Hard to say which of the common traits are cause and which ones are effect, but I think it's sort of interesting.

Perfect - that absoloutely nails it.

http://www.amazon.com/Billie-Jean/dp/B001NZ3AZS/ref=sr_f2_3?ie=UTF8&s=dmusic&qid=1246281547&sr=102-3

Amanda's is great, but is just handicapped by her being the wrong gender for the song, like if a male singer tried to cover something like "Sun Comes Up It's Tuesday Morning".

I've never been bothered by that sort of thing - Siouxsie and the Banshees' cover of "20th Century Boy", Placebo's cover of "Jackie", all these work fine for me.

I mean, I'd have no problem at all if the song was *written* about lesbian failures in love. But as it is, there's simply no way for Amanda to be worried about fathering a child she didn't like, so you have to take a step back and interpret it as her playing a character. Which, yes, Cornell is doing too, but his voice fits the character even better than Jackson's ever did.

As Rossney and others have pointed out, MJ, like Elvis Presley and some other entertainers, as well as Howard Hughes (per Scott H) and some others with tremendous wealth, had reached a vicious cycle in his life. He had not only outlived his ability to do those things he did to electrify those who saw him, he had failed to curb his lifestyle so that he didn't exhaust all his resources (not just financial) at the rate he could get away with early in his career, when money, power, fame, sexual partners, creativity, health, and stamina were all at his fingertips. Life, for those people, becomes an ongoing grind of having needs they can no longer fulfill, no more thrilling than the life of the average heroin addict. And, typical of those tragic lives, in retrospect we see, in the rare event when we're able to reconstruct, that the irreversible changes occurred in their paths long before anyone noticed anything was wrong.

Admittedly, I've occasionally commented that folks on the autistic spectrum can approach "Cambellian aliens" (from the neurotypical POV). But that's a simile, not an identity -- indeed, it's only because spectrum folks are in fact human, that we care about being accepted, and get hurt by the reactions of "normal" folks to our differences.

Not in the striving-toward-the-Singularity meaning of the term, but the Bruce Sterling-ish self-remanufactured off the deep end variety.

The Onion's short-short new article for the occasion summed up everything: Michael Jackson Dead at Age 12.

He could no longer function in normal society, nor should he have been allowed to do so. Both for other peoples' safety and his own.

The first line of Rossney's article really did hit it dead on...

But he'd have needed someone to intervene on his behalf who was strong-willed enough to resist boarding his roller coaster on his terms, and he was such a megastar that I don't know if anyone like that existed.

I agree that there's no need to mourn the man; the need is to mourn the loss of who he might have been, had anyone really cared enough.

His life, his fame, made it impossible for him to address the neurological and emotional damage. Though his efforts come through loud and clear in his music. Blame him, but don't forget to blame the people who did it to him, too.

Mostly, it's because of the people they trust.

As Rossney says, hearing "No" a few times might have helped Jackson a lot.

Listening might have helped. He probably heard it more than a few times, but when you have the power to fire everyone in your life, it's easy to stay on the path of least resistance.

Reference to Joseph, John, or some other Campbell?

Is this like the kind of alien in Mork and Mindy?

I am a little confused.

Am I the only one who thinks Michael Jackson isn't all that weird? Or, more precisely, that he became exactly what you would expect given the circumstances of his life?

It's not just that he was a childhood star who became extremely famous and wealthy, though that's part of it. Add to the mix that he was raised a Jehovah's Witness, was almost certainly non-heterosexual in some way, had lupus and vitiligo, and also apparently was an extremely anxious, shy, introverted man, and you have all the ingredients for a cataclysm:

- Childhood star: a lot has been said. Basically, he never had his own childhood, but he also never learned to interact with anybody who didn't want something from him, who didn't already have their own image of what he was. And he had the immense pressure of being his family's primary breadwinner from the age of 10. So: never learned how to normally interact with people, never did the "learning about oneself" that is the outcome of such interactions, and dealt with intense, crushing stress all his life. For a naturally shy, anxious person, that must have been hell.

- As a teenager / young man, he must have been becoming aware that he was, sexually, not something that society approved of. I think there are many enormous differences between being gay and being a pedophile (I'm gay myself), but I imagine that the psychological effects in his case would be similar: either way -- as a devout Jehovah's Witness living in the 70s/80s -- he probably would have been horrified, deeply shamed and full of self-loathing. And because of his immense fame he would have had nobody to talk to about it or (if he was gay) experiment about, etc. Enter all of the pathologies of the closet, hatred of one's body, etc.

