Did Michael Jackson's Death Save His Reputation?

Copy Not as Good as Original

With the Motown special, Jackson took it all up one final notch. His dancing had always been a cause of wonder and admiration but, that night on television, Jackson put on a show -- including his first "moonwalk" -- that made viewers think of the greatest dancers of the century. At that moment -- and not for much more than that moment -- Michael Jackson was, in critic Mick LaSalle's words, the coolest person on Earth.

After that, it was just a long, long decline, ending last week. Sure, there were huge hits and multi-platinum albums and record-setting concerts, but Michael Jackson never again made another important contribution or added substantially to his repertoire. He just grew creepier and odder -– the world's greatest Michael Jackson impersonator, but even that only on his good days.

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As it happens, I was a rock music critic during Jackson's brief arc of greatness. I can remember being hugely impressed by "Off the Wall" -- and awestruck by both the ambition and execution of "Thriller." Like half of America, I was shouting at the TV during the Motown moonwalk. But I never even bought "Bad," and the videos, to my mind, quickly became a collection of puerile subjects, silly lyrics and predictable dance moves (strut, spin, pose, grab crotch, repeat). The only Michael Jackson song I listened to during the next 20 years was 1991's "Black or White" -- and that was only to hear Slash's guitar riff.

The deaths of loved ones lead to introspection, while the deaths of famous public figures lead to retrospection. Now that he's gone, looking back over Michael Jackson's career, it seems obvious that he was a transitional figure. He began in the Top 40/LP/Network television era with the Jackson 5. Then, he reached his peak as a solo performer -- indeed, briefly, the "King of Pop" (though not later on, when he claimed to be) -- by mastering better than anyone else the newly emerging technologies of MTV/Music videos/modern studio recording. During that brief interval, he made a handful of seminal contributions to popular music.

But, unlike, say, Dylan or Lennon/McCartney (even though he owned their music), I think Michael Jackson was not necessarily a genius, but a supremely talented entertainer. And, so, around his small bag of tricks, Jackson essentially built a persona and a musical empire out of pieces borrowed from more creative sources. Unfortunately, the copy is never as good as the original -- and once you got past the small corpus of great songs and the moonwalk, to me, Michael Jackson's shtick grew tired and shopworn real fast.

And, remarkably, even in that, Michael Jackson became a creature of this new era. Ours is not an age of originality -- at least not at the level of art. Television, YouTube, the Web, digital music, not only have ferocious appetites for content -- making sure that every plot device, every character cliché is repeated a million times each day -- but they also make omnipresent every filmed, photographed or recorded piece of creative art. As such, the idea of anyone coming up with something so fundamentally new and appealing that it knocks the world on its collective ear -- as Michael Jackson did in the early 1980s -- is almost absurd.