The King of Pop

When I hear people talk about Leaving Neverland as proof that Michael Jackson was some sort of cultural anomaly, I find it a bit naïve. For Michael Jackson truly is the King of Pop—that is, the king of popular culture. I say this because, what is popular culture’s function, if not to: 1) treat women to be inherently evil and disposable, as he repeatedly does in Leaving Neverland 2) forge an indelible obsession with whiteness, as he did throughout his life, and 3) sexualized youthful innocence, as he did repeatedly, in private, and (I argue) with everyone’s consent?

We want to believe that he is aberrant, as if his fame and wealth allowed him to exist in a cultural vacuum. It was precisely his attaining society’s highest capitalistic achievements in his lifetime, however, that eventually afforded him the power to prey on children to the extent that he did. Wealth—the greatest measure of cultural capital in our society, that thing we are all programmed to kill ourselves trying to attain—facilitated his becoming a monster; he did not become a monster in spite of it. 

I’m clearly not justifying his behavior, or giving him sympathy whatsoever. I’m just saying that he took many of our ingrained cultural practices—misogyny, ageism, racism, wealth ambition, etc.—and played them out to their extreme, horrific conclusions. It was our adulation of him (as a black man exalting whiteness, as a symbol for some pervasive Horatio Alger myth-remnant, and yet still as a caricatured other that we could comfort ourselves in mocking) that inspired us to buy his albums and line his pockets. It was our lack of concern for sexual assault survivors, coupled with our tendency to serve as a voyeuristic public jury, that saw his trial—his being brought to accountability—as nothing more than spectacle and farce. It was our fixation and paranoia surrounding the attainment of wealth that led us initially to dismiss his victims as money-grubbing fame whores. We can, likewise, easily write him off as a grotesque oddity—and many of us have; but I think, instead, we should try “starting with the man in the mirror,” so to speak, and question the ways in which we perpetuate such common, toxic cultural practices every day.