Chamon Cha cha Chamon

Perhaps I am a little late to the party or do I mean wake? In the few days since Michael Jackson’s death I have been able to shake off the sense of pure uncensored shock. “Michael Jackson is dead” was the text message that delivered the news. “Michael Jackson is dead.” Michael Jackson can’t be dead, people like Michael Jackson don’t just die but then again people aren’t really like Michael Jackson.

Then the predictable, melodramatic, outpouring of emotion chugged in through the television like a steam train. With my cynical head on, I ducked for cover like 20’s cinema audiences who feared that images coming towards them on screen would leap out and crush them.

BBC tried their damndest to tweeze out the raw emotional responses of Jackson closets friends, with surgical questions alarmingly devoid of any sense of tact or empathy. They scrabbled together obvious questions about whether the controversy surrounding his alleged child grooming would affect his standing as a true legend of music. A phone call to Uri Gellar before his death was even confirmed was particularly stomach turning.

Then they decided to go live to Lizo Mzimba at Glastonbury who was gauging the reaction from members of the public. I don’t know who I was taking less seriously, the BBC for deciding to ask people would so obviously be on pills for a clear concise comment worthy of airtime, or Lizo, the ‘journalist’ who spent years on Newsround telling kids “Lots of bad stuff happened in another country today but its ok because David Beckham kicked a ball good.”

Apart from shock it was difficult to ascertain how I actually felt about his death. Without being too callous, his superficial face makes it hard to think of him as a real person and without this, it is hard to feel genuinely sad. It would however be immature to ignore the magnitude of his death as an event in the tapestry of entertainment history. I am waiting for the 25^th of June to be renamed “Michael Jackson Day” and the mastering of the moon walk to be the pass or fail requirement of Year 6 SATS.

But in terms of how I feel, I don’t know. For me, there are two Michael Jacksons. The child prodigy, who turned into the slightly odd looking star, that danced his way around the set of the scariest music video of my childhood, Thriller. And then the freaky looking kiddie fiddler it was acceptable to parody in the likes of South Park without so much of a nervous twitch of morality or sympathy.

I cannot connect with either.