Michael Jackson, manhood and me

Like most of the world, I spent much of Thursday night thinking about--and, yes, mourning--Michael Jackson.

It started off cerebral. Marveling at the guy's weirdness and influence. Thinking about how not having a normal childhood may have made him obsessed in a warped way with children.

My setting was my San Francisco Mission neighborhood, on the eve of gay pride weekend. Hip hop kids of color, hipsters, heterosexual families, gays and lesbians all shared the streets. It struck me that Michael Jackson had a little bit of everyone in him, and yet remained apart. He was "gay" in his effeminateness and flamboyance, and his body transformations and fashion made him look female. But he never explicitly came out as a homosexual or transvestite. He was "black," but whether out of medical necessity or not bleached away from that race. And though he became "white" he remained rooted in African American musical traditions.

He may have been the ultimate misfit, and the world mocked him plenty. But last night, with hindsight, everyone claimed him as their own. "We love Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson," said a sign outside a bar that caters to the cool cycling crowd. (It somehow didn't seem fair that Farrah got upstaged in death.) The college-aged kids in an apartment down the block put up a sign commemorating Jackson and blared "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" out their window. That Jackson belonged to all of us was confirmed by graffiti I saw on the side of a stove left out on the street: "RIP Michael Jackson my nigga."

That told me that even hip hop culture--often macho--appreciated Jackson. And the tag changed the tenor of my reflections. I started to see the King of Pop through the prism of masculinity, a topic I've been exploring on this blog. And as I returned home and watched some of Jackson's videos on YouTube, I was moved by the way he tried on multiple versions of manhood.

"Don't Stop" shows him as an innocent lover. In what looks to be a pre-MTV video, with crystals and balls floating in the background and Jackson wearing a tuxedo with giant bow tie, he seems lost in the music and mood. The lyrics--"Keep on with the Force...this is love power"--mix the mystical and the romantic (and probably Star Wars, which made a splash two years earlier). The roughly 20-year-old Jackson dances awkwardly at times, putting his hand in his pocket. But his little hops and big smile convey a barely contained joy.

Three years later in "Beat It," Jackson moves on to embody an intriguing male peace-maker. "You want to be tough...No one likes to be defeated" he sings, looking frustrated while two street gangs prepare to battle. But he eventually defies the "beat it" warning to stay away. His character intervenes in a knife fight, transforming it into a dance joined by each combatant. The conflict is defused, but the movement remains primally male, with undulations and stacato moves of speed and strength.

This identity, though, gives way to hyper-masculinity in "Bad" several years later. In that video, Jackson leads a group of gang-bangerish guys through a subway station with a relentless refrain of macho-ness. He looks like nothing so much as the same pathetic toughs that he helped to reconcile in "Beat It."

It's dangerous to judge a person by their art. But the trajectory of those songs and videos suggest Jackson began to doubt his masculinity, and responded by going overboard in a show of testosterone. Perhaps that imbalance foreshadowed the way he later swung wildly between extreme images of male virility--witness his crotch-centric costumes--and femininity--such as the girlish hair.

***

By the time "Bad" hit, I was in college and past Michael Jackson. But he played a key role for me as I grew up--and I suspect he did so for many other men who came of age in the 1980s. He helped us dance. Made us want to, with Off the Wall and Thriller. We Amherst Junior High School guys got sweaty in Lisa Dux's living room to "Working Day and Night." And "Beat It" and the rest of "Thriller" served as soundtrack to hours playing basketball in my Buffalo-area driveway. Basketball was a way I funneled adolescent boy aggressiveness. There was something right about being physical and competitive on the basketball court, and "Beat It" confirmed that.

A few months ago, I found myself thinking about Jackson's song "Man in the Mirror." I was taking stock of life at 40, and it struck me Jackson was right on. Yes, the song has a cheesiness to it. But he hits on that timeless call to brotherhood with some clever lyrics. "I've been a victim of a selfish kind of love," he sings. And then there's that stirring key change and the rich harmony: "make that change."

Jackson's many changes amounted, at least in part, to an attempt to sort through what it means to be a man. The results were mixed, odd and apparently tragic. But I give him credit for trying, and for hitting some high notes along the way.

There's a moment in "Don't Stop" that broke my heart a little when I watched the video Thursday night. Jackson opens his arms widely. Not in the posturing way he later does in "Bad," but in an expression of pure vulnerability. Ready to embrace everything around him. I aspire to that sort of openness--it's a key to the big rewards in life of wisdom and love. But maybe Michael Jackson was too vulnerable, made to be too vulnerable, tortured somehow as a result.

In any event, much of the world is now embracing you back, Michael. As the tagger said, may you rest in peace.