Joan Walsh: "I was cringing at the idea of his comeback tour. I expected it would be a train wreck."

[Amerigo Vespucci]

After I’d written a book about Michael Jackson, I found myself struggling with a sense of shame on more than one occasion. So many people said things like: “You’re a serious critic. Why are you writing about Michael Jackson?” Or, “I mean, I love his music, and 'Thriller' is one of the all-time great videos, but I can’t stand looking at him and I don’t want to think about what he’s done.” If I’d published it before the sex scandals and trials, my interest -- let’s go ahead and say my passion -- might have looked different. It might have looked as reasonable as writing about Madonna, Elvis or Bob Dylan.

Suddenly, death has restored Michael Jackson to cultural respectability. Death gives us an easy way out of the unanswered questions and uneasy feelings. But (and this is the good thing), death also restores our total pleasure in his artistry. It makes me happy to see masses of people revel in the ache and charge of the music again, in the brilliant dancing, in the reckless splendor of his showmanship.

Never has the phrase “body of work” suited an artist more. Remember the body of that 10-year-old could do the work of men twice his age. Remember the voice that could pipe, growl and croon. Savor the gestures and costumes he took from every show or film he'd ever seen, then made over and made new. About films, John Berger writes that when they “achieve” art, they create "a spontaneous continuity with all mankind." Though I have to change his “mankind” to "humankind," that’s exactly it. That’s what Michael Jackson, did, that’s what he still does, and that’s what he’ll do forever.

I didn't like much of anything Jackson did after the amazing "Off the Wall." "Thriller" unsettled me, and not the way Jackson intended to, I don't think. His physical transformation began there, and so did the paranoia. For the last 20 years I tried to tune out the tragedy he had become. I was cringing at the idea of his comeback tour. I expected it would be a train wreck and I preferred to remember him from the '70s. And so I will.

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2009/06/26/remembering_michael/

[liberal N proud]

1. I would say it never got on the tracks.

[NWHarkness]

2. The segment of article you've quoted was not Joan Walsh

It was by Margo Jefferson.

[EFerrari]

3. Thank goodness. It's shallow as hell and doesn't sound like her at all. n/t