26 June 2009

One Less Angel on Earth; One More in Heaven... As For Zombies...

Requiescat in Pace, Michael Jackson, 1958 - 2009
Requiescat in Pace, Farah Fawcett, 1947 - 2009


Two icons, one clearly more prominent than the other judging by the news coverage, have tragically departed - both before their time. Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson, each in their unique way, defined a time in pop culture history that was post-psychedelia and pre-UCaPP. It was time of cultural intermezzo, as the fogey generation's peak influence on pop was in decline, and the UCaPP generation was yet more than a decade away. And out of that arose both fluff and brilliance, Charlie's Angels as a counterbalance to Thriller. It makes boomers feel their age as they realize that one of our archetypal pin-up girls succumbed to one of the thousand ills that remind us of the frailty and fragility of our mortal shell. It makes all of us stop to realize that the perpetual child, a true Peter Pan of Pop, was middle-aged as are so many of us, and vulnerable to something as seemingly ordinary as a heart attack.

The Michael Jackson YouTube channel has disabled embedding, but to watch the complete Thriller music video is to witness genius, as crazy, perhaps, as genius often is.


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