Greil Marcus on Michael Jackson

[Robin Landseadel]

Greil Marcus' "Lipstick Traces—A Secret History of the Twentieth  
Century"—points to the Punk/Situationist connection and has  
particularly biting things to say about Michael Jackson, the commodity:

	MICHAEL JACKSON

	Michael Jackson stands in the White House Rose Garden with
	President Ronald Reagan to receive an award for allowing his
	Thriller hit "Beat It" to be made into an anti-drunk-driving TV
	commercial. On newscasts covering the event, a bit of the
	commercial is shown: a skeletal hand grasps the hand of one
	still living. The suggestion of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel
	ceiling, where Adam touches the hand of God, is inescapable;
	so is the feeling that Michael Jackson is becoming a kind of
	god. The newscasts cut back to the Rose Garden: "Isn't this a
	thriller," says the president. Previously, for $5.5 million dollars,
	Jackson had allowed his great Thriller hit "Billie Jean" to be
	turned into a Pepsi commercial.

	For television there are in fact two commercials, and both are to
	be weighted with satisfying intimations of hubris, of tragedy. In
	the first, young black breakdancers are seen slippin' and slidin'
	over city streets; Jackson and his brothers appear, and the
	dancers halt in awe. Led by a tiny pre-teen virtuoso, they
	bounce back, and affirm their authenticity as folk dancers
	against—no, with: the commercial is saying that in America
	anyone can grow up to be Michael Jackson-the authenticity of
	the star as star. Soon it would be announced that the tiny
	virtuoso had broken his neck breakdancing, and had died.

	As with the rumor that Annette Funicello lost an arm while
	waving to a fan from a bus, the story wasn't true: radio stations
	and newspapers that carried obituaries ran corrections. But it
	was only a warmup. During the filming of a second Pepsi
	commercial, in which Jackson descended a stage to join his
	brothers in praise of the drink, explosions of light heralded his
	presence, and he was burned. The resulting publicity was so
	productive, for both Pepsi and Jackson, that some were sure
	the accident had been faked. The day before the official debut
	of the commercials, on the 1984 Grammy Awards telecast
	where the advertisements, which were themselves advertised,
	were presented to the public like new records, like art state-
	ments—TV news shows, still featuring daily medical bulletins
	on Jackson's condition, used parts of the commercials as news
	footage. Jackson appeared to collect eight Grammys; as he
	stepped forward to accept the last, he removed his dark
	glasses.

	All of this took place in what situationist Guy Debord had called
	"the heaven of the spectacle." "I am nothing and I should be
	everything," a young Karl Marx had written, defining the
	revolutionary impulse. "The spectacle," as Debord developed
	the concept through the 1950s and 1960s, was at once the
	kidnapping of that impulse and its prison. It was a wonderful
	prison, where all of life was staged as a permanent show-a
	show, Debord wrote, where "everything that was directly lived
	has moved away into a representation," a beautiful work of art.
	The only problem was absolute: "in the case where the self is
	merely represented and ideally presented," ran a quote from
	Hegel on the first page of La societe du spectacle, a book of
	critical theory Debord published in 1967, "there it is not actual:
	where it is by proxy, it is not."

	"The spectacle," Debord said, was "capital accumulated until it
	becomes an image." A never-ending accumulation of
	spectacles-advertisements, entertainments, traffic, skyscrapers,
	political campaigns, department stores, sports events,
	newscasts, art tours, foreign wars, space launchings-made a
	modern world, a world in which all communication flowed in
	one direction, from the powerful to the powerless. One could not
	respond, or talk back, or intervene, but one did not want to. In
	the spectacle, passivity was simultaneously the means and the
	end of a great hidden project, a project of social control. On the
	terms of its particular form of hegemony the spectacle naturally
	produced not actors but spectators: modern men and women,
	the citizens of the most advanced societies on earth, who were
	thrilled to watch whatever it was they were given to watch.

	Pages 97-99