Former Bay Stater's gritty retrospective on the personal meaning of Michael Jackson

I must confess that Michael Jackson's death did not send me scurrying to the media in search of retrospectives or remembrances, until Michael Thomas wrote this op-ed piece in Sunday's New York Times. Michael is a former Bay Stater who related his days of growing up in Waltham and idolizing the Jackson 5 to family struggles he's experienced in his own life:

The Jackson 5 — not the Jacksons, or any other iteration — were like family. My brother, sister, cousins and I grew up with them. When we were young and together, they were all we’d listen to, and really, in pop-culture terms, all we really knew about. They were a conduit — unlike the dead, white authors we were told to read and emulate, and the dead, black martyrs we were to told to mimic and revere — to a larger world. His death, as I’m sure is the case for many others, makes me scan time backward and forward in order to understand, how he, we, came to be here now. My backward trek — unlike my children’s relationship to their time capsule discovery of “Thriller” and “Beat It,” unlike my white high school friends and their adoration of “Billie Jean” — has little connection to those periods, that person.

For folks roughly in their early 40s through early 50s, the Michael Jackson we knew was that of the Jackson 5. Michael's piece interweaves that celebrity fandom in a very gritty way with his family's challenges, including a brother now in jail. It's a far cry from the standard-brand analyses of race, identity, and celebrity that have been filling up virtually every media outlet.

Michael also is the author of Man Gone Down, a semi-autobiographical first novel that has been earning a lot of plaudits, most recently the Impac Dublin Award.

For the full piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/28/opinion/28thomas...