The deaths of Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson provoke shared moments of cultural shock. We abandoned television for more intimate, interactive media like the internet and Twitter for news updates. Such collective moments of unmediated emotion beg us to ask why.
Superficially the two men were similar. Both were uniquely gifted synthesizers of swirling cultural currents in music, and each expanded the language of the acceptable in popular forms.
Both reached a point where they could do no more without alienating some of their fans. I’ve seen artists as diverse as Harry Belefonte and the Osborne Brothers who try variations on songs they’ve been forced to repeat for years greeted with disapproval by audiences who’ve so internalized their music that deviation could not be tolerated.
Yet, audiences want to see more, want to see something different, and so each could only evolve as performers. The Elvis of Vegas and the Jackson of the tin soldier suits are not the artists we were drawn to, but the products of our demands for new sensations within the confines of the claustrophobically familiar.
We can’t imagine either of them married watching their children play soccer. The hyper-sexuality of the one and the ultra-androgyny of the other could not be domesticated. Our perceptions built cages they couldn’t leave without risking our wrath.
We cut off creative individuals, used to working hard, from either pursing innovation in music or seeking normal domestic lives. To evoke F. Scott Fitzgerald, what possible second act did we permit them?
In the past, religion would have provided a model. But that avenue was closed to these two. Both were raised in strong evangelizing traditions, the Assembly of God and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and already had influenced more people everywhere in the world than any conventional missionary. Presley was perhaps luckier because he could maintain his ties to his past through gospel music.
The secular alternative pioneered by Ezra Cornell to devote one’s second life to philanthropy has been attacked by conservative politicians angered by the social changes supported by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations. Both instead used late songs instead like "In the Ghetto" and "We Are the World" to do things aggressively outspoken critics would not otherwise permit.
We put them at the pinnacle of our success pyramid with no place to go. All we allowed was what we could imagine, the excesses of materialism. When they die and we see the consequences, we’re shocked because the emptiness we discover is the emptiness of our closed culture which has no options.
By chance, Presley died when we were struggling with economic problems under Jimmy Carter which we denied by following a less talented performer who could metamorphose into a politician. Jackson died in our current recession caused by the very kinds of excesses we condemned him to live.
What we intuit in their deaths is the failure of our shared world view to function when it is most needed. They become transformed into the canaries of our cultural crises that none of us can escape.
