TNG contributor Doug Cousminer submitted this post.

When I first heard about Michael Jackson’s death, I thought it was a joke.  After all, Michael Jackson isn’t supposed to die.  For many of my generation (who were kids in the 80s and early 90s), his music, videos, and image were ubiquitous throughout our childhood.

I remember owning Bad on one of those white-shelled cassettes and befriending kids who had Off the Wall and Thriller on tape.  I borrowed their tapes and made really awful-sounding copies using the “high-speed dubbing” feature on my dual cassette deck.  I refused to watch the “Thriller” video on TV, because it scared me too much.  My mom’s coworker attended a Michael Jackson concert and brought me back a t-shirt.  At the time, I couldn’t imagine going to any rock concert, let alone a Michael Jackson show, so I felt like someone had gone to the moon and brought me back a bunch of moon rocks.  I remember collecting Michael Jackson trading cards from 1984.  Each set came with a pack of chewing gum.  But I found the cards in an antique store in the early 90s, and I could never quite dare myself to eat ten-year-old gum.  In fourth grade, my teacher inexplicably played us the VHS tape of Moonwalker one afternoon (but then, she also passed out the lyrics to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” and The Beach Boys’ “Kokomo,” and we had to memorize the words as a music lesson).  Then, I remember the day after the “Black or White” video premiere, everyone in my fifth grade class talking about the morphing effects used in the video (before such effects became a summer movie cliché).

My interest waned around the time that the HIStory album came out, just before I started high school.  I listened to the new CD on a portable discman in my room, wanting to like all the new tracks, but I just didn’t enjoy them as much as his older stuff.  By the time I went to college, I had expanded my musical tastes, and Michael no longer formed the bread and butter of my CD collection.  I watched as his personal crises overshadowed his music; part of growing older and realizing that all the people you looked up to as a kid are human, too, and they’re actually more screwed up than you are.   But his death still seems a bit unreal.  It’s as if McDonald’s has suddenly gone out of business; I may not eat there anymore, but I still expect it to be around.

Michael Jackson changed the face of pop music.  Before him, MTV did not play black artists, and artists did not create big-budget, tightly choreographed music videos, nor did they appeal to such a wide audience.  His influence may not have been entirely positive.  The expectation that a pop artist must sell 20 million-plus albums has probably encouraged the shift towards increasingly homogenized-sounding, manufactured stars.  Yet, with his death, I wonder if the era of the larger-than-life pop star has finally come to an end.  Many of today’s most creative entertainers cannot thrive in the major-label system, and they build a following through word of mouth, mp3 downloads, touring, and online networking.  Now that anyone can publish a blog or create a Facebook profile, we can essentially become our own pop stars.

More than that, though, Michael Jackson’s death creates a bit of an existential crisis for me.  It hits me that so many things that mattered in my childhood don’t exist anymore.  The element of total fantasy embodied in Michael’s best music and performances, which I bought into as a child, has been replaced in my life by a self-aware, “I-know-what’s-really-going-on-behind-the-curtain” outlook.  Not that that’s bad, but isn’t there still a place for some of that fantasy in our adult lives?  And do I have to admit that, at the age of 27, I am now really an adult?

As others of my generation reminisce on Facebook about their fifth grade memories of Michael Jackson, I wonder if they feel as I do.  Are we now the ones in charge?  I feel as if my life has just started.  In the past two years, I have graduated college, got my first driver’s license, and moved out on my own for the first time.  When Michael was my age, he had already peaked as a superstar.  Even then, people unfavorably compared his new work to things he had already done.  I guess some people just peak early in life.  For the rest of us, the journey is just beginning.  And it may be up to us to be larger than life, to make our own dream-world real, in our own ways.

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