Does anyone else find problematic the adoration of MJ as a champion of childhood alongside the mass, collective amnesia about his creepy affection for specific little boys? Or how about his very public self-immolation with drugs given the continuing affinity for a war on same?
I am reminded of the untimely death of a particular favorite of mine, Janis Joplin, in 1970, one year after I saw her live in concert in Columbus, Ohio. There was a short-lived movement to create a monument to her in the city of Joplin, Missouri, but the mayor and locals shot that down in a jiffy because she was such a terrible role-model due to her sexual and opiate-related behavior.
What gives? Why the apparent double standard? I suspect these are some of the reasons MJ is on the verge on canonization while JJ remains just another fast-lane artist who crashed and burned:
Jackson used prescription ‘medicine’, not street drugs.
There’s something almost benign about walking around whacked on Vicodin or Oxycontin in the public mind because you take it from a pill bottle carrying a pharmacist’s label. No matter if you are popping them by the dozen, it’s still FDA-approved medication produced in a lab by clean people in white clothes. Nothing like Janis’s buddies scoring a packet of scag on a L.A. street corner.
Jackson did his drugs at home.
We never even saw him drinking beer in public while Janis was famous for slugging Southern Comfort on stage.
Jackson’s music is entirely unthreatening.
Jackson’s pop tunes, if not exactly bubble-gum in content, are suitable for his kiddie favorites. Happy, sappy, peppy and sometimes catchy, you may like them or detest them, but you can hardly be offended. Joplin sang tough blues numbers and caterwauled about sex and abusive lovers. Not exactly for mass icon-worship.
Jackson pretended to be straight and even a family-man.
God help us. Not that anyone was particularly convinced, but he performed the required bow to mainstream public standards, so people could pretend he was straight-arrow while knowing perfectly well that it was phony. Joplin never hid her carousing and sexual appetite. If Jackson had been convicted on the pedophilia charge, that might have cooled a few jets. But I suspect the adoration would have continued largely intact.
Jackson had no association with vaguely controversial social issues.
Neither did Joplin for that matter, but she lived at a time when our society was sharply split. It was obvious which side of the divide she came down on just from taking one look at her psychedelic Porsche.
Et cetera. The point being that in the end it’s not the behaviors that people really care about, but rather what they stand for and what the actor in question says about them. It’s about keeping your sins private and nodding in public to received authority on moral issues. You do that, and no one really gives a crap what you do behind closed doors.
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