zeruch.net (zè-rook) Joseph Arruda’s Autodidactic Naval Gazing

Pop Culture Rants: The Moronic Inferno

In a weird twist that seems to mark the fortunes I have during periods of utter exhaustion and hopeless disdain for the overworked schedule I maintain, I am inspired by pop culture.

Not because it is particularly uplifting and inspiring in the conventional sense, but because it is almost categorically bizarre, insane or careless in its attempts to add gravitas to what is essentially mundane drivel.  This is why God will one day send a plague of locusts that feed on stupidity, venality and gaudy self-aggrandizement to eat Hollywood and Broadway and the Vegas strip in a colossal display of his awesome power and dislike of people who worship Michael Jackson.

Usually in these cases I am inspired to creative work, or to simply consume more pop culture until I am bouncing off the walls.  This time I’m writing.

Michael Jackson is dead at 50 from an apparent case of cardiac arrest.

Part of me is upset in the way anyone gets upset when they find someone has passed on.  They leave families and friends and all the attendant badness that this holds.

Part of me feels bad that the man who worked with some great collaborators -Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, Bill Bottrell, George Duke, Eddie Van Halen among them- to create some fairly memorable bits of pop culture history and to help frame a particular zeitgeist during my adolescence, is now gone.

This leads me to the last part.  The part I would have liked to see gone without requiring permanent expiration.  His damaged childhood led him to become a spectre of utterly self-absorbed bonkered derangement coupled with a talent that when mixed with suffocating global adoration by a sea of fans would help turn him into something so incomprehensible, that the axiom’ truth is stranger than fiction’ seems trite to the point of insulting.

Cintra Wilson, whose ruminations on pop culture, fame, and any number of other topics is perpetually readable, stated it well in her book A Massive Swelling, Celebrity Re-Examined as a Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations:

…Jackson became one of the rare and proud to achieve a substantial stretch of documented extraterrestrial excellence, like Baryshnikov in his prime, or Michael Jordan.  Much of his his older dance music holds up as well as anything in the timeless lexicon of royal R&B greats…Shortly after those records broke all previous records, mega-mega-megafame trained the deadly blue heat of its X-Ray eye on young Jackson and stared him crispy.

This is ultimately too true.  The nature of communication now makes the possibility of a fame concentration like Jackson highly unlikely.  It also pushes in sharp relief the dangers of that same environment.

This bodes badly for a society that has been totally unable to wean itself off a decade of insipid reality TV and careless regard for current events that can’t be spun into post-ironic soundbytes.  It’s the most terrifying portions of a Howard Chaykin story come to life.  Wilson again:

Jackson epitomizes the fullest scope of über-fame in the United States. He’s lived through the whole gauntlet: the best parts of it…the worst, humiliating and scandalous parts….Anything Michael does now just reads like Outsider Art - he has become as strange and isolated and deranged as anyone who has ever walked or crawled through shock treatment.  He’s the strangest uninstitutionalized crazy person in the public eye since Howard Hughes.

The part that bothers me is that the inevitable result of all this (including this post ironically enough) is there will be endless discourse about the man for weeks.  People will be cashing in on anything MJ related, including members of his own family, of which several show the same spice-addiction to fame but have lived as lampreys off brother Michael for decades.

The media circus has already begun, and deaths of other significant entertainers like Farrah Fawcett will be lost, as well as suppression of important world-impacting stories; socio-political unrest in Iran, continued unheaval in Afghanistan/Pakistan, a still hobbled global economy, and countless other stories will be lost in the stream of tributes and retrospective blather over a man who seemed to be able to sing and dance well.

Which is where the weird twist comes in.  After leaving the office I decided to go to a record store.  I walked in and people were in fact looking for MJ material.  I instead went and scoped the bargain racks and found a Steely Dan Greatest Hits cassette, a 12″ single for Terence Trent D’Arby’s Sign Your Name single (which includes a rare remix by the awesome Lee “Scratch” Perry) and most importantly, a decent paperback copy of  The Moronic Inferno by Martin Amis.   It provides the closing quote of the day, as a definition of the title:

The moronic inferno [is] a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy.