson’s short and tearful tribute to her father didn’t number among them. In fact (along with Brooke Shields’ speech and Jermaine Jackson’s vocally unsure but heartbreaking performance of “Smile”), Paris' appearance struck me as one of the day’s few uncreepy moments. Given that Paris and her brothers have been made to wear Halloween masks in public for most of their lives, I can understand why it might have been meaningful for her to step forward in public with her own face on.

Far ickier was the whitewashing of Jackson family dysfunction in the speech of Al Sharpton (has he ever said anything more demonstrably untrue than “wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy”?) and in that horrid occasional poem by Maya Angelou, read by Queen Latifah. In addition to being just an atrocious piece of doggerel (“now that our bright and shining star could slip away from our fingertips like a puff of summer wind …”), Angelou’s poem was awash in pious falsehoods: “Despite the anguish of life, he was sheathed in mother love and family love …” Obviously a funeral is not the place to probe old wounds, but give me a break. Joe Jackson’s ruthless careerism, and the allegations of abuse leveled by several of his children, are well known, and if Katherine Jackson really let all that happen, she must be a world-class enabler. (Joe’s self-defense is chillingly clueless: "I never beat him … I whipped him with a stick and a belt.”) In the looming custody battle between the Jacksons and her biological mother Debbie Rowe, Paris will need all the poise and courage she showed at the podium yesterday.

Photograph of Al Sharpton by Mario Anzuoni-Pool/Getty Images.

Tags: child abuse, michael jackson funeral

I'm truly heartbroken. MJ was my very first love. I wrote him letters through his fan club when I was a girl, of course never imagining that his cute baby-face would eventually morph into something that looked like a laboratory creation. I loved him through my teen years and even stuck with him through high school and into my first years of college. By then I was long over wanting to marry him and was doubtful that he even liked girls. Still, watching his physical transformation through the years was heartrending. He was such a beautiful boy when he was just plain black and with a real nose instead of a pasty, cream-colored creation with a plastic plughole. But the interesting thing about MJ’s many physical phases was that with each one he became less a member of any one group and more a musical symbol for all. Of course it was mostly because he was such a fantastic entertainer; his music, his singing, and his dancing skills were unparalleled. But at the same time, gay, straight, and sexually ambiguous people could equally embrace him, as could every racial and ethnic group across the board. That’s why he was once as loved in Japan as he was in South Africa, as he was Moscow, as he was in Harlem or Minnesota. Few entertainers ever reach across so many racial, cultural and geographic lines.

I just wish the kids who now worship only moderately talented here-today-gone-tomorrow music studio creations being passed off a “stars” could have seen the old Michael—pre-sex abuse allegations, freakish face, and oddball behavior—perform.

A few years ago, after turning my little niece on to MJ through his song “Rockin Robin,” which I would sing to her as lullaby, I gave her a CD of MJ from his Jackson Five days. She looked at his picture and asked: "Who is this?"

"Michael Jackson," I said.

"No it's not," she insisted. "Michael Jackson is peach, he's not brown."

She was stating the facts as she saw them, but to me her comments captured just how colorless, and universal, MJ had become. My niece was right. MJ was a peach, flaws and all.

Photograph of Michael Jackson memorial by John Moore/Getty Images.

Tags: michael jackson death

Now that Michael Jackson has gotten what always seemed to be his wish for eternal youth, I expect participants in his secretive life will emerge for a last reminder of the extremely gifted pop star’s lifetime of sad dysfunction. The Jackson Family will surely have a stake in resolving who will attain custody of Jackson’s offspring. Any dispute will no doubt also involve Debby Rowe, the dermatologist’s nurse who bore Jackson his oldest two, 11-year-old son Prince and 10-year-old daughter Paris. Rowe seems to have upheld her end of their strange bargain, but their businesslike marriage ended in businesslike divorce. (He found a less personally taxing way to reproduce by using a surrogate to create his third child, also named Prince II, but nicknamed Blanket).

