Why stunned? People don’t always think about stuff that’s been around. It’s like when you see a movie and you’re introduced or re introduced to a song and you want to listen to it more. Was it bizarre when the song “Be My Baby” started getting more attention after the movie “Dirty Dancing” came out?
No-one with any credibility at all has ever offered any evidence to suggest that he was a pedophile, and it’s unreasonable to insist that he was guilty on the strength of those accusations. I suppose it is a brilliant way to get away with child molestation: Just make absolutely sure that your victim and their family are well-established as scammers who bring frivolous suits against entities perceived as having deep pockets.
For sure, Michael Jackson had a preoccupation with childhood that was way over the line into pathology, but a kiddie-diddler? The chances of this being true appear to be about as thin as his nose was, at the end. You’d better have some evidence if you’re going to hang a label as nasty as “child molester” on someone.
Actually, the real REAL tragedy is that I had “We Are the World” in my head for hours last night, and here I go again…
Everything in moderation. When we deviate from that, especially when the overabundance isn’t of our own choosing, that’s when it becomes an issue.
I liked Michael’s music just fine over the years despite being more of a classic rocker. But now there’s an absolute onslaught of a few selected works by him that penetrate not just the music channels but have crossed into every crack and crevice of electronic media. Like Freudian, I’m getting ear worms of Billie Jean, ABC, Thriller, We Are the Worls, Man in the Mirror, whatever that one is they keep repeating from his last audition, etc.
It’s too much and the prospect it might actually increase is nothing short of nauseating.
Well, to be fair, lieu, I like hearing Billie Jean and so forth, and my iTunes “Recently played” list shows quite a bit of his stuff. “We Are the World,” though, is just so cloying! Though it’s really my own fault–they show it on that MJ videos program that’s been playing on VH1 a lot. I should just change the channel when that one comes up.
I concurr.
Michael Jackson, or more realistically Michael Jackson’s advisors, can hardly have relished the idea of a highly publicised court-case. Fortunately he was a zillionaire superstar, so money was no object. They probably thought no-one would believe the allegations anyway - after all, ‘Michael Jackson loves children - he lives in a themepark to which he invites sick and underprivaleged kids.’
Of course thereafter, given that smoke had appeared from somewhere, it became legitimate to assert that there must somewhere be a fire to go with it.
Clamour all you want about the evidence against him - often it’s seemed to me that people forget that his accusers knew him as a person, not a distant megastar as we all did - effectively not much more than a brand. ‘Evidence’ against someone you know personally is trivially easy to rustle up, and you KNOW the authorities are going to look into child molestation. For example, if I know someone to have vitiligo, I can come up with some pretty distinct and specific-sounding physical descriptions of them. If the rest of the world has a hard time believing that that person has vitiligo - because there are so many outrageous stories surrounding that person as a brand - my evidence gains credence in the eyes of the well-meaning gossip.
Elsewhere on this board, which usually strives to be impeccably rational and pragmatic, the question of ‘How did Michael Jackson turn his skin white?’ is being entertained as though any of us has the foggiest idea. How COULD he have turned his skin white? Sure. Why could he have chosen (or, more correctly when you’re the most famous guy in the world, been HELPED to choose) to do so? Sure. Yet the most likely explanations, when we take into account that very few people have lived the life of Michael Jackson, are painted as the special pleading of naive apologists.
When a black man starts to loose pigmentation, BANG, Occam’s razor says Vitiligo, not… well, no one’s actually provided an alternative!
I feel that Occam’s razor may have blunted somewhat recently. When I read that psychological proffessionals with experience of hundreds of pedophiles, and who can often sniff them out in the blink of a Malcolm Gladwell-esque eye, did not find Michael Jackson to strike them as one (The Smoking Gun: Public Documents, Mug Shots) I was content not to have an opinion. The trite mantra that we are each ‘entitled’ to one ought not to apply to things about which we really know very little. That takes us into the realm of belief. I’m content to just wait and see. Particularly as the man, sadly, is no longer with us.
I wonder whether some people need so badly to project outward their hatred of pedophilia (in which I hope they’re not especially remarkable) that there’s some kind of cognitive ‘better safe than sorry’ clause when it comes to the accusation of someone, with whom they have an artificial and superficial familiarity, that they already feel to be unusual. It’s not the intuitive sense of ‘unusual’ that you might get from ‘weird Bob’ down the road though - it’s, as I said above, the sense of unusual that Michael Jackson’s singularly unusual life could, conceivably to me, have conferred.
I can get behind this. I can honestly say that Michael Jackson’s music has never held any real appeal for me; he was way past his prime before I opened up enough to listen to anything that’s even remotely in the same neighbourhood.
Nevertheless, I find myself making up improvised lyrics to the approximate tune of Bad to amuse my daughter. Or myself. Whichever. “She’ll have a bath; a bath; she really needs a bath!” etc. Makes me feel dirty.
Well there was much more than “just an accusation,” if the cops went to court they believed they had a case.
The thing one needs to really ask yourself is, if this man wasn’t Michael Jackson would YOU have the same opinion?
You don’t need to waste time answering in this forum, but you should be honest with yourself. Jackson had a bunch of hits, but so did his sister. Madonna, Whitney Houston, and Mariah Carey also had a bunch of hits.
