The prevailing thought on my mind has been: “Wow, amazing that someone can be accused of being a pedophile, be so odd that eccentric doesn’t quite cut it, mangle their appearance with surgery to the point of abject disfigurement … yet still be mourned by millions. It says a lot about one’s accomplishments.”

Or, it at least cites how highly suspect is the value of public opinion. People, in general, have notoriously bad judgment and dubious taste.

Michael Jackson’s early work, though, is something I believe to be evidence of profound musical talent. It’s true that he benefited from great producers and industry personnel who helped propel him to stardom, but he had the raw materials that those people refined into a singing and dancing machine.

Still, I think he ceased to be creatively relevant by the time the ’90s hit. “Smooth Criminal” was a decent song in concept, but I think it really shows signs of his megalomania coming to the fore. The 10-minute video, most of it pure dreck and utter nonsense, shows him as some sort of gangland tough. He even shoots people and crushes a cue ball. Right. Michael Jackson the Goliath.

So, he’s dead. And, in the way that it is sad when anyone loved by someone else is gone from the land of the living, it’s sad. But he didn’t exactly live in the world as it is understood by the greater human consensus, so he’s actually just physically gone from the place he mentally checked out of a good 20 years ago.

Tags: boo-hoo, death, mental illness, Michael Jackson, perverts, sex-offenders, stuff white people like

This entry was posted on Friday, June 26th, 2009 at 5:56 PM and is filed under creativity, entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.