Michael Jackson

Another RIP post, fuck.

Any words I may write will be drowned out not merely by size but by strength. Almost everyone in the world will have something to say, and most of them will say it. The scale of this is so far beyond the things I habitually blog about that in any other circumstances it would be almost comic. But in this case it carries more the authentic air of tragedy; for all that his life was so much part of the age of celebrity, with which he shared his childhood and which he did so much to push to its current level, it has the sense of tragedy in the deeper, historic sense, not the sense of merely losing a fucking football match - for so long now, and precisely because of what he had been, it had seemed to be heading this way (he was probably still in his 30s when I first started thinking he wouldn't last long into his 50s).

So no doubt it will seem a morality tale, proof that - if you let it - celebrity will get you. And let us not pretend, as we have with so many others, that we particularly respected what he became towards the end. But why was there still so much excitement about the 02 Arena shows, even though he hadn't toured for over a decade and, when our heads finally defeated our hearts, we all doubted he could get through it? Someone who can still, so late on, create so much anticipation - against all logical sense - must have made people feel, however momentarily, however falsely when we woke up in the morning, that anything was possible. And that, we can be sure, he did. Ignore, for the moment, all the rap remixes and "have you seen my childhood?" and the endless compilations. They were all part of the long road that could only end in this.

Within 24 hours we will all obviously be sick of this comparison point, but as the NME said in August 1977 over its cover picture of the Elvis of half a lifetime earlier, remember him this way. And be, perhaps, more grateful for the mundanity of your own life. But be grateful too that what you have just heard existed.

Steven Wells

I didn't always agree with him - at times I thought his dogmatically pro-pop-culture stance could be (inadvertently and obviously quite against his intentions) appropriated by the very people he despised the most, and of course he was tainted for me by staying with the NME well into the Europhobia-for-the-soft-left phase it will clearly never now leave - but fuck, 48/9 is no age. He'd clearly have hated people saying he was comforting to have around, but - as with his old adversary Mark E. Smith - you always felt, whether or not you agreed with him or liked what he'd done that week/year, that his presence was A Good Thing. He undoubtedly played to the gallery (probably to stay in work) in his later years at the NME, but at his best he made people think and think again, which is more than most writers ever do.

For he was capable of a lot more than the tabloidised NME of his later years there would allow him to do - his pop-culture evangelism, for all that I'll always be in two minds about it, was always and only ever on the side of those who create the best pop and the idea of what it could/can be, set free. He never pretended (unlike some NME writers I could mention) that the media controllers - those in charge of the mass culture industry who claim ownership of everything it does - were on the side of the Left. When I started buying old NMEs I noticed that his writing about politics and the culture industry, and especially the politics of the culture industry, was a lot more subtle and multi-layered - particularly in his July '86 piece about the Christian Right and specifically the odious Peter Mullen - than I'd been used to from him (or from the NME more generally) in my own adolescence, and one of the main reasons why I wish the NME had stayed as it was at that time is that he'd have been encouraged to write more pieces in that vein, rather than just play to the crowd and phone in rants about Belle & Sebastian or whoever, which - funny as they were - were as unrepresentative of what he was really capable of as the "Mr Agreeable" columns were for David Stubbs. His Guardian and Philadelphia Weekly stuff late on showed what he was really capable of, and it is to be regretted that the books he was apparently planning never came to fruition. Also, of course, he contributed to On the Hour and The Day Today, neither of which has been equalled since and certainly won't be by the cawing and LOLing excuses who dare to pretend to fill their shoes today.

I'll miss him. RIP.