Michael Jackson: a shamanic figure

Image of a sculpture in Campeche, Mexico

I admit that I’m getting to this topic a bit late when everyone else has mercifully begun to think about other things. But I’d like to ask about the explosion of feeling caused y Michael Jackson’s death.

The first days afterward, CNN didn’t talk about anything else at all, even the wars, the massacres and all that was going on in Central America. The BBC was a bit less monothematic, but even that channel dedicated hours and hours of broadcasting time to it. Internet congestion was total.

Why? There hasn’t ever been this much outpouring of grief for one person. If we compare the concentration of broadcasting time over MJ with that given to the deaths of other figures (for example: María Callas, John Lennon, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Monseñor Oscar Romero, Salvador Allende, Augusto Pinochet, Mao Zedong) we have to admit that it has been disproportional. And I do not doubt that he was an excellent singer and dancer.

In his lifetime he attracted hostility and legal aggression, almost always related to some sort of moral repudiation. Again, why?

Here is a possible answer: he was a mythic, even shamanic figure. He wasn’t a man or a woman, an adult or a child, a father or a son, a black or a white, a hero or an “abnormal”. His “moon-walk was out of this world. We could only adore him or hate him.

The shamans break up our comfortable world views. They cause terror when everything we have hidden on the other side of the looking-glass shows up in the real world outside its oniric borders.

But we need the shamans because every-day life isn’t enough. We need more than work, homework, paying bills, shopping at the grocery store and the like. We need to penetrate normal-life barriers

Maybe Michael Jackson offered that. It is interesting that fantastic figures like Harry Potter and the Hobbits are so attractive. But they are clearly fictional. Michael Jackson was real.