By Greg Tate

What black American culture—musical and otherwise—lacks for now isn’t talent or ambition, but the unmistakable presence of some kind of spiritual genius: the sense that something other than, or even more than human, is speaking through whatever fragile mortal vessel is burdened with repping for the divine, the magical, the supernatural, the ancestors.

You can still feel it when you hear Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, Aretha Franklin, or Cecil Taylor, or when you read Toni Morrison— those who carry on the tradition of  making forms and notions as abstract, complex, and philosophical as soul, jazz, or the blues seem so deeply and universally felt. But such transcendence is rare now, given how desperate, soul-crushing, and immobilizing modern American life has become for the poorest strata of our folk, and how dissolute, dispersed, and distanced from that resource-poor but culturally rich heavyweight strata the rest of us are becoming.

The yin and yang of it is simple: You don’t get the insatiable hunger (or the black accculturation) that made Michael Jackson run, not walk, out the ’hood without there being a ’hood—the Olympic obstacle-course incubator of much musical black genius as we know it. As George Clinton likes to say, “Without the humps, there’s no getting over.” Black Americans are a people whose central struggle has been overcoming the non-person status we got stamped and stomped into us during slavery and post-Reconstruction and resonates even now; and we have become past-masters of devising strategies for erasing the erasure. His dreaming up the most self-flagellating erasure of self to stymie the erasure is what makes Michael Jackson’s story so numbing, so macabre, so absurdly Stephen King.

The scariest thing about the Motown legacy is that you could’ve gone into any black American community at the time and found raw talents equal to any of the label’s polished fruit: the Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Smokey Robinson, or Holland Dozier Holland.  Indeed, Michael himself is our best proof that Motown didn’t have a lock on the young, black, and gifted pool, as he and his siblings were born in Gary, Indiana.

Where black modernity is concerned, Michael is the real missing link between the way we were and what we’ve become in what Nelson George has astutely dubbed the “Post-Soul Era”—the only race-coded “post” neologism grounded in actual history and not puffery. Michael’s post-Motown life and career are a testament to all the cultural greatness Motown and the chitlin circuit wrought—and also all the acute identity-crises those entities helped set in motion in the same funky breath.

From Compton to Harlem, we’ve witnessed grown men broke-down crying over Michael; some of my most hard-bitten, 24-7 militant black friends, male and female alike, copped to bawling their eyes out for days after they got the news. It’s not hard to understand why: For just about anybody born in black America after 1958, Michael came to own a good chunk of their  best childhood and adolescent memories. The irony of all the jokes and speculation about Michael trying to turn into a European woman is that after James Brown, his music and his dancing represent one of the mightiest peaks of what we call Black Music.

Fortunately for us, that suspect skin-lightening disease, bleaching away his black-nuss via physical or psychological means, had no effect on the field-holler screams palpable in his voice, or the electromagnetism fueling his elegant and preternatural sense of rhythm, flexibility, and fluid motion. With just his vocal gifts and his body alone as vehicles, Michael came to rank as one of the great storytellers and soothsayers of the last 100 years.

Furthermore, unlike almost everyone in the Apollo Theater pantheon save George Clinton, Michael now seems as important to us an image-maker as he was a musician/entertainer.  But Michael’s phantasmal, shape-shifting videos, upon reflection, were also his way of socially and politically engaging the worlds of other real blackfolk from places like South Central L.A.; Bahia, Brazil; East Africa; the prison system; Ancient Egypt. He did this sometimes in pursuit of mere spectacle (“Black and White”), sometimes as critical observer (“The Way You Make Me Feel”), sometimes as a cultural nationalist romantic (“Remember the Time”), even occasionally as a harsh American political commentator (“They Don’t Care About Us”).

George Clinton thought one reason Michael constantly chipped away at his appearance was less about racial self-loathing than about the number-one problem superstars have, which is figuring out what to do when people get sick of looking at your face. His orgies of rhino- and other plasty’s were no more than an attempt to stay ahead of a fickle public’s fickleness.

In the ’90s, at least until Eminem showed up, hip-hop would seem to have proven that major black pop success in America didn’t require a whitening-up, maybe much to Michael’s chagrin. Whatever Michael’s alienation and distance from  black America, he remained a devoted student of popular black music, dance, and street style, giving to and taking from it in unparalleled ways. He let neither ears nor eyes nor footwork stray too far out of touch from the action, sonically, sartorially, or choreographically. But whatever he appropriated also came back transmogrified into something even more inspiring and ennobled than before.

Like the best artists everywhere, he begged, borrowed, and stole from and/or collaborated with anybody who he thought would make his own expression more visceral, modern, and exciting, from Spielberg to Akon to, yes, cosmetic surgeons. In any event, once he went solo, Michael was above all else committed to his genius being felt as powerfully as whatever else in mass culture he caught masses of people feeling at the time.

Of course, Michael’s careerism tripped onto a slippery slope when he decided that his public and private life could be merged, orchestrated, and manipulated for publicity and mass consumption as masterfully as his albums and videos. I certainly began to feel this when word got out of him sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber or trying to buy the Elephant Man’s bones, and I became almost certain this was the case when he dangled his hooded baby son out a balcony window for the paparazzi, to say nothing of his alleged darker impulses. At what point, we have to wonder, did the line blur for him between Dr. Jacko and Mr. Jackson, between Peter Pan fantasies and predatory behaviors? At what point did the Man in the Mirror turn into Dorian Gray? When did the Warholian creature Michael created to deflect access to his inner life turn on him and virally rot him from the inside?

The unfortunate blessing of Michael’s death is that we can now all go back to loving him as we first found him without shame, despair, or complication. “Which Michael do you want back?” is the other real question of the hour: Over the years we’ve seen him variously as our Hamlet, our Superman, our Peter Pan, our Icarus, our Fred Astaire, our Marcel Marceau, our Houdini, our Charlie Chaplin, our Scarecrow, our Peter Parker and Black Spider-Man, our Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke, our Little Richard redux, our Alien vs. Predator, our Elephant Man, our Great Gatsby, our Lon Chaney, our Ol’ Blue Eyes, our Elvis, our Frankenstein, our ET, our Mystique, our Dark Phoenix.

Celebrity-idols are never more present than when they up and disappear, never ever saying goodbye, while affirming James Brown’s prophetic reasoning that “Money won’t change you/ But time will take you out.” JB also told us, “I’ve got money, but now I need love.” And here we are. Sitting with the rise and fall and demise of Michael, and grappling with how, as Dream Hampton put it, “The loneliest man in the world could be one of the most beloved.”

Now that some of us oldheads can have our Michael Jackson back, we feel liberated to be more gentle toward his spirit, releasing him from our outright rancor for scarring up whichever pre-trial, pre-chalk-complexion incarnation of him first tickled our fancies. Michael not being in the world as a Kabuki ghost makes it even easier to get though all those late-career movie-budget clips where he already looks headed for the out-door. Perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise both for him and for us that he finally got shoved through it.

In addition to founding and conducting the band, Burnt Sugar, Greg Tate is a writer whose work has appeared in publications, including The Village Voice, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Vibe, and the author of the books Flyboy In The Buttermilk, Everything But The Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience. He is also a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition.