This is not the J’accuse obit. It is one of those “reflections” on how the pop world, pop culture and the internet-driven global village will “deal” with the passing away of the King of Pop (“self-styled” -as some radios are insisting). Bereavement won’t have much to do with this. Sure, some fans (and that some is an understatement) will miss Michael. Others like myself, whose generation was, for a long period, marked by Thriller, the moonwalk and “being bad” and who still live in a world where it matters if you are black or white will probably not know how to describe the feeling of emptiness (not a black hole, but that nagging feeling that something is missing).
What J’accuse is interested in observing for now – before the real reflection on Michael Jackson’s death – is the reaction. It’s the world’s latest opportunity for a not-so spontaneous manifestation of mass “mourning”. I think the words of a Los Angeles editor interviewed by the BBC might be an interesting indicator:
“I feel this is the biggest celebrity story in a long time and has the potential to be the Princess Diana of popular culture.”
It was raining in Glastonbury as BBC crews interviewed those who were already on their feet in their steady downpour. The news story was not any public shows of prayer or remembrance for the man who thrilled millions. Nope. It was a story about what to expect once the thousands of festival goers crawled out of the tent in the mud and slush and once they were told that Michael Jackson – THE Michael Jackson – is no more.
If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with. -Michael Jackson “King of Pop” b.1958 d. 2009
ADDENDA (from BBC report):
Google reported an upsurge of “Michael Jackson” searches that led the company to believe that it was under a cyber attack.:
Search giant Google confirmed to the BBC that when the news first broke it feared it was under attack. Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results. It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.
Google might have avoided a crash but the same was not to be for Twitter:
The microblogging service Twitter crashed with the sheer volume of people using the service. Searches for topics related to Michael Jackson peaked at 3PM Pacific. Queries about the star soon rocketed to the top of its updates and searches. But the amount of traffic meant it suffered one of its well-known outages. Before the company’s servers crashed, TweetVolume noted that “Michael Jackson” appeared in more than 66,500 Twitter updates.
