The Column #60

Reflections on the Man in the Mirror

Twelve months on and it seems like the conspiracy theories surrounding Michael Jackson’s death are only just beginning. So far, we have heard that he is living on the Moon; he faked his own death to avoid playing 50 concerts and is hiding out in Mexico; he is living under the assumed identity Dave Dave (a severe burns victim) or that he was murdered by ruthless music executives who wanted to get their hands on his back catalogue. His sister, La Toya, claims that he was murdered because he was ‘worth so much more dead than alive’.

Dave Dave

Society’s inability to simply accept the death of a major celebrity is nothing new. We have all been subjected to a tedious story or two about where Elvis is living now and heard the reasons why Princess Diana didn’t die accidentally. We have also witnessed the rather odd case of Tupac Shakur, who was assassinated in Las Vegas in 1996 and yet inexplicably continues to release albums of music, including duets with the likes of Elton John. Is Tupac dead? Let’s face it, who cares anyway!

The case surrounding Michael Jackson’s death is a curious one. On the face of it, he was clearly not enjoying the best of health and there was concern among his fans that he might not be up to performing any concerts at the Millennium Dome, let alone 50 in a row. This pressure, added to his ludicrous personal circumstances and mounting debts, was clearly taking its toll on the singer. He was suffering from chronic insomnia and had employed Dr. Conrad Murray as his personal physician, at a cost of $96,000 per month, to help him prepare for the forthcoming tour.  Whatever the outcome of Dr. Murray’s impending trial, one can’t help but feel we will never know the truth of what happened to Jackson in those final hours. 

Dr. Conrad Murray

Since his death, Michael Jackson’s estate has generated over $1 billion in revenue and paid off half of his debts. He sold four million albums in the six weeks following his death, and by June 2010 this figure reached 24 million albums, plus 26.5 million digital downloads (source: The Independent). This figure is only going to continue growing with news of a ten album deal with Sony over seven years and a series of films and television shows in production or planning. It seems there is much truth in the theory that death is the most lucrative career move for an artist.

Cirque du Soleil, the Montreal-based circus troupe, is planning a series of themed shows based on Michael Jackson’s music and work. The details are as yet unconfirmed, but the show will presumably require a series of actors of varying ethnicity, from black through to plastic-white, in order to accurately chart his appearance over the course of his career. Either that or they will need a highly talented make-up team and a very patient lead-actor.

The one person who has had very little mention in the furore surrounding Jackson’s death is Bubbles, his one-time best friend who sat in on the recording of the Bad album and once drank Japanese green tea with the Mayor of Osaka. I refer of course to Jackson’s pet chimpanzee (not a monkey, as is he often mistakenly referred to) whom he adopted from a Texas research facility in the early 1980s and promptly turned into an international star. Bubbles was toilet-trained, wore a nappy and a red coat, ate at the dining table and apparently helped with household chores. He had his own bodyguard and was also able to moonwalk, something that made him the envy of scores of young boys in the late 1980s.

Bubbles

Bubbles now lives at the Centre for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, where he enjoys painting and listening to flute music. He is extremely intelligent and spends his time sitting in trees reflecting on his rock-star youth with his best friend Sam (another chimp). Shortly after his removal from the Neverland ranch in 2003, Bubbles attempted suicide, a rare feat in the animal world and a poetic gesture at his separation from Michael Jackson. He survived the attempt, has since settled into life at the Centre and, according to his keepers, has a sweet character.

Michael Jackson’s relationship with Bubbles was one of the key reasons the media began to mock him for his eccentricity in the late 1980s. The idea that a grown man would hang around with an animal, no matter how intelligent, was absurd at best. To share a bedroom with him and have him attend album recordings, tours and social functions (apparently he once ‘worked the room’ at a party at Elizabeth Taylor’s house) was incomprehensible to the press, and yet is perhaps the biggest clue to Jackson’s true personality.

He was a vulnerable child trapped inside the body of a man. He was undoubtedly one of the most talented musical artists to set foot in a recording studio, and single-handedly inspired a generation of young men to dance, but it was all clearly too much for him. He couldn’t handle the pressure of fame and lurched from one crisis to another, both in terms of his appearance and his decisions in life.  He could never recapture the musical heights of Thriller and Bad and yet his fans loved him all the more for it.

Michael Jackson

The conspiracy theories will continue to circulate, growing in scale and grandeur as the years pass. Was he really killed by Osama Bin Laden who climbed through his bedroom window, injected him with a poison and then left a box of Milk Tray on the bedside table as a gesture of irony? It could become a game, where people act out their own theory in front of friends, replacing charades as the de-facto group guessing game. It is a testament to Jackson’s life that no theory is too ridiculous or unbelievable. His life was so incredibly wacky that one would naturally expect his death (or lack of it) to be equally as unorthodox; instead he passed away quietly, alone in his bedroom. The drama was finally over, time to rest in peace.