Speaking of mothers, I doubt we’ll hear again from the housekeeper at Jackson’s amusement park ranch, whose son testified he was molested by her financially generous employer, nor from many other characterless characters characterized in Maureen Orth’s vivid Vanity Fair reporting of Jackson’s icky legal saga. The cataloging and carving up of his convoluted estate, however, will surely be a subject of much scrutiny. What about the Beatles music? Who will get the collection of unpaired gloves? I just read the new owners are already refurbishing Jackson’s former playground ranch.

I went to a Jackson Five show in Las Vegas in the early 1970s. I remember a number that featured tiny family member Janet, then about 6 years old, singing and dancing in a pink boa with her youngest big brother, the adorable teenage Michael. He’s gone from this world, but I hope that boy who performed with his baby sister has found his way to the original Neverland, where nobody has to grow up.

I was particularly touched by Emily Yoffe's remembrance of Michael Jackson as the young, innocent, and extraordinarily talented boy he once was, before his life went terribly wrong. His childhood played out in public like the lives of kids on reality TV shows, before the concept of reality TV was even fully formed. As a result, his childhood was ruined, and he never got over it. Yet, despite such cautionary tales, parents continue to push their kids in front of the cameras long before the age of consent. Just look at the children of Jon & Kate. Or rather, don't look. Please don't look, and let's starve such shows of their ratings and thereby spare their young stars a similar fate.

That's the tribute I wish we could pay Jackson in his death. Because as it stands, it's already too easy picturing the Gosselin brood all grown up: the plastic surgeries to come, the TV specials of their family "reunions" (complete with vicious sibling rivalries), the "comebacks" for child stars who are famous merely for having always been famous (without even the compensatory joy of having had a genuine talent, as Jackson had in spades). Maybe they'll be lucky. Their fame, after all, is diluted by their numbers. So maybe it won't turn out so ugly for them in the end. Then again, I think we all know: It's unlikely to be pretty.

Tags: Jon & Kate Plus 8, michael jackson death, Reality TV

A friend told me last night the sort of thing that you only admit when you’re standing in a bar where the entire room is grooving on the 18th song in a marathon of Michael: that recently, for no real reason, he had read through a bunch of the coverage of Michael right after Thriller was released. The general sentiment at the time, he told us, was awe at what Michael’s music did to existing standards of “black” and “white” music. Back then, Billboard had its top-10 mainstream chart, and a separate “Black LPs” chart, and there was little overlap between the two. Michael changed that.

I was less than born when Thriller came out in 1983, so for me, it was strange last night to think of Michael as he once was: someone who raised issues of race not by being some ever-changing hybrid of black and white, but by being black. I remember the occasional Jacko playground chatter, a child-like one-upping of knowledge: “Did you know Michael Jackson used to be black?” It was a sort of truth you came upon while looking through a cousin’s cassette collection or hearing tales from older kids, and wanted to spread, proud of your discovery, as you would your newly gleaned meaning of “second base.” And you said it not fully understanding what those old images of Michael meant about his race now. Was he still black? What happened to him? But, in the manner of recess gossip, you rejected such ambiguities, and described to everyone how dark he was in that album you’d caught a glimpse of that weekend, and everyone ooohed and aaahed at the strange thought.

Despite Michael's drastically changing melanin levels within my lifetime, the racial reflections he raised in the early ’80s are a wonderful tribute to the work he did, and still feel relevant today. This is from a 1984 New York Times article by John Rockwell, headlined “In Pop Music, the Races Remain Far Apart”:

The vast majority of the populace sinks back in upon itself, lazily content with its own traditions and only vaguely aware of more vital, unfamiliar, challenging music just a few notches away on the dial. This applies to blacks as well, who may be missing out on exposure to challenging forms of white music they now don't hear often enough. Black and white music can overlap indistinguishably. But they have divergent stylistic tendencies, and those extremes can grow flaccid or eccentric when they aren't pollinated by the other—when audiences aren't regularly, unself-consciously exposed to styles other than their own.

Ultimately, the racial divisions in music may simply recede, as the listening public and the country as a whole grow more open-minded. If that happens, then maybe Mr. Jackson's success will turn out to have presaged something positive, after all.

Photograph of Jackson at a London concert in 1997 by Dave Hogan/Getty Images.

