King of Pop or King of Crazy?

Disclaimer/Warning to ALL Diehard Michael Jackson fans (especially those related to me who have not yet grasped the dark shades of sarcasm in my blogs) - please do not read this before adding more than a pinch of salt to an alcoholic beverage of your choice.

Jokes and black humour(pun intended) about Michael Jackson's shenanigans, had been going on for years, but less than twenty four hours after his death they started doing the email rounds, hitting Facebook statuses, and twittering all over the place. Even at the risk of being ‘un-friended' by hoards of upset MJ fans, the moment he passed away, people started posting hilarious (albeit bad taste) jokes every minute on the minute.

The comments ranged from theories about the way he died to how he was going to be buried. Some speculated that his death was a hoax staged to get rid of the child molestation accusations. Quite a few conspired that this death was a scam because he had actually died about 18 years ago.

Granted, I was never a big Michael Jackson fan and this is no reflection on his music or him as an artist, singer, dancer or entertainer. I was simply born in the wrong musical era and can only honestly call myself an ABBA, Ira, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton fan. As sad and unfortunate as it may sound, for me, the rest of the world's music is either of the more annoying or less annoying type!

Still, even though I never voluntarily listened to Michael Jackson, and though I have never danced the night away to his music, I can understand how the king of pop kicking the bucket could seriously upset a lot of people. But the reactions that some had and couldn't control, had me dumbfounded and gagging in disbelief. Friends whom I had always thought had a good head screwed on their shoulders and who were otherwise entirely sane and commonsensical, lost their wits and cried their hearts out for days on end.

Personally I can hardly get myself to cry at a relative's funeral because, like most of the Maltese population, I believe that unless I'm half drunk celebrating the village festa, I should keep public displays of affection to a bare minimum, but these fans cried and sobbed their eyes and hearts out like they had just lost a child. They watched the funeral over and over again, scanned the net for updates, held their breath when MJ's daughter made a 20 second scripted speech, and went on not to function for days!!

Now he's been dead for two weeks. Over 550,000 people have left a note of remembrance on his memorial website, and his music is more popular than ever. Due to the astounding reactions that some of my friends had to his death I went online and researched his life a little bit.

You see, this is where I was coming from - because of the way his skin colour and appearance changed over the years, I would have thought that he wouldn't have had one black fan left on the face of the earth, but then, I read about his skin condition and became a little bit more understanding. I also read that he had suffered an accident on stage that resulted in third degree burns and that plastic surgery was required to help restore his appearance. This to me justified all the plastic and all the colour, and I started to think that perhaps he wasn't so silly as to try to deny his ancestral past after all.

If people knew that MJ suffered from Vitiligo - a chronic disorder that causes patches of skin to lose their pigment - it would have put him in a much better light even with regards to all the other accusations luring in the background. But for some reason this man was capable of getting his music and his name into every household worldwide and yet wasn't able to manage this PR disaster. His only serious attempt to go public was during an interview on the Oprah Winfrey show, but clearly this was not enough because most people still do not know about it and cannot explain it.

So Michael Jackson was the man behind' Thriller' - the biggest music hit in history with sales reaching 53 million copies and which spawned many hit singles.

Michael Jackson was the first black person to get MTV to play black music.

By the end of the 1980s Michael Jackson was crowned "Artist of the Decade," for his 'Thriller' and 'Bad' albums.

In 1991, his album Dangerous was contracted for $890 million by Sony.

And yet he could not, for the life of him, get his Vitiligo and burn accident stories out enough to justify his ‘wackoness'!!!

Seriously!