Creeping Elvisism

Gerald Posner, the investigative reporter, was on MSNBC tonight talking about Michael Jackson; he, and several other commentators I’ve noticed, are launching a meme that, unchecked, may create another Michael Jackson-Elvis Presley similarity.
Back in the day, even the most unpredictable of the early rock critics—Lester Bangs comes to mind—lost their backbone when it came to Elvis. Few said his latter-day work was excellent, but time and time again you could see the writers bending over backwards to spin whatever Presley was doing positively. Over time the cognitive dissonance involved in actually listening to the towers of vinyl nonsense Presley foisted off on his fans and trying to keep him on his unquestioned critical throne produced an odd tic in how Presley was spoken about.

“Elvis was trapped,” we were told. “He wasn’t allowed to record what he wanted to.” In this way, the Presley story as it was told turned, as the years went by, into the story of someone acted upon, rather than acting. The ultimate Elvis Presley biography, I noted long ago, would be written almost entirely in the passive. (Dave Marsh’s Elvis came close; later, Peter Guralnick’s well-researched two-volume exercise in lugubriousness was this approach’s apotheosis.*)

Anyway, Posner’s argument was that what killed Michael Jackson was his inability to deal with the fifty looming concert dates in London; somehow or other a line has been disseminated that Jackson thought he was signing up for only ten shows, but that AEG, the concert promoter, somehow pulled a fast one on him and committed him to fifty.

Michael was tricked!
This line doesn’t jibe with the other, competing image we’re given of Jackson, the businessman—the shrewd businessman—who picked up ATV publishing for a song. Jackson gets credit for that, of course. But he also gets credit for signing a deal for performing fifty shows. The idea that he didn’t know what he was signing infantilizes him, just as the bullshit about Presley’s being trapped infantilizes him.

There’s two other reasons this is a silly contention. For the first, fifty shows is a walk in the park. Jackson would have had to rehearse fifty times just to do ten shows. Jackson was a performing artist, but he hadn’t mounted a serous tour in more than a decade. He wasn’t worried about the fiftieth show; he was worried about the first. That was the hard one.

Secondly, the ironic thing is that, in this case, Jackson was trapped. But he was trapped by himself—by his whiny little insistence by spending money insanely. It’s likely he was making $20 million a year—and he still managed to essentially mortgage a huge chunk of his 50 percent share of a billion dollar corporation, Sony/ATV. After wheedling himself out of innumerable prior jams, he was finally being made to, pardon the expression, face the music.
He didn’t have to play live. All he had to do was stop spending money. Jackson chose the shows.
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* Like Jackson, Presley was a heel when it came to his will, with no bequests to his Memphis Mafia, the gang of good old boys who laughed at his jokes and bore his tantrums for decades. Guralnick, as I recall, outdoes himself in trying to explain away this classic example of Presley thuggishness.