Michael Jackson, RIP

I'd be remiss if, as one of millions of anonymous bloggers, I didn't mark the passing of Michael Jackson yesterday, from sudden cardiac arrest.

Put simply, my views: Jackson revived a music business that was struggling in the early eighties, but only a) delayed its demise, to b) insure its next decline would be permanent. Jackson's stature, ratcheted up by his various promotion machines, set a precedent for hugely over-paid entertainers - costumed, big dollar economic salvation machines - that contributed as much to the collapse of the music business as its own myopic tribulations with file-sharing and media evolution. Jackson's talent may have warranted his media-hugeness, but isn't that quotient that's impossible, really, to assess.

Looking at all the footage the media spewed forth last night, it occurred to me what a genuinely sad spectacle Jackson had become - immensely talented, but utterly and freakishly alien to the world that the rest of us live in. Weird, implausible, dysfunctional marriages...serial plastic surgery...costume intrigue...that weird kid thing....child abuse trial appearences in pajamas....or even the fact, weird itself, that he was the richest entertainer on the planet (including Sir Paul) in 1985, and died yesterday $400 million in debt.

Did he spend it all trying to buy the normalcy his dancing and singing lifted so many of us past?

Tragic for losing his life, whatever it was, so early, but his real contribution to the culture, in my view, pales beside that of James Brown, Elvis, Dylan and Louis Armstrong. He may be in that pantheon, but not at the top. He benefitted a great deal from those who came behind - and those who followed took little from Jackson that wasn't directly resultant from his own, unsharable talent.

RIP Michael. Here's hoping you find a place in heaven you never found here on earth.