- Because of his vast money he could at this point withdraw from many of these problems and create his own fantasy world. It's not surprising it revolved around childhood, since not only was that something he missed out on, but -- dealing with what he would have seen as the horror of his sexuality -- it must have seemed especially pure and ideal. He obviously wanted nothing more than to go back to that.

- But he couldn't. Then he got vitiligo, which I would guess would have had the following psychological consequences: (a) making him hate his body even more; (b) making his already tenuous and ambiguous relationship with his race even more fraught. My guess is that he bleached himself once the vitiligo got "too bad" (read: too ugly for him). This, of course, rather than making him appear more normal, just set him apart even more as a freak. Same thing with the plastic surgeries, which were starting then too.

- Then the accusations of child molestation. If he was guilty, talk about the self-loathing, and the crumbling of this edifice he had constructed separating him from society and people. If he wasn't guilty, the psychological effects would probably have been worse. For all this time, he at least could have used his extremely positive reception about the world as a source of emotional sustenance. Having been tried and found guilty in a court of public opinion of a crime that is universally one of the most reviled ever had to have been shattering. Especially if he wasn't guilty, but even if he was. (Although, of course, if he was it was no more than he deserved).

- This is getting long, so I'll just note that after that is a steady downward spiral in which his tragic attempts to make things better -- plastic surgery, unsuccessful documentaries -- only made it worse and worse for him.

It's horribly tragic. And speaking someone who is myself introverted, gay, and anxiety-prone, all I can think is: there but for the grace of God go I. Thank goodness I was not also super-talented, black, devoutly religions, and born in 1958.

It definitely says something about our culture (as well as the man himself) that MJ became the person he did. Which is part of why, I think, there is so much interest in him. He's kind of a twisted reflection of some of the worst -- and best -- of who we are.

Over the last few decades, high school, and then college, have become almost mandatory for being a "productive member of society". (Of course, the underclasses still tend to be shut out from both proper education, and full rights in our society. :-( )

There are other factors involved in the American-based "pedophilia plague/panic", too. Besides the recurrent Puritan streak in our culture, I'd say the age-segregation in our schools is part of the problem -- it splits up the parts of the human lifecycle, especially tending to isolate most kids from most adults, and vice versa.

I'm kind of hoping that the easy access to free pornography will help solve this kind of thing. Do you think that would help? (How long ago was that conversation?)

Do others find it's easier to hear words on cover versions than the original? Between Chris Cornell (excellent) & Ms Palmer I just understood about 30-50% more of that song.

Completing the cover song trifecta (at least for me) of Johnny Cash with "Hurt" and k.d. lang with "Hallelujah" is Mariah Carey and Trey Lorenz with "I'll Be There" (the MTV Unplugged performance).

NO! Pornography provides visual stimulation, but not the social experience that would contribute to the viewer's own social development. Not to mention it screws up the expectations of a developing adolescent....

Speaking of Campbellian aliens, he almost reminds me of Valentine Michael Smith. Human by race, other by upbringing. I don't intend to excuse anything he may or may not have done by saying he "didn't know it was wrong," or that he was so twisted he didn't care. He was on the outside looking in and he knew it. It wasn't the big things he didn't understand - it was the little things he had never been socialized to see as inappropriate. He grew sideways because he never had the chance to grow up.

I agree: it was his life that was the real tragedy, more than his death.

You know, I think that's the briefest reasonably-accurate description of his problems that I've seen.

Something about it being 5:44am here after a day or so without more than a quick upright doze probably influenced the style … gunna try for several consecutive zzz-hours, preferably overnight, soon. Didn't manage today (approaching 7am, sunrise, and trying for an hour or so).

I would agree. And yet oddly enough, it is the original that keeps playing in my head (triggered, no doubt, by these covers).

And could make a tragedy in their future. I'm terrified for them. They deserve better than the freak show they've lived with so far.

After watching that video, I just didn't want to find any of her other work. Sorry. There are a bunch of interesting remixes of Billie Jean in the wild, though. I wish Talvin Singh would do one.

I agree with a lot of comments here that his upbringing kept him from developing normal human relations. This children deserve a lot more than that.

I'm not registered at Newsweek, but I'm sure we can oblige... The question is, can anyone think of something that doesn't involve gratuitously insulting the Olsen girls?

Yes, but I think it's just hearing two-or-more different versions, regardless of who did which. I always have trouble understanding several words from each version, but different words. I think I subconsciously fill in the blanks when I hear a new version, sorta merging the two together.

