but sure enough, the gossip sites were lit up. tmz led the way; perez hilton was actually crashed; cnn just kept feeding updates. long after even the press wires had called it, people.com was frozen with preliminary reports that still had the pop star in a coma.
we kept an eye on the associated press and the los angeles times -- our best shots at getting the latest and/or best reads.
we ditched our planned centerpiece and our 1a designer ably took the couple of dozen images i took from the ap and cranked out a strong feature package with recent and early images of the superstar.our managing editor was taken aback by the flood of coverage on television and online. with roots firmly in politics and west virginia university sports, he's one of those folks who seems just as content as not to let pop music of recent vintage pass him by.
plus, being at least 20 years older than the rest of the staff, he didn't have the experience of the mtv revolution as part of his cultural resume. there was no reason for him to feel stunned for having it abruptly end.
the rest of the newsroom, generations x and y, after deadline were left staring at and musing over the pieces left of a faded, fallen pop idol.
the lede in today's washington post reaction story said it best:
In the weeks before his death, we might have said we didn't know how we felt about Michael Jackson. He'd become so bizarre, so pale, so foreign and different from the musical genius some of us once worshipped. We thought that we hardly thought about him, except perhaps as a punch line. We felt that we felt nothing. But when news of Jackson's death broke yesterday, it turned out that we were wrong.like vinyl lps in the basement, he was something of a quaint curiosity, an old toy that once brought joy, long since outgrown.
but in the remarks and reminiscences of my colleagues, it became evident he was less a basement curiosity as part of the very foundation of our youth.
personally, i chose to ignore him even as his star was rising. as a young adult, i was striving to make myself "hard" with loud, aggressive music, not the smooth and rhythmic pop he was laying down.
even if i might have secretly appreciated his work, trying to deny that jackson was creating infectious, groundbreaking music was kind of like being the atheist who denies there is a God: you're trying to ignore something that is all around you.
so i allied myself with those who were just sick of seeing him monopolizing the only media we had -- videos, tv commercials, record stores and the radio. "real" rock fans weren't supposed to like him.
i tried to sort of shrug off his efforts to expand his appeal with the recruitment of guitar god eddie van halen on "beat it." but van halen created such an attack of focused fury in complement to jackson's driving, rock edge, i didn't even feel the blade opening up my musical and cultural perspectives.and, despite his demons, i think that was his gift, this tearing down of walls, the push against boundaries, in collaboration with all the right partners, from genius producer quincy jones all the way to basketball legend michael jordan.
(while i'm not sure if that was entirely his artistic vision, there seemed to be too much craft and joy in it for my cynicism to call it mere savvy marketing.)
unlike, say, a madonna, who hopped from calculated iteration to iteration, early adapting herself to the next big thing, jackson simply created his own body of work. the public made it the big thing on its own.
so despite covering my ears to it, his music was still in the background noise of my youth. maybe that's why the observation that he was my generation's elvis presley is not far off the mark.
truth be told, i hadn't seen this kind of reaction since '77 -- the shock, the media saturation, the sense of loss.
even when john lennon was killed in 1980, the beatles were the memory of another generation too fragmented and far away to dominate and stir the thoughts and conversation of my peers.
sitting at the copy desk last night, working with colleagues 20 years my junior, i was joined in my ruminations with their own recollections of favorite jackson tunes.
it made for a weird sense of communal grieving.
i guess it was the suddenly stirred pot of memories that his death evoked, as if a door to our childhood and youth were slammed shut, and the unexpectedness of it was a sobering shock. no one wants to acknowledge that everything has an end.all along the backyard fence that is facebook, users today posted links to favorite jackson videos, results to inane "quizzes" ciphering "which michael jackson song are you?" that somehow sprung up overnight, and simple words of appreciation -- or light-hearted snarkiness.
i heard the noontime dj on a local pop station admit through small sobs that he was crying at the end of a jackson song i wasn't familiar with ("will you be there," off of "dangerous" maybe?). normally this fellow can be so flip and obnoxious that i've wondered why he hadn't been yanked in the middle of his broadcast.
in the course of finding links for this post and chasing down video, i got choked up myself, which i absolutely did not expect.
what has surprised me in the aftermath of this pop icon's death is how interwoven his phenomena and persona had become in the fabric who i am. having this odd, hidden section cut out leaves an unexpectedly conspicuous hole.