Michael Jackson is a man who could’ve done so much, but instead chose to live in a fantasy world building a monument to his own ego. Now people say, “But he loved kids, look at all the kids he entertained at Neverland.” (I’m talking legit here).
Yes that is true, but how much MORE could he have done, had he not been so concerned with his own ego.
So he lost his own childhood, so did plenty of other child starts. Michael Jackson was NOT the superstar when he was little. In the late 70s, he was no more than an “average star.”
A lot of these problems he created himself. It reminds me of “AbFab” where Saffy tells Eddie, “You live from one self induced crisis to another.”
In the end, even without the charges, Jackson was a man who sang and had a bunch of hits.
Well you know what? People die, we all will. In the end Jackson was a man who could’ve done more, but didn’t. Fine I can accept this, it’s his life and his money.
And after he died we have all this family and so called friends, leeching on his fame to make a profit.
And remember IF Jackson did molest those kids, well, ask yourself this, and again, don’t answer here, but ask yourself, IF he did, are you just overlooking this or do you believe that it doesn’t matter.
Perhaps in the long run it doesn’t, after all kids get molested all the time, and these kids probably got a lot of money for their suffering. Because as it seem with this funeral, MONEY is what Jackson and his family is all about in the end.
I think he’s vastly overrated and this current handwringing is a joke. A lot of his so-called friends hadn’t seen him in years. His career peaked in '83 and went downhill thereafter.
Personally, I believe he did molest children. Regardless, he was clearly a deeply troubled man and perhaps now he has a little peace. The current nonsense is more about what people can get from his death rather than anything to do with his legacy.
As I’m sure several others here do, I have the dubious privalege of having met and conversed with a handful of child molesters. My enjoyment of any songs they might have written in no way mediates my reaction to their crimes. I’m sorry, Marxxx, I know you didn’t want anyone to answer here, I just wanted to point out that for me the link operates in the other direction: I sometimes wonder how I can enjoy Michael Jackson’s music knowing that he was accused of child molestation.
In the same way, I’m slightly conflicted in my appreciation of (singer) Chris Brown’s talent, having seen the state he made of (singer) Rihanna’s face. However, there’s no dispute about his guilt.
The implication I sought by making the obvious point that MJ has died, was that we can at least be certain that he isn’t going to molest any children from now on. There’s no particular urgency in my eyes, and we don’t really need to make beliefs or opinions of our suspicions.
The real tragedy of his death?
The 24/7 coverage of it.
MODERATOR COMMENTS:
First, I apologize for getting to this so late.
Second, we have a policy (I don’t agree with it personally, but it’s the policy) of allowing negative comments in an obituary thread about a celebrity. So, while I personally find your post to be in excruciatingly bad taste, it’s not against the rules.
However, I also point out that we do have a rule (in the Registration Agreement that says:
I suppose it’s a fine point, whether you are implying that a dead person is “deserving of harm,” so I’m not issuing an official warning or anything of the sort.
NOW, IN MY ROLE AS A POSTER (NOT MODERATOR): I think your comments really are offensive and in hideously bad taste. Whether he was a “nice” person or a deranged criminal, wishing that he suffer torture and a slow lingering death is less than tasteful.
The real tragedy is that it’s verging on 168/49.
Let’s stop this before he turns into the Generalissimo Franco of pop.
Well this thread took a nasty turn, which was totally expected.
Extremely talented at what? I’ll grant his dancing was something, until it devolved into the repetitive crotch-grab/groin-thrust/spin sequence. Did he write “his” songs? Arrange them? Play any instrument on them? You can’t mean his squeaky little non-voice, I know.
:dubious:
Tell that to the Beatles.
Fear not, the Reverend Al Sharpton will get us through it.
I was thinking more of the Generalissimo Franco of popping pills.
Somehow he managed to channel both Elvis and Howard Hughs at the same time. Even though he was surrounded by people I can’t help but think he lead a very lonely life.
The real tragedy of Michael Jackson’s death is all those little kids he never got to sleep with. He had so much love to share, so many reacharounds to give, so many young butts to grope.
Heartbreaking.
The real tragedy is how fucked up his poor kids are going to be.
They were raised by a deeply damaged, emotionally retarded weirdo, and now it looks as though they might be raised to adulthood by the dysfunctional family who contributed to making dear ol’ dad such a deeply damaged, emotionally retarded weirdo.
High dollar psychotherapists are already dancing a merry jig around the cash register in anticipation.
He wrote his most of his own songs. He is the 38th most acclaimed artist. I think it’s a pretty save bet to call him extremely talented.
Agreed. That he was abused and used by his parents, family members and hangers-on is unfortunate, the fact that pissed away whatever talent and fortune he used to have is too bad. The fact that he apparently abused children is revolting. The fact that he had kids because of his messiah complex or whatever, and that they will have to deal with the fallout from his wreck of a life while being raised by either his screwed up family or by a woman who acted as a surrogate money because it was an easy ticket to millions, actually could be tragic. It’s hard to see it ending well.
Frankly I’m almost looking forward to the new strain of Michael Jackson jokes that are inevitably going to follow the week-plus of absurd media hagiography. They’ll be nastier than the old MJ jokes I heard as a kid, I’m sure.