It is Friday night. I am watching India-West Indies first one-dayer as all channels flash MJ is no more. I take out from mybookshelf Moon Walk where it is with Nabokov’s Speak Memory, Malraux’sAnti-Memoirs, Neruda’s Anti-Memoirs, Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk toFreedom and Marquez’s Living to Tell the Tale. It was a birthday present to my son who, right from his school days was MJ’s fan, had heaps of his CDs and DVDs and a large board on the wall with a blown-up poster We are the World mounted on it. No lover of Pop, I was a slow convert to his magic. I was touched by the poetry in this lyric of MJ and LionelRichi, the evocation of childhood and a determination to change the world.
Over the years I watched how his double-platinum singles rocketed to the top of the music charts with afierce velocity equalled only by his hallmark gyrations of the body and wild rumoursabout his eccentric personal life; how his Thriller was listed in Guinness Book of WorldRecords as the biggest selling album of all time.
Michael Jackson was no Vaslav Nijinsky. He never performed a ballet A pres-midi d’unFaune. He was far away from the divine dancer whose loveliness and joy combined with a poignant melancholy, so much praised by Paul Claudel. But he too had a darkened soul. When he performedThriller, he too seemed to have another soul that carried his body and his attire was aflame. He had captivating eyes behindhis black glasses.
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He had spoken with candour and courage about the crushing isolation of his fame, a childhood that had harshness and joy in equal measure. He was loved and adored by zillions of fans spread all over the globe. Quite a few of them, Madonna included, wept. Among his public friends were Paul McCartney, Fred Astaire, Marlon Brando and Katharine Hepburn. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis thought he was the world’s most acclaimed entertainers, an innovative and exciting song-writer whose dancing seems to defy gravity. He had 13 Grammies spread over four decades for his albums.
He too had his detractors, more particularly among the older generation across the globe who looked upon him as a threat to their local culture. A Vietnamese Vice-Minister Culture mentioned during a dinner about their youth taking to him as fish takes to water forgetting their traditional songs and dances. The Chinese considered him an equal threat and blamed his baneful influence for the youth forgetting the piano, the most traditional musical instrument. Many in our own country also felt the younger generations are ignoring our classical dances and songs under his influence.
The electronic media speak about his accumulated debt of 400 million dollars and the loss to the promoters of his forthcoming performance around 40 million dollars. His brother points a finger at a coterie ultimately responsible for his death and there is already a debate about the abuse of medication. I know his death will have its controversies as his life had. In life, he was big,larger than life. In death, he will be even bigger, on his own terms.
