10 The Jackson Four, UP
It was the first suggestion that not only was this going to be an unusual
memorial service, but one so gigantic, random and barking that the viewer at
home would often have to touch their legs, say, or look at a kettle, saying:
“These are the normal things. I must remember what the normal things are.”
Michael Jackson’s $15,000 golden casket was carried into the arena on the
shoulders of Jackson’s brothers, as a choir sang — perhaps ominously, in
view of the open-casket funeral tradition — We are Going to See the
King.
Jackson’s brothers, you couldn’t help but note, were all wearing a single,
white, rhinestone-studded glove — Jackson’s signature accessory motif, aside
from a full-face mask, and/or enraged chimp. To put this into context, it’s
as though all the pallbearers at Elvis’s funeral had been wearing big
plastic quiffs and doing that wobbly thing that Elvis did with his legs.
Amazing.
9 Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, DOWN
In the ultimate “Good luck with that!” moment of 2009 so far, Congresswoman
Lee took it upon herself to mention both Jackson’s $22 million, out-of-court
settlement to Jordy Chandler and the seven counts of child sexual
abuse and two counts of administering an intoxicating agent in order to
commit a felony that he was charged with in 2005. But in a good way.
“As a representative of Congress, we understand the constitution. We know
that people are innocent until proved otherwise!” she said, trying to sort
out that whole “persistent paedophile rumours” thing in a couple of breezy
sentences in front of Jackson’s children.
Personally, CW would have played it marginally safer, and done a nice reading
of Stop the Clocks.
8. Kentucky Fried Chicken, UP
Magic Johnson — helpfully described to us Limey viewers by the BBC host Paul
Gambaccini as playing for “the Lakers, the Manchester United of America” —
appeared to walk up to the podium with two agendas: 1) To respectfully
honour the life and times of the late Michael Jackson; 2) To mention
Kentucky Fried Chicken in a positive manner as many times as possible.
“I went to Michael’s house and the chef brought Michael out a bucket of
Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was like, Michael — you have Kentucky Fried
Chicken! That was the greatest moment of my life . . . we had such a great
time, sitting on the floor, eating that bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
God bless you, Michael!”
7. P.Diddy, DOWN
P. Diddy — to whom some of us still insist on referring as “Puff Daddy”, his
original, stupid, made-up name — also attended the memorial. Being a man of
the 21st century, Diddy keeps Twitter up to date with his movements at all
times. The entry for the day before the funeral read “I haven’t been to
sleep yet! LOL. I’m still at the after-party from last night! No sign of
quitting!” There was a quick tone change with the two subsequent tweets:
“I’m at the memorial. RIP Michael Jackson,” and “Just left the funeral. So
sad!! RIP MJ!!!”. But the next day it was back to business as usual, with
the presumably lunch-inspired: “I love sweet tarts!!!” Interesting Diddy
point: both “sweet tarts” and the burial of the King of Pop warranted three
exclamation marks.
6. Brooke Shields, DOWN
Giving a weeping testimonial that appeared to go on for nearly three days,
Shields’s aim was to convey to the audience what the man she had known was
like. Unfortunately, the man she had known was Michael Jackson, and every
anecdote she had sounded like a cross between the kind of dream you have
when you’ve got chickenpox and something that she was making up in order to
get him into even more trouble.
A case in point was the story of how, the night before Elizabeth Taylor’s
wedding, she and Jackson broke into Taylor’s room as she slept, to look at
the wedding dress, because Michael — a 33-year-old black, straight man — was
too excited to wait until the morning. The next day, at the wedding, Shields
and Jackson “pretended to be the mother and father of [Elizabeth Taylor]. It
sounds weird,” Shields concluded, looking rather wild-eyed, “but we made it
real!”
You think? As CW has said once before today — good luck with that!
5. Diana Ross and Elizabeth Taylor, UP
Both the pivotal gay icons in Jackson’s life were absent from the memorial
service — preferring to issue personal statements on the day instead.
Taylor commented that she did not want to be part of the “Whoopla” — an
important coining of a new word, given that mankind did not previously have
a term for “Memorial service where the corpse’s daughter will ‘close the
show’ by being herded on to a stage, weeping, while her uncles comfort her
by stroking her with rhinestone gloves.”
Ross, meanwhile, had different fish to fry. Following the unexpected
revelation that Jackson had wanted custody of his children to go to her —
inspiring thoughts of some screwball Motown version of Baby Boom,
with Ross as Diane Keaton — Ross’s message made her position on the matter
very clear.
