Michael Jackson's celebrity suicide

Born not just to celebrity but to stardom, Michael Jackson never knew what it was like to live normally, or even behave normally. He was drafted into the family's musical act, the Jackson 5, while in elementary school, and taken to Motown records. He was taught how to live a manufactured image at the feet of Berry Gordy, who was quite good at such legerdemain.

If you're 9 years old and born to be a star, such training will definitely turbocharge the marketing of your record sales; as for the fact that almost all the money from those sales went to your teacher and not you ... well, that was his second lesson.

Trust, truth ... these were concepts Michael Jackson learned early on didn't have much worth. But of course he had his family, right?

His angry father beat him and his eight siblings with some determination, reputable biographers have told us. (Untrustworthy La Toya said that she and Michael were sexually molested, too.) On tour at age 10, Michael tried to sleep as his older brothers banged groupies in the motel rooms they shared. Then all the kids watched in wonder as their father took up with another woman and had a child with her.

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I think it's fair to classify Kurt Cobain's death as one brought on by medical problems, specifically the roiling interaction of depression and addiction. Jackson's death is in this sense more purely a suicide, just as Elvis Presley's was some three decades ago. Like Presley, Jackson at some point stepped through a door, closed it, and turned the key. What went on behind the door we'll never know.

http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2009/06/26/michael_jackson_crossover/?source=newsletter

Interesting how a guy who blows his own head off is less a suicide than a person who dies from a heart attack. In my world, where I guess I am just not as clever as Bill Wyman, death by blowing one's own brains out: suicide, death by heart attack: not suicide. But that is just me.

motel room cast the first stone.

Can you imagine having that sort of life when you're 10 or 11? Rehearsing, doing shows in different towns or cities every night, doing radio promos then trying to sleep on a bus so that you can do it all over again the next day? For weeks on end? Not to mention the TV shows, photo shoots, rehearsals for a new album (because you have to keep yourself out there or you'll be washed up at 14).
There's no way I could have done it...

Kill - has an active plan
Be killed - engaging in high risk behaviors, i.e., heavy drinking and drug use combined with driving or getting into bar fights
Just want to die - people who are too depressed to take action but don't want to live.

All three are equally lethal.

to work for a middle school principal who was a dead ringer for the Jackson kids' father. My skin literally crawled when this guy was introduced to the faculty at our beginnng-of-school meeting. Strangely enough, he was dismissed a couple years later - there were always reports of his inappropriate conduct toward female faculty and students. Both men - very, very creepy.

for an article/editorial of this nature...why not go into the belly of the beast??