A Tough Week for the Gen X Crowd

Here it is the day after the deaths of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson (not to mention, a couple of days after the death of Ed McMahon), and now I at last understand why our parents were so deeply affected by the passing of entertainers like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. You really do feel like a part of you has died, and fully realize how much these icons were a part of your formative years.

I was only seven when Charlie’s Angels made its debut, but it wasn’t long before me and my brother bickered constantly about who was the prettiest angel. He was a Farrah fan, I favored Jaclyn Smith (and secretly was dying to know what Charlie looked like because he sounded so manly over the phone!). For we fans of the show, it was a shock when Farrah decided to leave the show after only one season. And it was a momentous occasion when “Jill” came back for a couple of episodes later on in the series’ run. I even remember a spoof of the Angels in a skit from the Donny & Marie Show! My brother had just gotten out of the hospital after nearly dying from appendicitis, and I spoofed the spoof of the Angels, which got my brother laughing to the point where he was crying out, “You’re going to make my stitches fall out!!!” And he meant it.

The first Michael Jackson songs in my record collection were on K-tel albums. Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground), Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough, and Rock With You appeared on several K-tel compilations between 1979 and early 1980. And when Burger King had a special cross-promotion with CBS records for discounted albums, the record I chose without a second thought was Off the Wall. A couple of years later, Michael started to work his way onto the charts again, big time, with The Girl is Mine and Billie Jean. That spring of 1983, I went on a field trip with my 8^th grade science class, and someone with a boom box on the bus played the next single Beat It repeatedly for the whole trip. By the time the bus ride was over, the entire class was singing along. In December of that same year, me and my friend ran all the way home from school in time to see the world premiere of the Thriller video. Within a matter of days, I had learned the entire zombie choreography, because they showed it every hour on the hour! My mother wanted to learn it too, so we would gather in front of the TV to do the zombie dance together whenever the video was shown.

Those moments are how I remember the pop culture figure of Michael Jackson impacting my life. And that’s sort of where I’ve always compartmentalized him. When things started to get…um…off the wall with him in the 90s, I, and I think many people, kind of felt in their minds that the old Michael Jackson had actually died. But now, with the passing of the troubled soul of the actual man, and not the ‘legendary figure’ we think of, many of us seem to have reconnected the two, and still feel great remorse despite what has transpired in the past 15 years. I mean, I was driving home from work today, listening to the marathons of his music on the radio, and songs like Beat It, Working Day and Night, and Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ were bringing tears to my eyes! I was remembering the star I used to know and love, who had really just melded into my existence and become a part or me and my past.

Scandal is not new for the famous and infamous who have died young: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Elvis Presley, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Sid Vicious, John Lennon, Marvin Gaye, Kurt Cobain. These are lives that were filled with controversy: sexual, homosexual, bisexual, drugs, homewrecking, violence. But in the end, we separate the life from the art and remember them for their iconic status and how they shaped who each of us is individually and who we are as a whole. While there are those who feel Michael Jackson doesn’t deserve to be honored, as well as those who feel guilty that they feel bad and are torn between honoring him and despising him, I think many of us may have been holding on to the hope that somehow, someday, Michael Jackson would be able to regain his past reputation, clear his name, and give us one more mind-blowing reminder of why he was such a musical phenomenon. And I think we mourn for that lost opportunity maybe as much as, if not more than, we do for his actual death.