On Michael Jackson and Hemingway, by Robert Lashley
“Michael Jackson spent almost $35 million to cover up his molestation of 24 boys”
Just as a generation of writers (led by Norman Mailer) made their careers mimicking Ernest Hemingway's most unredeemable literary qualities, a generation of pop stars (Chris Brown and R Kelly most glaringly) have taken the music of Michael Jackson at his most atonal, inorganic, and staggeringly self pitying and made it a key testament of modern radio. Like the legacy of Hemingway has been plagued by his Frankenstenial sons, the Legacy of Jackson's music is being plagued by the Michael Jackson hero. These pop stars--generally charming yet vacant, living in a world free from responsibility, obsessed with niceness to the point of forgetting to have anything nice to say--are pale imitators of their teacher but hauntingly tied to him, and thus the carriers of his legacy.
Also, by taking Hemingway's dryrot and alchemizing it into a "man code", more than a couple generations of writers did damage to the language, single handedly building wings of restrictive gender constructions and limiting the vocabulary in which men could express themselves without being damaged by other men. I don't know if a generation making Michael Jackson an artist-saint will fare any better. In the face of this [article], the half listenable pity dirges that make up so much of his later music sound less like the outbursts of a tortured man-child than the soundtrack of a conscious "institutional man" capable of a breathtaking, bottomless cruelty.
Were the short stories and A Farewell To Arms worth the untenable legacy of war porn, gruesome MRA rage, and feckless. pathological, Freudian dithering on the page about masculinity (a dithering so vehement that one felt like he cheapened the word)?
Are Off The Wall and Thriller worth this? Worth not talking about this?
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Robert Lashley is the author The Homeboy Songs (Small Doggies Press, 2014). A semi finalist for the PEN/Rosenthal fellowship, Lashley has had poems published in such Journals as Feminete, No Regrets, and Your Hands, Your Mouth. His work was also featured in Many Trails To The Summit, an anthology of Northwest form and Lyric poetry. To quote James Baldwin, he wants to be an honest man and a good writer.