06.25.09 R.I.P. MICHAEL JACKSON
Holy crap, Michael Jackson died. This is totally going to overshadow the Farrah Fawcett retrospective. TMZ is reporting:
Michael suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon and paramedics were unable to revive him. We’re told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back.
Jackson was 50 and is survived by his three children. And if you’re wondering at all why I’m mentioning this on a TV blog, you clearly weren’t alive in the ’80s. Michael Jackson practically made MTV. Or at the very least, he single-gloved-handedly made MTV a cultural phenomenon before it decayed into the musicless mental wasteland it is today. The video for “Thriller” was basically the coolest thing to happen in the 1980s. “Thriller” and maybe the Berlin Wall coming down. Dude, there was an arcade game inspired by Smooth Criminal. Think about that. A video game based on a freakin’ song. He was an absolute giant — no, a messiah — in pop culture.
Of course, the last 15 to 20 years have been a long downward spiral for Jackson. The plastic surgery. The marriage to Lisa Marie Presley. Financial problems. The trial for child sexual abuse. Perhaps his legend would be more glowing had he died twenty years earlier, but for today at least, I’ll remember him at his best: when he was black.
(p.s. Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson all this week. And David Carradine before that. Death’s been working overtime recently.)


My mind has been corrupted for years upon years of Jackson kiddie sex/skin bleaching jokes, but I believe there was a still a good man somewhere inside of him.
While I think he he committed certain deeds to warrant all the insults (and more), he still did have a profound impact on society. R.I.P.