Why didn’t Michael Jackson become Rembrandt or Shakespeare?

Mick LaSalle is right: If anything, Michael Jackson is not sufficiently appreciated, or at least not Jackson at his height in the early 1980s. Jackson was more than a popular icon and musical genius. He was an artistic god.

At the public elementary and Catholic middle school I attended, Jackson commanded a peculiar form of sacramental piety. At lunchtime, we imitated his moon walk. At our Friday afternoon dances, we danced not just to the mega-hits on “Thriller” (”Beat It,” “Billie Jean,” and “Thriller”) but also to his less famous singles (”Human Nature,” “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” and “Human Nature”). At home, we watched his videos on MTV and talked about them the next day at school; Eddie Halen’s guitar solo in “Beat It” and the use of real gang members in the song’s video were rich conversational pieces. Although even at this age I was a Springsteen and U2 man, owing to the influence of an uncle, and never bought one of his albums, I could not deny his artistic brilliance.

Jackson arguably was as popular as any musician in history. Sinatra at his height made girls swoon and men sing. The Beatles made not only girls swoon, but also teenagers dance. However, only Jackson did both and made everyone appreciate his talent. He had transcended to a status few humans in history achieve.

Yet within a few years, Jackson’s great artistry and fame were gone. He continued to be admired and liked, but not worshipped and revered. His talent withered and his life unraveled. He slept in the same bed with young boys and never had a mega-hit. How could this happen?

Over at his Crunchy Con blog, Rod Dreher blames his father and corporations, quoting approvingly from an eye-opening 1984 article by Michael Kinsley about Jackson’s eccentric lifestyle:

What’s happened to Michael Jackson isn’t too different from what they used to do to young male singers in Europe a few centuries ago, to keep their voices sweet. In another way, it resembles the exploitation of child stars like Judy Garland in the heyday of the Hollywood studios. In fact, what American capitalism has done to Michael Jackson is even a bit like what the Soviets do to their women athletes.

A sickening cover story on Jackson in the March 19 Time takes as its theme that there is something wonderful about being an incompetent human being. “Jackson’s world of fantasy is easier to dismiss with malicious gossip than understand with sympathy,” Time scolds. It quotes Steven Spielberg: “He’s like a fawn in a burning forest.” Describing Jackson “chatting and swapping gestures with E.T.,” Spielberg reflects, “I wish we could all spend some time in his world.” Jane Fonda reports on a week ostensibly spent talking with Jackson about “acting, life, everything. Africa. Issues.” Her conclusion? “His intelligence is instinctual and emotional, like a child’s. If any artist loses that childlikeness, you lose a lot of creative juice. So Michael creates around himself a world that protects his creativity.” Time notes with approval: “His friends [sic] . . . help him keep life at bay and illusion near at hand.”

At this early date, Kinsley’s answer may be the most accurate; Ben Fong-Torres, the well-known Bay Area music critic, offers a similar interpretation. And the damaged lives of Britney Spears, Drew Barrymore, and Lindsey Lohan support the idea that capitalism can exploit child superstars. But I wonder if this explanation is overly simplified, a bit too pat for reality.

In thinking about an unrelated topic, the downfall of Senator Ensign and Governor Sanford, I was reminded of Walker Percy’s neglected 1983 book Lost in Cosmos. Percy discussed the concepts of transcendence and re-entry, the ideas that when a person ascends via fame or riches or status, he must descend somehow. What caught my eyes in re-reading this section of the book, or part of the section, is Percy’s idea that artists are far more likely to self-destruct than scientists:

In the age of science, scientists are the princes of the age. Artists are not. So that even though both scientists and artists achieve transcendence over the ordinary world in their science and art, only the scientists is sustained in his transcendence by the exaltation of the triumphant spirit of science and by the community of scientists.

It is perhaps no accident that at the high tide of physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the great revolutionary physicists — Faraday, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein – were also men of remarkable integrity and exultant wholeness of character, of generosity and benignity. Compare the lives and charactes of the comparably great in literature at the same time: Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway.

With the disappearance of the old cosmological myths and the decline of Judeo-Christianity and the rise of the autonomous self, one the study of secondary causes, the other the ornamental handmaiden of rites and religion, were seized upon and elevated to royal highroads of transcendence in their own right. Such transcendence was available not only to the scientists and artists themselves but a community of fellow scientists and students, and to the readers and listeners and viewers to whom the ’statements’ of art, music, and literature were addressed.

But what is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by the problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What do you do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table.

The only exception to this psychic law of gravity seems to be not merely the great physicists at the high tide of modern physics but any scientists absorbed in his science when the exaltation of science sustains one in a more or less permanent orbit of transcendence – or perhaps the rare Schubert who even during meals wrote lieder on the tablecloth …

But the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by writers and artists. They, especially the later, seem subject more than most people to estrangement from the society around them, to neurosis, psychosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, florid sexual behavior, solitariness, depression, violence, and suicide.

Percy’s thesis is tantalizing. Suppose Michael Jackson were a musician in 17^th century Europe, a superstar plying his trade for the King or a wealthy benefactor. He could have turned out like Rembrandt or Shakespeare, two men who struggled personally but overcame them to produce a lifetime of great works and personal stability. I realize Rembrandt’s and Shakespeare’s circumstances were different; Rembrandt was widely popular for decades, while Shakespeare was not revered during his lifetime. Yet both men were sustained by a culture in which religion and art were triumphant rather than science. I am not saying that great artists can’t excel in our post-religious age; only that their greatness may be the exception rather than the rule.