King of Stop

Word of the day: saturation (noun) The flooding of a market with all of a commodity that consumers can purchase.

In case you haven’t heard, Michael Jackson died.

Now let me say that any death is a terrible tragedy and a traumatic experience for the family and close friends left behind. Simply put, it really, really sucks.

As well, any time a celebrity dies, there will be media saturation. When a favourite media target like Michael Jackson dies, there will be A LOT of media saturation.

But, honestly, can we please move on?

My biggest beef with all the hype surrounding the King of Pop is that the musical legacy he will leave behind ended at least 10 years ago and that is not going to change just because he died. Will Thriller stay the best selling album of all time? I sure hope so. Will I feel compelled to dance, no matter where I am, whenever I hear the opening bass lines of Billie Jean? Absolutely. Do I wish I could moon walk? Every day. (Okay, that might be exaggerating, but you get my point.)

I honestly don’t care that he hung his baby over a balcony or his nose may or may not fall off at any given moment or that he wore pajama bottoms to court. It’s of no interest to me that he drapes his children in all manner of scarves when they are out in public or that his Neverland ranch has been foreclosed or that he moved to Bahrain. Thing is, this is the man he has been in the past 15 years and none of this has added (positively) to his legacy as the King of Pop. And I will not deny him the impact he made, first as part of the Jackson 5 and later as a solo artist. I’m just really done with this big media love affair that’s going on, despite the fact the media has been more than vicious to him over the past decade plus.

But as a society, we keep eating it up and pretend we didn’t buy the tabloids with stories about “Wacko Jacko” and then read those stories with a perverse kind of glee and then we gush about how he was the greatest musician ever and we’re all his biggest fan and then have to rush out and buy all his albums because we don’t own them, despite being his biggest fan.

Please. Just. Stop.

I’d like to get back to my regularly scheduled effed-up world, if it’s all the same to you.