Brutal truth

Personally, I felt inclined to blame it on the boogie. Sunshine, no. Moonlight, definitely not. Good times, maybe to some extent. But boogie, for certain. On Facebook, my friend Nathan was wondering which tabloid would be the first to use the headline ‘The King of Pop-ped his clogs’. Soon the jokes were flowing. What’s the difference between Sir Alex Ferguson and Michael Jackson? Ferguson would still be playing Giggs in August. Radio Two was playing the modern equivalent of martial music when a royal dies: every time I switched it on, ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’. Jackson had long since got enough, but couldn’t stop. ‘Can You Feel It?’ Not any more.

But the surprise — and, let’s be frank, mild frisson of excitement — when someone incredibly famous turns their toes up was tempered, in this case, by a sense of inevitability about it all. Jackson, you felt, was never going to make old bones. For years now his appearance had suggested an experiment that had gone terribly awry. What would he have looked like at 70? Would there have been any money left? Would he still have been making his increasingly useless records? Would he finally have been held up as the classic example of what appalling damage can be wrought by lifelong fame and celebrity?

His death allows us to forget all this and wallow in nice comfy nostalgia. In the 72 hours after his demise, the average adult in the UK heard Vincent Price’s voice-over on ‘Thriller’ 11.3 times on TV, radio and blaring out of shops and pubs. Private Eye’s phrase ‘takes out onion’ characterised most of the media coverage: everyone had decided, without obviously thinking about it much, that Jacko was the greatest pop star since Elvis and one of the towering figures of late 20th-century culture. And it is true, he did sell a hell of a lot of records. But if the bottom line were all that mattered, Titanic would be the greatest film of all time and Phantom of the Opera the only thing worth seeing in the theatre. (Dan Brown? Jeffrey Archer?)

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