Kamau Peterson
CFL.ca
I’ve been fortunate enough in my lifetime to walk my path and understand the importance of knowing what came before me, which has aided in my assertion of who I am. I can only think of a handful of people who have lived during my lifetime that have had enough influence on both a personal and global scale to truly give them iconic status in my mind.
I don’t throw the term icon around as loosely as some, for to me it’s not enough to just be extremely well known the world over. An icon must use the influence that he/she has gained in whatever realm they have gained it in, to better the world for others in a monumental way.
To truly be an icon, people must feel as if their existence has been made better by your presence, or your actions. An icon must be so thorough and so dominant in their own field that there status is never in question yet they must go beyond that field and take significant strides toward the greater good. Like him or not, Michael Jackson was such a man and it has taken me a while to understand exactly what is lost by his death. To me, the world has lost its inspiration; the world has lost its muse.
I feel bad for those too young to understand. For those who only knew what the media made of Michael Jackson over the last years. For those who only really saw the circus that it had become, and never got to live in the time when this man helped pave the way for Oprah Winfrey to be the highest paid and most influential female in North America. When this man broke down doors so that Will Smith could command the highest dollar per film in the U.S.
I’m talking about a time when one man dictated the fashion, style, dance, and rhythm of several continents with his own trailblazing, unique style and talents. Like I said, I feel bad that you can’t say that you lived through it, but the least that I can do is try to make you understand.
Never before, and perhaps never since will we see a single performer need to prepare 12 tents at each and every performance, solely for the audience members that happen to faint at the sight of him. At 50 years old he recently announced what he called his final tour. 48 hrs after the tickets went on sale 750,000 tickets had been sold worldwide. Although only 8-12 thousand tickets were given out for his memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, LAPD estimates 1.6 million people entered L.A. to pay tribute in some way on that day. Simply put, the man was magical.
So much has been made of Michael’s personal life as of late that I feel it my duty to explain what he truly represented. What the world needs to remember and understand first and foremost about Michael Jackson is that he paved the way for black entertainers of all realms and genres. From music, to movies, to daytime television and even athletics Michael was able to first bring color to mainstream outlets that had not yet embraced it.
While Sidney Poitier, Thurgood Marshall, Booker T. Washington and Jackie Robinson, et al were able to lay claim to being the first blacks in their respective fields, with all due respect, Michael’s strides were equal if not bigger simply because of the enormity of his scope.
Not only black people, but all minorities are indebted to Michael Jackson because his main contribution to the world of entertainment was his ability to infiltrate the living rooms of mainstream whites the world over. In a time in which a brown face on the color of Time magazine was unheard of in the world of entertainment, MTV didn’t show black musicians videos that were performing in traditionally black genres prior to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean, and the general idea of any entertainers of color still made a great many mainstream whites very uneasy.
Simply put, there is no Oprah Winfrey, there is no Will Smith, Jaime Foxx, Tiger Woods or even Barack Obama without Michael Jackson first increasing the world’s and especially North American whites’ comfort with black people.
His depths of inspiration are so far reaching that the amount of entertainers that he’s inspired to climb the ranks of their industry is seemingly countless. Aside from the obvious artists of today like Usher, Ne-Yo, Beyonce, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and Mariah Carey, or even past groups like New Edition, New Kids on the Block, Backstreet Boys and N-Sync that searched to recreate the success and showmanship of the Jackson 5, Michael’s inspiration reaches beyond the musical realm.
Any person of color who ever had any aspirations of breaking the shackles that society as a whole had on them in that time could not help but to be inspired by watching this young upstart singer moonwalk his way into the homes and hearts of the world.
Whether you had aspirations of being an actor, artist, rapper, athlete, or businessman you had a model of what it was to put your best foot forward and truly give all that you had into every performance that you had available to you in Michael Jackson.
He was able to convey to all that it was ok to be yourself, even if what you were doing may be different from the pack you could still define yourself how you saw fit. His widespread influence in dance culture is still felt today through modern day choreography and dance as seemingly every young pop artist jumps on the scene making their way as a singer/dancer has roots in the school of MJ.
Need proof?
Watch a music video today. Anyone that you see pop-locking (which is a whole lot of people these days) got it from Michael Jackson. He also sparked a number of fashion trends that ranged from urban youth, to the middle aged business crowd, to biker bars and everywhere in between from the late 1970s through the 1990s. The leather jackets, glitter gloves, and jerry curl hairstyle were just some trends that many would now probably like to forget but were driven by Jackson.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity – Martin Luther King Jr.
Perhaps the greatest testament of the man that Michael Jackson was is in his philanthropic history and the fact that he transcended color completely; and I’m not referring to his reported Vitiligo (skin pigment loss) disease.
Michael was the most recognized figure on the planet and chose to boldly use that status to firmly take a stand on several world fronts. He donated proceeds from the 1988 song “Man in the Mirror” to Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times, a camp for children who suffer from cancer. He equipped a 19-bed-unit at Mount Sinai New York Medical Center for cancer research and donated part of the earnings from his Victory Tour to the United Negro College Fund. He donated all the money he received from his Pepsi endorsements – $1.5 million – to the Michael Jackson Burn Center for Children at Brotman Medical Center in Culver City. Jackson had been treated there when he was burned during the production of a Pepsi commercial.
Before a concert at Wembley Stadium in 1988, Michael met with Prince Charles and Princess Diana, handing over checks totaling more than $400,000 for the Prince’s Trust and a children’s hospital. Michael founded the Heal the World Foundation to fight illness and poverty among children around the world. He boldly joined Ryan White a boy who was infected with HIV by contaminated blood transfusions, in his fight against the discrimination of those with AIDS — at a time of great fear and dread over the AIDS epidemic.
In 1993, Jackson was one of the stars to perform at Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration. Before he sang “Gone Too Soon,” he talked about the plight of those with AIDS and mentioned Ryan, who died of the disease in 1990. Seven years later, the Guinness Book of World Records cited Jackson for holding the world record f
or the “Most Charities Supported by a Pop Star.” It’s unclear how much Jackson had donated over the years, but some estimates put the number at more than $500 million.
Aside from Gone Too Soon, Jackson wrote a number of hugely influential songs for remarkable charity events and campaigns. We Are The World was written by Michael and Lionel Ritchie and the proceeds of the record were donated to those starving in Africa, while all sales of Man In the Mirror went to Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times for cancer children. Finally, Heal The World was the flag song for the Foundation of the same name that Michael set up to help numerous international charity organizations combat poverty, hunger, abuse, cancer, AIDS, disease, racism and illiteracy. And finally, his hit song Black or White spoke volumes of racial tolerance which is an issue that has made tremendous strides over the last number of years.
I knew that when I was approached to write a piece on this topic, I ran the risk of being long winded, simply because in order to speak of any man that has achieved a certain level of greatness you would do them a disservice to not include the bulk of their life’s work.
For Michael Jackson, the main thing that I wanted to accomplish is to shed some light on what made this man one of the truly great figures of our time. I feel that too much of the scope has been set on his flaws, or personal battles in recent years without paying sufficient time to the truly great and inspiring things that he was able to do throughout his life. It seems to me that when greatness is upon us, it is seldom recognized for the genius that it is.
True to form it seems that Michael Jackson is appreciated more in the first week of his passing than in the last five years of his life. A man that graced every tabloid cover from Time to Rolling Stone and People at his height to every trashy gossip mag in his later years has left a world that he did great things for, and most importantly he did them out of a genuine love and passion for the human race. In a time when the world truly needs to be inspired, we have just lost our inspiration and that is nothing short of a tragedy.