From what I've observed, real prodigies push their parents, not the other way around. My son plays the violin (don't worry--I'm not going to claim he's a prodigy.) He never wanted to do it for a living, but he was good enough to be part of an "elite" music scene until he graduated from high school. During his school years I knew kids who decided at the age of 6 that they wanted to be violinists. I knew kids who asked to be home-schooled so they could practice for hours a day. I knew a kid who fought with his mother when she tried to pull the violin out of his hands. He snuck it out to the garage to practice when she told him to do his homework. (He once performed on the radio show "From the Top".) It was as though these kids were born wanting to play the violin. One went to Juilliard, one to the New England Conservatory, one to the Manhattan School of Music, and one went to Yale and from there to the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

omg--Making Light now has spell-checking!! Hooray!

I actually know a child star (whom I shall call P.); he was living down the street from us when he had a starring kid role in a Broadway show, and he's still in the film/TV business in his mid 20s, though he's also a minister (with his father) at a non-demon church in Hollywood. Of course there came the time when he had to pull out of the public school system and move away. They were a very together family, but his father was extremely protective of him. His brother was actually the more driven type; P. was a typical firstborn "well of course I am destined to excel" type.

One certainly hopes so.

I mean, I've watched Angel, but I'd always assumed that that was fiction.

It seems like a lot of child prodigies are in tournament-type fields, where only a small fraction of people can ever make a living at it, and most people who try to get into the field, even the ones who are really good at it, fail. This is at least true of music and sports and acting.

ISTM that realizing your field is a tournament rather than a normal career is immensely important. A career is something that you succeed in by basically being good at it and doing a solid job. A tournament is something where only a tiny fraction of the people trying can succeed, so that you can be very good at it and still never make it.

In hindsight, I would like to have been pushed more to do music as a child, but I can't see how my parents could have been expected to know that, given that I was equally obsessed with science at the time, and had more apparent aptitude for it.

Thanks for saying this. I also think some kids can benefit from a bit of parental pushing. My father and my brother were violinists, so it wasn't so weird for me to start my son on the violin when he was three. That may sound crazy to some people, but at that age he was only spending about 15 minutes a day learning to hold the instrument and play "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star." Today, at the age of 24, he enjoys picking up his violin and riffing on the Mendelssohn violin concerto or some Bach sonatas. He's a law school student (ugh! the first lawyer in the family, ever--I'm a mathematician) and this summer he's working at a law firm in DC. He and two other associates have formed a violin-cello-piano trio, and he's been practicing Hayden. I'm really glad that I gave him this hobby, even if I had to push a bit.

Amen. And thank you for saying that.

From what I've seen, the measure should be less how much a child is pushed in a particular field than just how hard the are pushed overall. It is natural to, for some portion of the time while raising a child, to push the child to learn and excel and etcetera, often despite the child simply wanting to play. If the child has a clear aptitude, there's no reason this time shouldn't be spent largely on this aptitude rather than in a more generalized direction. The issue is when the pushing of a child to excel begins to really take up more significant periods of time.

Obviously, how much time is enough is very hard to say, but there's definitely risk involved in not pushing someone at all.

I haven't seen anyone try to document this, putting pictures in order by date, before and after the burn. But it would explain a lot. I don't know what the limits of plastic surgery were in 1984, in terms of being able to reconstruct a badly burned face.

Back to Michael Jackson I feel it wasn't just that he was at that rarified height of wealth and fame that there was no one who could, or would tell him "No" but that as a child and rising star the discipline he was exposed to was abusive.

There's a pattern I've seen (in myself and others) that makes it hard to establish effective self discipline when one has been motivated in childhood by fear of punishment and has in consequence spent more time learning strategies for getting away with things than developing an adult sense of morality. Indeed self harm, in it's many manifestations, may be another result of this kind of upbringing where people seek to punish themselves for their shortcomings rather than tackling their own behaviour.

Obviously many if not most people can find a way out of this morass but fame and fortune don't seem to be much help.

A final thought, I've been cringing at the coverage over here in the UK of the performance of British child star Shaheen (12) at Jackson's funeral. Apparently he's going to headline the MJ tribute at the O2 arena and he's been photographed with Lionel Richie etc etc. So it begins all oevr again for another kid.

For one thing, Bubbles isn't dead.

On further investigation, he was indeed asking about the idea a few months ago, but the "horse's mouth" says, nope. I take some comfort in seeing that I wasn't the only one eager to believe this one -- inter alia, BoingBoing hopped on this one too.