Cody
Williams
Tears of a Clown
Michael Jackson is no kid. Neither does he believe he is. He’s a forty-six year old wise marketer.
That Peter Pan, never grow old song and dance has helped to build his Never-Never Land ranch. It has also made him a pop-icon and hundreds of millions of dollars. If something works that well for you, you don’t stop just because some tabloids nickname you Whack-O Jack-O.
Yes, MJ has milked that innocence of a child thing all the way to Wells Fargo Bank and back.
Rumor has it that his voice is a lot deeper than the one we hear when he addresses the world through the media. The management of the public perception of his alcohol consumption is evidence of his shrewdness. Or, I should say our lack of perception of his alcohol consumption. One of the more telling of the details of his private life during his less than sensational child molestation trial was the fact that he instructed airline stewards serving cocktails to camouflage the wine he occasionally consumed by first pouring it into a Pepsi can. Innocent childlike figures can not be seen consuming alcohol.
Didn’t Uncle Mikey once have a contract to help market Pepsi during his intensely popular 1980’s? Wasn’t it a Pepsi ad he was filming when electric sparks from the set ignited the Jheri Curl juice that softened his hair; singeing his scalp? Talk about your brand loyalty.
Jackson’s entire life has been a well-choreographed reality play performed before the world generating millions, if not billions of dollars and big business. Has anyone noticed that each of the plot-points, highs and lows, of his entertainment age, circus-like, clown show just happened to coincide with a network TV ratings sweeps month?
Motown’s 25th Anniversary special, in which Jackson first dazzled the world with his solo soft shoe and classic hit song Billie Jean was the highest rated non-sports related entertainment television show for that season.
The TV biopic in which MJ’s father, Joe Jackson, was eternally vilified was another highly rated Jackson Family TV phenomenon. Each Jackson family special that featured MJ has delivered millions of viewers to eager TV advertisers. Even the infamous Martin Basher exposé which led to the child molestation charges that almost brought down the House of Jackson and sent the performer to prison for a long time was a highly rated television event.
It’s estimated that 40 million viewers tuned in to watch the jury’s verdict at his trial and stayed tuned through commercial breaks to watch the feeble Jackson escorted from the courthouse arm-in-arm by his supposedly abusive Svengali-like father. The up from humble beginnings Mike Jackson reality show has come complete with an antagonist, its own villain, family patriarch Joe Jackson, who is said to have lorded over his nine offspring abusing them right out of a blighted Gary Indiana ghetto and into Hollywood, superstardom and mega millions.
Say what you want about him, for Pepsi and other advertisers during each of his episodes of life-as-drama, Mike has consistently delivered the goods: a buying public.
Jackson has appeared at each of these sometime staged events ready to perform, complete in full costume and clown white, never breaking character.
Supposedly, the pigment eating disease vitiligo bleached his skin, not Clorox baths as rumored. This I believe because if Jackson had truly discovered a way to turn black skin white, with the colored world’s envy of everything Nordic, patent money made on that process alone would have dwarfed any bucks he brought in from entertaining.
Now that the trial of this young century is over and Mike Jackson has been acquitted we can only anticipate his well-produced resurrection, rising like the Phoenix from the ashes of his hobbled career. Expect a second coming rivaled only by that promised two thousand years ago. Jackson, surrounded by the entertainment media he has generously funded over the years, will moon walk back into stardom, clad in military after-wear, surrounded by a jack booted third world police force, spinning, singing and grabbing his crotch.
There are too many careers riding on his resurrection, too much money to be made, too much at stake to let him limp off to Never Land, a defeated Pagliacci, and raise his non-biological children in solitude.
Pepsi still has to sell pop.
Pop still needs a King.
© 2005 Cody Williams
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