No One Ever Beats a Fable

What are the chances that I would be reading about Michael Jackson in Lipstick Traces on the day he died? It freaked me out a little. Typically, the only time anyone reads about Michael Jackson nowadays is when he is in the news for having done something terrible. Just a weird coincidence, then, but still.

What follows is a chunk from the book that especially stood out. Read on:

By 6 July 1984, when the Jacksons played the first show of their "Victory" tour, in Kansas City, Missouri - thirty years and a day after Elvis Presley made his first record in Memphis, Tennessee - Jacksonism had produced a system of commodification so complete that whatever and whoever was admitted to it instantly became a new commodity. People were no longer consuming commodities as such things are conventionally understood (records, videos, posters, books, magazines, key rings, earrings necklaces pins buttons wigs voice-altering devices Pepsis t-shirts underwear hats scarves gloves jackets - and why were there no jeans called Billie Jeans?); they were consuming their own gestures of consumption. That is, they were consuming ... themselves. Riding a Möbius strip of pure capitalism, that was the transubstantiation.

Jacksonism produced the image of a pop explosion, an event in which pop music crosses political, economic, geographic, and racial barriers; in which a new world is suggested, where new performances can momentarily supersede the hegemonic divisions of social life. Part and parcel of such an event is an avalanche of organized publicity, but also an epidemic of grassroots rumor mongering, a sense of everyday novelty so strong that the past seems irrelevant and the future already present. In all these ways, Jacksonism counted. Michael Jackson occupied the center of American cultural life: no other black artist had ever come close.

But a pop explosion not only links those otherwise separated by class, place, color, and money; it also divides. Confronted with performers as appealing and disturbing as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, or the Sex Pistols, with people who raise the possibility of living in a new way, some respond and some don't - and this, if only for a moment, becomes a primary social fact. It became clear that Michael Jackson's explosion was of a new kind.

It was the first pop explosion not to be judged by the subjective quality of the response it provoked, but to be measured by the number of objective commercial exchanges it elicited. Thus Michael Jackson was absolutely correct when he announced, at the height of his year, that his greatest achievement was a Guiness Book of World Records award certifying that Thriller had generated more top-ten singles (seven) than any other lp - and not, as might have been expected, "to have given people a new way of walking and a new way of talking," or even "to have proven that music is a universal language," or even "to have demonstrated that with God's help your dreams can come true." To say such things would have suggested that in a pop explosion what is at stake is value: that such an event offers as its most powerful aesthetic and social gift the inescapable feeling that the fate of the world rests on how a given performance might turn out. And this was not what was happening. The pop explosions of Elvis, the Beatles and the Sex Pistols had assaulted or subverted social barriers; Thriller crossed over them, like kudzu. Since Thriller never broke those barriers, but only made them briefly invisible, in Kansas City they once again became undeniable.

...Following the logic of the commodity, which goes where the money is, which will take you there whether you want to go or not, the imperatives of Jacksonism - its insistence on exchange as a mechanism for the production of value, its $30 ticket price, in $120 blocks of four - did not divide the audience of the Jacksonist pop explosion from those who chose not to be part of it; those imperatives divided those who did choose to be part of it from each other. The poor, who could come up with the money to buy a copy of Thriller, were out. Some of the poor went without food, clothes, or medical care to raise the $120 - for many, more than a month's rent - but, given the mail-order system, which allowed those arranging the concerts to select fans by zip code, they were off the map. The Jacksonist pop explosion was official, which meant not simply that it was validated by the president of the United States. It was brought forth as a version of the official social reality, generated from Washington as ideology, and from Madison Avenue as language - an ideological language, in 1984, of political division and social exclusion, a glamorization of the new American fact that if you weren't on top, you didn't exist. "Winning" read a Nestlé ad featuring an Olympic-style medal cast in chocolate, "is everything." "We have one and only one ambition," said Lee Iacocca for Chrysler. "To be the best. What else is there?" Thus the Victory tour - which originally boasted a more apocalyptic title: "Final Victory."

It didn't work. Days before the first show, LaDonna Jones ... wrote an open letter to Michael Jackson in care of her local newspaper, and the letter was reprinted across the country. It wasn't fair, she said. That was all it took. It was all over. The tour managers sent LaDonna Jones free tickets, but it was too late. Hidden in a uniform that likely weighed as much as he did (dark glasses, military jacket, pants above the ankles, laceless shoes, the uniform that in the Jacksonist explosion produced not the imitators who followed Elvis, the Beatles, and the Sex Pistols, imitators who found themselves forming groups to find out what it was they had to say, but only impersonators, young men emerging from hired limousines or rushing stages to be greeted by those who knew they were fakes with screams appropriate to the real thing), Jackson fought against the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes, denouncing his own ticket scheme, promising to give money away, but no one ever beats a fable. ~Greil Marcus, 1989.

The fable couldn't be beat, but along came Harmony Korine in 2007, 40 years after Guy Debord wrote, "The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images," making a new fable out of it all with Mister Lonely.


And to think kids today only know Michael Jackson as a monstrosity from the evening news. And how odd that there are such things as Michael Jackson impersonators when Michael Jackson continuously tried to reconstruct his body into something other than himself, into an image from his own deranged mind of what he imagined he should look like, or maybe even what he imagined the world collectively thought he should look like.

Michael Jackson is dead, long live "Michael Jackson."