Makusaimakusamamakusa

My first reaction was denial in a way of "this must be an April 1 joke". It immediately felt too obvious. I mean what else do you do when your empire is almost destroyed, you run enormous debts, the media is hunting you, everybody thinks you are a freak and a child-molester?

Of course you run to that secret escape island - where your icons Marlon and Elvis play monopoly every Wednesday, where Jim is tending his roses in the garden, where Kurt is teaching scuba-diving.

I mean all the pieces of the puzzle fit instantly. I still believe in it for about 15%. He just took some time off.

Then I saw the pictures and read what people say about Michael and I realized that for us he is gone. And this really means the end of an era.

I have been thinking about this for the last couple of weeks. Studying web 2.0 and all this long tail theories for work and for myself for the last several months I realized something, found the answer to the question that was bothering me for a long time.

I realized that I have to stop waiting and looking for the next big thing, for the next Nirvana. It is not coming. Period. And this came to me like a bust of a bubble accompanied with the rustling of the millions of keyboards typing in their searches in torrents and youtubes. Searching for thousands of obscure bands, searches satisfying non-consistent music tastes. No single music channel would be able to satisfy these music tastes. Like the single mom who got fined for millions of dollars this week - she was actually enjoying a quite eclectic collection of music on her hard drive.

We are not hooked up to one MTV channel anymore. We do not worship our celebrities like divine creatures anymore. We dig into their mundane lives on twitter, we download their home porn tapes, we see their underwear, or a lack thereof.

That is why we are not getting a new super-star that will blind everyone with its talent and glory any time soon. We will have to make do with a hand of small stars in non-overlapping music charts.

Yesterday this understanding became complete with the realization of the fact that now our childhood is gone forever. Our Peter Pan has left for his Neverland and is never coming back.

Yesterday I read online other people's childhood reminiscences that echoed mine precisely. I too was sitting in the room I shared with my elder brother and listening to Thriller again and again to learn the moonwalk. We would retell each other every frame of the videos of Michael Jackson, if one of us missed the show. Our father brought cassette tapes with Michael Jackson and other assorted greatest hits tapes from his business trip abroad in 1986. And for us, Soviet kids, this was the first encounter with the English-speaking pop-culture. Michael Jackson represented everything cool about the Western culture for us.

From Michael we learned how to wear leather jackets, shredded jeans... We took our dad's hat from the top of the shelf and played with it trying to copy his moves.

But leather jackets with zippers and buckles, and threaded and torn jeans were outlawed in the Siberian hometown of ours. So my brother bought a usual leather jacket (10 years later it would have been really priceless because it was very grunge), and secretly re-tailored it with a slanted zipper, belts and studs. My parents only found out about that jacket several years ago.

Looking back I am not suprised I grew up with all the bugs and divergences in my mind and soul. Just like everybody else in my generation. Well even our parents were affected - everybody saw how the black guy was growing up, growing white, growing weird. Snakes, leopards, Disneyworld-ranch, diamond gloves...

And he was not more weird than us - only a different scale. He didn't have to hide his studded leather jacket under a plain coat from his parents and from the world. He wore his true nature for everyone to see. And maybe for that everyone started to call him a weirdo. We have to forget about having snakes for pets and riding a fairy tale trains on our ranch, because we have mortgages to pay, parents-in-law to impress, assholes to cope with on a regular basis. We cannot tell the whole world: "I actually am afraid of the grown-up world, I don't want to pretend anymore, I want to build my own fantasy world, I want to change how I look, and I want to catch up on playing with children, because my parents wanted me to grow up too fast and I feel like I missed out on something back there when I was 6".

He was the king, he was given a given a lot, and in the end he had a price to pay for all of this.

He gave us the rhythm, the moves, the looks, the sounds, the visuals, the soul... and now he left and took our childhood with him.