Tags: michael jackson, Race, thriller

Michael Jackson was blasting on the streets of New York City last night, out of car windows, restaurants, bars, and radios set up next to makeshift fruit stands. People were paying their respects, but also up to something more. They were taking the first steps towards reclaiming his music, turning it on, turning it up, and finally, finally, beginning to jettison all the bad, heavy vibes his songs have accrued over the last 15 years.

In that time, we’ve all developed an awkward relationship with Jackson and his work. It’s not that the video for "Thriller" or the chorus to “Man In the Mirror” was any less awesome yesterday than it was today, but yesterday, it was still discomfiting. Yesterday, it still came with some really serious baggage, the before our eyes meltdown of a once supremely talented young man, who had, as Emily said, “so wholly turned himself into a freak.” I remember, years ago, watching an award show tribute to Jackson, in which a young performer (who may or may not have been Justin Timberlake, I can’t quite remember) praised Jackson’s talent and his influence. Jackson, of course, deserved the praise, but there was still a palpable dissonance between what the young performer was saying about him and the person standing up in the balcony, frail, pale, and gloved, looking on. Jacko was once great, but he was now ruined. It was impossible to forget either one of those things, and that took the joy out of not only that particular celebration, but everything related to Jackson.

Now the bad years, tragic as they were, right up to the end, are over, and we can start to appreciate the good ones, the ones when Jackson created more stupendous hit songs than most musicians could in many, many lifetimes. The weirdness still lingers, but it won't have pride of place for long. Watch, in a few decades, all the freakishness will be a footnote, and the kids will still be dancing to “Billie Jean” and trying to figure out how to moonwalk.

Tags: michael jackson, Music

Tracking celebrities' final moments has become a kind of collective, Internet parlor game. The e-mails start flying: Who's getting the best scoop? Who can spot the first credible death announcement? I'm currently standing vigil over Michael Jackson's Wikipedia page, wondering if I can catch the moment when someone adds in a date of death and all the verbs fall, like dominoes, into the past tense. (Edit—it just happened, at exactly 6:30 p.m. Watching the text ripple when I hit "refresh" felt oddly final.)

I've often wondered: Is this ghoulish? Perverse? Or is the intense way we've all spent the last hour focused on Los Angeles a fitting homage to this strange, super-famous man, who lived his entire life dancing in and out of our view? One thing I can't get over: I simultaneously can't believe Jacko is dead, and can't believe he lived this long.

Photograph of Michael Jackson by Stan Honda/AFP/Getty Images.

Tags: michael jackson, wikipedia

There are some celebrities who are unimaginable old: James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and now Michael Jackson. Others—Liz Taylor, Marlon Brando—you almost resent for getting old, for showing us the the blowsy, disabled reality of age instead of staying forever frozen in time. Jackson and Liz Taylor were at one time good friends. They must have bonded over understanding what it was like to be pushed on stage as a child, to be the talented gold mine for your family. So now we'll never have to watch an aged Jackson on the comeback trail, showing us that with his hip replacement he can moon walk again.

Has there ever been a major celebrity who so wholly turned himself into a freak? He destroyed his face (the tabloids loved to get photos of him sans surgical mask, a prothestic tip taped to the end of his ruined nose), he was involved in endless pedophillic scandals, and it was awful to think of him as a father. What happens now to his children, who have been trapped in his mansions, forced to live out his fantasy of the childhood he never had? And don't you just wish you could reach out to the beautiful, supremely talented boy he once was and make it all go another way?

Tags: michael jackson death

The Los Angeles Times confirms that Michael Jackson has died of cardiac arrest. Two pop icons down in a day, and to me their lives moved in opposite directions. After her flash appearance as a sex symbol, Fawcett spent the rest of her years backing away from that image, playing (and looking like) a battered spouse in the Apostle, making a video about her anal cancer, generally reminding us that body beautiful is fleeting, and we all go to dust in the end. Michael Jackson did the reverse. He started out as a beautiful innocent, and then slowly alienated himself from his audience, his family and himself, mostly by destroying his body with hair straightener, nose jobs, skin bleach and who knows what else.

Photograph of Michael Jackson by Dave Hogan/Getty Images.

Tags: celebrity death, farrah fawcett, michael jackson