R.I.P MJ

Infamous as I am for making sweeping generalizations, and not to be done in by all the foot-soldier work I’m being made to do as my first month at work at a 90-year-old national daily comes to an end, here’s another one to keep your ridicule of yours truly alive – Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, as Elizabeth Taylor (his dear friend) addressed him in the early 80s soon after the world realized that his skin tone was not much of a reason to keep the euphoria he inspired below that which his ‘white’ peers could generate, was a socialist at heart.

I’m sure you’ve started laughing by now, but as always, I’m going to try and corroborate this one, too. Everyone who’s anyone in any part of the world knows who MJ was and has heard most of his songs somewhere of the other. It is here that I would like to draw the reader’s attention to some of his songs.

Think back and try to remember the first time you heard the Earth Song, or Heal the World. Mind you – he was no mere social worker trying to maintain the status quo in society by just drawing people’s attention to issues which had been ignored by many and for too long – but an activist with a socialist outlook. This can plainly be seen in his attempt to drag people into action. The earth song video is a very good example.

The dead animals and the barren earth are not surrounded by groups of people (read ‘social workers’ a la the NGO culture of today) ‘healing’ the wounded animals or ‘awakening’ the people into recognizing their rights and demanding them from their governments. There is no UN (whose footage is visible more in his music videos than anywhere else) with its multiple agencies engineered to further the interests of the developed world, but the people.

The people who have lost loved ones in a war-torn land. People whose natural habitat has been polluted and left dead by the activities of companies based in a foreign land. People who want it back; people who shed tears at their own loss. The emphasis is not on fixing responsibility on anyone – but on reclaiming what is lost. In this attempt they fall to the earth on their knees and attempt to revive their mother earth by feeling it and comforting it with their bare hands. What better metaphor or symbolism for grass-roots activism can there be?

Here’s another example, then. His epic hit single, Bad. Now come on. Even a 7 year old who has watched the video will tell you it’s anarchic. He/she may not say it in such a way, but something to this effect shall indeed be said. Again, the emphasis on recognizing the under-ground culture, of understanding the cultural significance of it, on saluting the power of unity – even if it is the unity of those considered the scum of the metropolis, living at the subway station – it is a call to the people. The people who are not in the mainstream to keep faith in themselves.

Black or white. Do I even have to explain this one? This is the best attempt at positive social engineering that I consider plausible and tangible. Here you have a black man right in your own living room telling you it’s ok to be who you are. Telling you something that anthropologists and sociologists have been trying to articulate in a popular way for ages. And he does it in a few minutes on television. Again, what is appealing is the fact that the song can be seen as a metaphor for MJs own life. This was a time when MJ was putting a lot of junk in his body to get rid of a psychosis that he had developed very early in his life – one that was caused by his skin tome and the baggage that came with it. This was incidentally also the time when the media had gone all guns on his changing skin tone. One should view it with that in mind too. The iconic MJ was asking for acceptance. For the same love that he got when he was black. It was his way of saying ‘I’m the same guy. I have a lot of problems in my head. Please help me get over them.”

“If you’re thinking of being my baby, it don’t matter if you’re black or white.” It went. He was black and now he was white and would become whiter before he left the world in shock and agony last Thursday. It truly didn’t matter if he was black or white. He was, and always will be our baby.