Michael Jackson ‘worth more dead than alive’

Of course, the Jacksons have every right to get paid—to indulge their one enduring skill and to cash in as many times as possible on Michael Jackson, the brand. And reports are that they are going to do so yet again.

To quote Reuters, “The King of Pop is dead; long live the King of Pop. That’s what Sony Music seemed to be saying after signing a $250 million 10-album deal for previously unreleased music and the catalog from the late Michael Jackson.”

An amazing number, given how atrocious Jackson’s output has been since the mid 1990s. From the unbearably mawkish “Heal The World” to the ludicrous “They Don’t Care About Us,” the last twenty years made it apparent that the disciplined lyricist of “Off the Wall” and “Thriller” had long since left this mortal coil. His ridiculous, self-aggrandizing music and public postures were such that he alienated his former fan base and, after a while, even commercial radio and MTV wised up and stopped imposing his music on the American public.

And this was the case until his death. Afterwards, of course, everyone was a Michael Jackson fan. Everyone wanted a piece of that legacy, one infinitely more embraceable than the real-life man and his creepy affinity for giving children wine and calling it “Jesus Juice.”

With Sony paying a quarter of a billion dollars for the Jackson catalogue, we can expect aggressive and long-lasting promotion—of “previously unreleased” material and “acoustic sessions” and up-to-the-moment club remixes. More reissues! More box sets! And why not? Given the commercial stasis and creative torpor that afflicts living artists in mainstream pop currently, it makes more sense to cash in on the tried, the true—and the dead.

It is no accident that, with the exception of the chameleonic Lady Gaga, who seems like nothing so much as the kid the Pet Shop Boys would’ve had if they’d somehow bred, the commercially-revivified Michael Jackson is the first true pop star of the Obama era. Why not? There are parallels to be drawn there also.

Like Michael Jackson, whose pre-death shtick was rooted in pretending for the benefit of concert rehearsals that no time had passed between now and the old days when he and Milli Vanilli rode the top of the charts, President Obama’s shtick was rooted in historical antecedents.

The cadences he used on the campaign trail: borrowed from MLK just as surely as his overused phrase “the fierce urgency of now”. Candidate Obama used the gimmick just as Michael Jackson used his—to stoke the insatiable American appetite for sentimental nostalgia, for clinging to the referents of the past for edification and entertainment. And it worked. It got him elected.

Of course, now Obama is fading in the polls; months before even the midterms, the swing voters and, increasingly, the public at large rejecting his shtick. The public will get sick of Michael Jackson nostalgia also. Sony bets, however, that they will get $250M of action from it first. Just as Americans could be counted on to buy the “As Seen On TV” Obama commemorative plates in those heady weeks after his election, Sony trusts that they will be happy to buy Michael Jackson mp3s and reissues for at least the next few years—or until the music industry itself collapses, whichever comes first.

A.G. Gancarski is a freelance journalist based in Florida.