“I will be here [in her own home, not at the funeral, very far away from
everything, particularly the children] whenever they need me [to lend them
$20, or give them advice on floor-length, fish-tail cocktail dresses and
backcombing],” she clarified.
4. Paul Gambaccini and Trevor Nelson, UP
As the BBC’s commentators for the memorial service, Gambo and Nelson were put
in a slightly invidious position — given that what they were commenting on
prompted, more often than not, the simple, straightforward reaction, “Holy
moly, have I really just seen an ‘In Memoriam’ photo-montage in which a shot
of Michael Jackson shaking hands with Nelson Mandela was immediately
followed by a picture of Michael Jackson shaking hands with Kermit the Frog?”
In the event, the pair managed quite well — even filling the half-hour of
technical difficulties with this peerless piece of speculation on which
celebrity would cry first: “Either Jennifer Hudson [three members of whose
family were recently murdered by her estranged brother-in-law] or Usher.
He’s very young,” Gambaccini said, wisely.
3. Usher, DOWN
Well, in the event, Paul Gambaccini turned out to be a veritable Nostradamus
of celebrity grief: Usher did cry during his version of Gone Too Soon. Usher
— who, ironically, was not cast as an usher during the event — appeared to
have some manner of odd, compulsive moment during his number. Leaving the
stage, he walked down to Jackson’s coffin and touched the side of it
briefly, before, in a kind of trance, he jiggled the lid a bit. Almost as if
he were checking the quality of the hinges.
Celebrity Watch can imagine Usher using Jiggle The Lid as the title of his
next album. It has a tone of urban suggestiveness.
2. The Daily Mirror, UP
In a week when the entire media went “Right, he’s dead now, and none of his
relatives has the time, money or inclination left to sue us, so we can just
print absolutely anything that comes into our minds. Any old crazy s**t.
Chimps, sperm, drugs, ghosts. The lot. Woot!”, the Daily Mirror
won a close-fought battle for “Most wholly unnecessary and ancillary
bullet-point”.
Relaying how Jackson was to be buried without his brain due to the
requirements of the autopsy, the Mirror spared no detail — including,
with no little relish, the phrase, “The brain will be placed in a plastic
bucket”.
At the end, on a separate line, the report concluded: “Michael Jackson starred
in the 1978 musical The Wiz as The Scarecrow — playing the character
without a brain.”
1. Shaheen Jafargholi, DOWN
If Michael Jackson died “of” anything, it was — and I think we’re all in
agreement here — a combination of being treated as a cross between a
sideshow and a demi-god for possessing such unearthly talent; for working an
adult job from the age of 6; for fetishishing his own ruined childhood to
the point where it drove him insane, and for then having that insanity
scrutinised in a media spotlight so remorseless that there are entire wars that
have been given less coverage than the changing colours of Michael Jackson’s
skin.
If there was one single thing we could learn from the life of Michael
Jackson, it would seem — other than that sequin-appliquéed military-wear
dates unexpectedly well — it is that child stardom is a terrible idea.
So at Michael Jackson’s memorial on Tuesday it was interesting to see that one
of the 12 live performances came from Shaheen Jafargholi, the 12-year-old
Welsh semi-finalist from this year’s Britain’s Got Talent.
Introduced on stage by Smokey Robinson to sing Who’s Lovin’ You?,
a song that, as Robinson helpfully pointed out, a nine-year-old Jackson had
sung with “such knowingness and pain” — HELLO! THERE’S A CLUE THERE! —
Jafargholi had to face down a worldwide audience of millions and, right in
front of him, the entire Jackson family, Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey, and
Michael Jackson, dead, ten feet away from him. So no pressure or crippling
emotional resonance there, then.
It’s impossible to think of a single aspect of it that wasn’t dazzlingly
inappropriate. It was a supernova of wrongness. It’s almost the next
evolutionary stage in incorrect action. Performing children at Michael
Jackson’s funeral? Why would you do that? It’s like getting the Slimmer of
the Year to do a reading at Lena Zavaroni’s memorial.
The next day, the chat-show host Larry King said that, when he’d asked the
Motown founder Berry Gordy who Jafargholi was, Gordy replied: “I have no
cotton pickin’ idea — but if I were still in the business, I would sign him
tomorrow.”
Of course he would. Because, while Michael Jackson might have been lying
before him in a coffin, dead at 50, it was in front of an audience of millions.
And that’s the bottom line.
