When I read the comments after articles about Michael Jackson, the denial of the fans is quite unbelievable. The cult of a celebrity has rarely reached such heights and I tend to believe we are about to witness the birth of a new cult, a new religion. And I am not using these words lightly, as this is way beyond the usual fandom.
Four years ago, artist Rusel Parish had opened the first ‘Cult of Michael Jackson’ chapel in the middle of Williamsburg. Parish’s paintings and sculptures, of ecclesiastic nature, were presented in the form of a chapel in an art gallery, and this could have been totally funny if the guy hadn’t been the leader of the ‘Cult of Michael Jackson’, a weird organization whose website has now mysteriously disappeared. May be he sold all his gold icon paintings and closed it down, but what bothers me the most in all this, was how seriously he was talking about it, and the words he used, such as ‘the teaching of Michael Jackson’,… what is that exactly?
In an article related to this exhibit, nineteen year-old Hunnii White declared to the interviewer, ‘for sure he is a prophet, or a saint, and I am here to devote myself to him because he represented heaven for me for what he did to help people in need. Moreover, he was a complicated person and people don’t realize that even the God in which the monotheists believe didn’t create a perfect world’.
Of course this is insane, but unfortunately, this kind of language is very common among Jackson’s fans, I was in Los Angeles when he died, and the craziness and hysteria that were going on at Forest Lawn during the following days were out of control, there were people making circles, holding hands and doing all kind of cult-like prayers, there were flocks of doves released every day, and the terms God, Christ, saint, martyr were on every person’s lips. Why is that? Why Jackson and not Jimi Hendrix or Ottis Redding (if you want another black musician) or anyone else in music who died young?
There is a thread ‘Who have you converted?’ in the fan forum ‘Positively Michael’, there are threads about lightning candles for him, and love declarations are of course all over the place. I have visited discussion forums for other beloved artists, but nothing reaches this level of blind adoration anywhere else. There are several of these forums, and I have noticed that the threads about controversial topics are closely monitored, meaning you don’t have access to them if you aren’t a member! A good way to avoid confrontation.
But what is a cult exactly? And what does it means to be a follower?
Cult followers display an excessive and unquestioning commitment to its leader, whereas questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished. According to the fans, Jackson was this pure human being, this Christ-like figure who had never been a drug addict, despite the recent revelation by his doctor Finkelstein who treated him in the 90s and said that ‘his buttocks was so scarred up and abscessed [due to decades of drug abuse] that the needle almost bent’. Above everything else he was wrongly accused of crimes he has never committed and died for our sins. There is no doubt Jackson’s fans display an unquestioning commitment to him, they ignore the child molestation accusations, ignore the pedophile-like behavior and the facts. And if you dare to come up with the molestation accusations in front of them, they will certainly crucify you,… I’ve tried once and I have never been more insulted in my life.
According to the LA Times and LA Weekly, MJ’s fans believe it is their duty to cover the current trial, and some of them get to the courthouse every day, living on donations done by other fans. Taaj Malik is doing just that, posting her reports on a website Team Michael Jackson, totally dedicated to MJ (‘the PUREST of souls who was viciously snatched away from his family and the world by the vilest of evils’), and tweeting under the name @TeamMichael777 totally convinced it is her duty. There are a lot of them in Los Angeles right now, they are miles away from their home, they often come from Spain, Germany, China, they have left their children home to be there and follow the trial, and they have tears in their eyes each time they can get a glimpse of Katherine Jackson entering the courthouse. Beside the dubious objectivity of these fans’ reports, this is definitively quasi-religious: When you devote all your time to something, when each one of your minutes is consumed with MJ, I guess you qualify for a cult follower.
This is what Malik declared recently to the LA Weekly: ‘Justice for Michael is my life. He was the greatest, you know? He was the greatest the world has known. The children of the world were all his children. To us, he’s like Martin Luther King or Gandhi.’ Another fan added : ‘The media don’t say a lot of the things that Michael did — humanitarian things, things with children. We think that he was martyred. This is an injustice.’
The problem with MJ’s humanitarian work is that things have never been very clear, I don’t doubt his will to help with his money but his ‘Heal the World Foundation’ was suspended in 2002 ‘after failing to file yearly accounting statements’. Plus, when you buy so many things for yourself (antique furniture, art, cars,…) now all stored in five wahrehouses (five huge warehouses!) you aren’t exactly Jesus Christ.
When I observe the fans, there is no doubt in my mind that Jackson’s cult could become a true religion… who knows what will happen to his image/grave/status in a few years, he could become our next savior, because human minds work like that. But when you look at the type of objects that Jackson was surrounding himself with, a red throne, hundreds of portraits of himself dressed like a renaissance king or a Michael Angelo character, he was seeing himself more like a king (the king of pop obviously) or a mythology figure than like a god.
