1:9:22

Africa Brooke on self-censorship: "It's much easier to keep yourself safe in groups where everyone says the same thing."

Coffee and Covid's summary of Friday's Supreme Court hearings

Jeff Childers:

"Each of the three liberal Justices told the lawyers, repeatedly, that the vaccines stop INFECTIONS, astounding many commenters. How is it possible that the judges on the highest court in the country misunderstand this basic fact, when it’s now well-known by every other citizen in the country except maybe some very old people in a nursing home someplace? I mean, do the liberal Justices even read The New York Times??"

The truth tellers are always so calm and sane.


For the past two weeks, I've been researching Michael Jackson--again--for my new film project on Musicians. I've been trying to write about the cultural pathology that is Michael Jackson for twenty years, starting but never able to finish various essays. Now I realize MJ has to be analyzed using the same media that he helped weaponize and institutionalize, and that was the gateway for the self-commodification that is social media.

Mark Fisher on Michael Jackson's Thriller years:

"... By 6 July 1984, when the Jacksons played the first show of their 'Victory' tour, in Kansas City, Missouri... Jacksonism had produced a system of commodification so complete that whatever and whoever was admitted to it instantly became a new commodity. People were no longer consuming commodities as such things are conventionally understood (records, videos, posters, books, magazines, key rings, earrings necklaces pins buttons wigs voice-altering devices Pepsis t-shirts underwear hats scarves gloves jackets - and why were there no jeans called Bille Jeans?); they were consuming their own gestures of consumption. That is, they were consuming not a Tayloristic Michael Jackson, or any licensed facsimile, but themselves. Riding a Mobius strip of pure capitalism, that was the transubstantiation...The Thriller phenomenon was in fact the first taste of the reality system that has just collapsed."

Fisher calls Jackson's Off The Wall album a "seducer's diary" and Billie Jean "cyborg soul." I've been listening Heartbreak Hotel (the acapella demo version) all week. It's a spooky and very revealing Jackson 5 song . And then there are all the horror tropes. The monster motifs. The sacrificial kids, whom I think about a lot. Of course, Jackson was one of the first transhumanist figures in hypercommodified popular culture. The constant surgical alterations, but also the cyber-imperialist clothing (the military arm bands) and stage costumes were also clear signifiers. I've been thinking lately, too, that the Thriller video--and Jackson himself after he made the album--might be one of America's first global pop culture psyops. For, what an odd subject for a solo artist to start with. To be celebrated for, to become ubiquitous for.

And then there's the odd disclaimer that introduces the film (supposedly by Michael Jackson himself) that denies and disavows the very premise it's setting forth--the occult. What else is Thriller but a celebration--conviction of--the occult? Occult stardom, occult fame, occult pop, occult politics, occult masculinity, occult face, occult voice. What is that epigraph doing there besides establishing a gaslighting and cognitive dissonance about the end of the 20th century? What you are seeing and hearing is not what you are seeing and hearing. What could be a "stronger conviction" than the logic of Thriller? Stardom is your ghoul. Stardom is your monster. Was Jackson our favorite occult star after Elvis Presley? Even if Thriller is not a "belief," as Jackson claims, it is most certainly an endorsement of the belief of endorsement as the new reality principle. The hard sell of stardom. Jackson is not only the King of Pop, he is King of the pop-occult ("Cause I can thrill you more than any ghoul could ever dare try."). He will make that abundantly clear 13 years later with his 33 min music video Ghosts (coincidentally, the Thriller video was 13 min and made in 1983). Jackson’s music videos are full of occult imagery and symbols. Black magic, black cats, black panthers. He turns into all those things and they turn into him. Thriller is not a one-off.

Jackson had already established himself as a ghost, as a ghoul--as the living dead--with Thriller. The most important star was a rotting corpse by 25.

Is Thriller Jackson's self-eulogy? His musical tombstone?

Again, look at that opening quote. That strange, mysterious disclaimer.

After his death in 2009, a woman in her early 20s was stopped on the street by Jay Leno’s Tonight Show and asked, “How’d it happen so fast?” To which she uncannily and assuredly replied, “So fast? Jackson was dead a long time ago. Dead inside and his body was just catching up with the rest of him. That’s all.”

The interviewer just laughed, oblivious.

Jackson's lyrics rarely lie about who he really was

Last night I rewatched Leaving Neverland and today I rewatched Spike Lee's Bad: 25 Years Later, which is blatant spin and image reform. The only insight the 2013 documentary offers is the pathological narcissism and lack of ethics in the music industry, which shamelessly continues to mythologize and praise Jackson because he made everyone, including himself, rich and famous. No one in in the documentary even tries to temper their total sycophantism, Lee included (The same goes for the doc, This Is It). Instead of presenting Jackson as a parable. they continue to deify him as an idol and model for success. I am as nostalgic as anyone who lived through that time, but It's as though it's still the 1980s and nothing terrible ever came to light about Jackson or the music industry. Whatever was great about Jackson was a very long time ago and happened at the expense of both himself and others.

As one person commented online about MJs 1996 Ghosts video:

"You have to give Michael Jackson credit for documenting--via his art--one of the more extravagantly depressing lives of any modern entertainer."

What shocked me most was Spike Lee's montage of Jackson and Quincy Jones' sweeping the Grammys in 1984 (besides their shameless love of money) was the shot of a very vulnerable-looking and very tiny Emmanuel Lewis, whom Jackson paraded around on his lap at various press events (Lewis was 12 and 13) during his Thriller success. It's eerie. All this shit was right under our noses, in plain sight, and nobody cared. I now suspect that Jackson began wearing those big dark sunglasses all the time because he had started having cosmetic operations on his eyes.