Brow Beat: Slate's Culture Blog

TMZ Came To Bury Jacko, Not To Praise Him

To anyone who ever bought into the Michael Jackson mythos—for a decade, for an album, for the opening bars of "Billie Jean"—it's something of a cruel and cognitively dissonant indignity that TMZ.com was the coroner at his bedside, scribbling his death certificate. On one hand, we have the "king of pop"—a quaint, archaic title by 21^st-century standards. On the other, we have the fiercely irreverent figurehead of the 21^st-century gossip-industrial complex, for which there is no such thing as royalty, for which the emperor isn't just naked but naked in a bunch of pictures he was foolish enough to keep on his Sidekick. Michael Jackson famously erected a 30-foot statue of himself in 1995, and the tabloids speeded it along on its way to Ozymandias-style ruin. (At least Ozymandias never had to deal with rumors that his nose was falling off.)

But as tempting as it is to describe a parasitic, inverse relationship between Jackson and the tabloids—as his power and prominence waned, theirs grew exponentially—the coupling was more complex. Jackson didn't go so far as, say, Britney Spears and date a paparazzo, but he paved the way for her brand of tabloid symbiosis in other ways: developing a persecution complex and making antagonists real and imagined the subject of many of his songs; submitting to a Faustian arrangement in which the paparazzi would keep the flashbulbs popping as long as he kept the crazy coming. Jackson's vanity fed into and fed on the vicious news cycle. He never put out for the cameras as much as Spears did at her barefoot, panty-free best, but he never quite slipped the noose the way she seems to have done today, either, cleaning up her act and asserting a degree of control over the situation by turning it into postmodern theater. In part, Jackson's inability to handle the paps comes down to the fact that he was a much, much weirder person than Spears (and, for that matter, Elvis). The only way for him to clean up his act was to haul it to a remote island in the Middle East and do his best to go dark (no pun intended). But in part it's also because of the era he came up in, one that left him ill prepared for the one that followed and that was well on its way out by the time Spears hit the scene: an era in which all meaningful distinction between intense adulation and intense scorn hadn't yet collapsed, in which it wasn't yet written into the standard-issue pop-star contract that, in the end, however it plays out, TMZ gets the last word.