On MSNBC the other day, the writer who goes by the name Touré was telling us we’ve just all been too mean to Michael Jackson:

[A]mong the people, you know, the music and the joy and the cultural importance of Michael has been liberated from the discussion of the eccentricities*, which is what the media, and a lot of regular people, too, have focused on in the last decade or so.

Now, hold that thought for a minute. Meanwhile, in the NYT, my friend David Carr was coming to the defense of Steve Jobs:

[L]ast week, Mr. Jobs returned to work on a part-time basis, precisely when he said he would. Experts with only a general knowledge of his treatment suggest his prognosis is good.

That did not stop the keening on the blogs, in the news media and in the investment community that he and Apple needed to do a medical full monty to explain his conditions because they believe they are material to the company’s future and should be reported as such.

To which I, and not many others, say: Is anyone really confused about Mr. Jobs’s health status? I remain unconvinced, in part because I believe that prurience, not legitimate financial concerns, drives most people’s interest in the illness of others.

Now, what unites these two comments is an overweening concern for the tender feelings of celebrities—or, in the much more egregious Touré-Jackson case, for the tender feeling of a dead celebrity.

Two things are going on here. For the first, their perspectives are uncannily similar to the position that would be taken not just by the famous people involved themselves, but their PR establishments.

In Toure’s case I think it’s pretty much a case of his being a popist, that sphere of pop culture writing that thinks that there’s just too darn much criticism about pop stars out there. The popist mantra is to take pop stars on their own terms. Carr is a much more serious person and is of course not carrying Apple’s water, though he is equally wrong.

He’s wrong because of the second issue, which is much more important. Neither Touré nor Carr said the obvious: That when you live by celebrity you die by it—metaphorically, of course I mean, though mortality at least brushes each of these cases.

Jackson lived and Jobs lives in almost unimaginable luxury, and more than that they both lived lives in which their every whim was fulfilled. They each can make the boast of the truly fortunate person, which is that he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to do, and can basically do anything he wants to do.

And forgive me for sounding crass, but the category of doing what one wants to to, particularly when it comes to men, often involves sex, and it’s hard to believe that both, like most other celebrities, haven’t enjoyed the manifold benefits of that, too.

You didn’t hear either of them, or their respective amen corners, complain about the state of their lives before the downside of their wealth and fame arose.

In fact, both, to a great extent, have been hoisted on their own petard. Jobs, of course, is famously intransigent and unforgiving. He’s insulting, rude, impulsive, and, by all accounts, a heroic asshole, by which I mean he goes the extra mile and is mean to people even when doesn’t have to be.

Beyond that, he’s turned himself into a celebrity—a brittle and remote one, of course, but a consumer icon.

Well guess what? People get interested when you contract a mysterious disease.
Tough shit if he’s getting subjected to a little too much publicity about his health, particular when a) he and the company have been at best obfuscatory and at worst untruthful about his condition and b) he patently is a key corporate asset whose health, for better or worse, is tied to Apple’s financial fortunes. How is interest driven by these two forces “prurient”? I mean, it might be, as well, but the prurient aspect is far outweighed by the other two.

There’s a really easy way to work in the business world and have this not be a factor, and that is to own your own business and keep the company private. Jobs made that decision many years ago.

As for Jackson, jesus—his biggest claim to fame is his celebrity qua celebrity. He’s an amazing pop artist, of course, but he’s no Stevie Wonder, to name just one Motown fellow. He’s no Springsteen**, either, and he’s no Prince. A lot of black activists, like the buffoonish Al Sharpton, have been trying to prop up his rep as a breakthrough black artist; I take the point that “Billie Jean” was a watershed for MTV, but Wonder was hitting crazy commercial landmarks in the 1970s. (Songs of the Key of Life debuted at number one, for example, an almost unprecedented event at the time, and while I don’t care much about the Grammys, his dominance of the event in the middle part of the decade was nearly total.)

Anyway, the one thing people can say about Jackson was that, for a time, he had the biggest-selling album ever in the U.S.*** He played his celebrity for all it was worth. He was an early practitioner of the art of being more famous for being famous.

Again, guess what? People are going to be interested when kids say you molested them, in whether you’re gay if you’ve apparently never had a heterosexual relationship in your life, in why your skin color changed, or in why you’ve destroyed your face with plastic surgery.

He got all the attention for the things he wanted to have attention paid to—god knows we’ve heard enough about Jackson’s accomplishments. But it takes a special type of journalist to then turn around and complain when people also talk about the weird stuff.

Indeed, Toure was also on MSNBC excitedly telling viewers that Jackson was “bigger than Elvis in the history of music,” which is a silly thing to say, for reasons I‘ve explained earlier: Most particularly, the difference is that Jackson’s supreme skill was marshaling his already formidable commercial appeal and taking it to a new level—a temporary one, as we saw. Presley, as we all know, invented himself, his music, and then his audience one by one, in an absolutely epochal series of audacious moves.

If, as popists do, you equate simply popularity with importance, it’s easy to fall into such absurd logical traps.  As more of the hoopla goes on, the more brittle Jackson’s legacy feels to me. If you gotta keep insisting someone’s important, he starts to seem more of a simulacrum. In this way I think Jackson will be a most impermanent star.

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* Touré, who I bet didn’t write about Jackson’s “eccentricities” when he was alive, also doesn’t think they should be talked about when he was dead. (”Is it appropriate now to go into those issues? … We’ve gone over them over and over”) His remark provoked this smackdown from Gloria Allred: “May I say we weren’t just talking about eccentricities for the last what, 15 years or so.  What you call curiosity other people call accusations of child molestations.”

** Springsteen was a serious songwriter, of course; he melded the music of everyone from the Crystals to Van Morrison in a strikingly open-hearted way; he ran away from celebrity at crucial times; and he’s carried himself through an almost 40-year career with a great deal of dignity.

*** Until Their Greatest Hits by the Eagles supplanted it. Now, you’ll, note, everyone talks about how Thriller is the largest selling album worldwide. It probably is, but it’s a conveniently uncheckable factoid; in some twelve days of almost constant coverage, I’ve yet to hear someone say that Thriller is the second best-selling album in U.S. history.