Results tagged “Michael Jackson” from Birmingham Mail - Is It Just Me

All it needed was Sir Elton John wheeling out his all purpose memorial anthem Candle in the Wind to make the day complete.

Michael Jackson's funeral-come-concert was Oscars meets Edgar Allen Poe meets Yardley Crem. There must be a word that combines naff and glitz but glaff and nitz don't quite do it.

It wasn't bad taste or good taste just no taste with just about every word saccharine coated hyperbole.

The problem with the celebritocracy we seem to now live in is that even minor celebrities - i.e. once seen in an episode of EastEnders - have to be lauded and praised to the heavens when they pop their clogs. So when a star like Jackson goes it now has to be a full Hollywood production number with the event bigger than the star.

The next development I suppose will be pre-recorded messages like we get at award ceremonies when the recipient "can't be with us tonight because they are filming a toothpaste ad in Albania".

So get ready for the first memorial concert with "I'm sorry I can't be with you tonight but I am dead but I am with you both in spirit . . . and in the shiny box at the front."

As a funeral it had just about everything but dignity.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking Michael Jackson. In terms of popular music he was an important player but to see the media frenzy and mass hysteria surrounding his death you would be forgiven for believing he was the second coming.

We had some young girl in tears saying this was the day the music died with the irony of quoting from a song about the death of Buddy Holly lost on her and another girl outside the hospital where his body had arrived a couple of hours earlier saying she and all the people around her would know exactly where they were the moment he died.

Not a difficult feat considering they only had to remember back to lunchtime when they had all made the trek out to the hospital. We have then had the celebrity fest of tributes and people who have never owned a Michael Jackson track in their life buying them like sweeties. His music is no better or worse because he is dead and if they were not inclined to buy Jackson when he was at the peak of his stardom then buying now smacks at best of musical voyeurism or at worst of being a human sheep. .

But half the world is swept up in epidemic of mob grief complete with makeshift shrines with conspiracy theories coming on the hour about poisoning, overdoses, even suicide and murder but strangely no mention of court cases involving minors, bought off parents and behaviour that stretched the boundaries of eccentric into another dimension. Faults are not so much forgiven as forgotten, excised from the mob psyche.

We have seen it all before though, Jade Goody was transformed from thicko racist in the eyes of the popular press to saint by the simple act of dying and who can forget the outpourings over Princess Diana when reason was suspended?.

Perhaps a psychologist can explain why people manage to get wrapped up in grief for someone they never met, never knew and probably never thought about except in passing until they died. It is not something I can explain.

I would have put money on Jackson not managing all of his 50 date run at the O2 arena but that hardly matters now as he has risen into legend and the promoters are even set to make money out of that with an offer to the O2 concert goers of your money back or you can have a commemorative ticket instead.

The commemorative tickets, which were to be give free to concert goers, are presumably already printed so would either be pulped, or with 800,000 of them, sold for very modest sums as mementoes - unless of course you can get hundreds of thousands of griefed-up punters to shell out £75 upwards each for them to commemorate a concert that never happened presumably in the hope they can find even more griefed-up saddoes on eBay.