A world shaken by celebrity deaths.

People say that celebrities always die in threes. Stupid people actually believe it.

A couple years ago I signed up for Celebrity Death Beeper so I would get a silly little e-mail every time someone famous dies. Of course their definition of “celebrity” is pretty broad, so most of my beeps are for obscure Czechoslovakian arthouse directors who were active from 1973-1978 or small-time rappers who made one album and then got shot by their publicists as a promotional stunt to sell more albums. When a real celebrity dies, I still typically hear about it through the usual channels, then get the beep later that day and go, “Well duh. Old news, weird e-mail robot thing.” Such is the case with these four deaths…

6/23/2009 – Ed McMahon
I’m too young to actually remember watching Johnny Carson, so to me Ed McMahon was always just that guy with the big checks and the subject of a Weird Al song. Still, I enjoy a good HEY-O once in a while, which I suppose I owe to him.

6/25/2009 – Farrah Fawcett
Who? Wait, let me load up Wikipedia…

…oh, right, her. Man, I’m glad I didn’t grow up in the seventies when that poster of the big-haired lady with the zombie-like grin was the pinnacle of sexy. We had way better jerk-off material in the 90s.

6/25/2009 – Michael Jackson
Uh… let’s come back to this one.

6/28/2009 – Billy Mays
This one really bummed me out. Yeah, he’s the annoying Oxyclean guy, but you have to respect a man with that much beard. Plus I’ve been really enjoying his new show on Discovery and I doubt they’re going to do a second season Weekend At Bernie’s style. It’s interesting that his death isn’t being universally celebrated though; I kind of always figured I was the only person who secretly found him entertaining. Either Pitchmen changed a lot of people’s minds about Mays’s ability to entertain, or the Shamwow guy is just that universally reviled. On second though, there’s no reason it can’t be both.

So yeah. Michael Jackson. That’s the biggie, obviously.

Most of Jackson’s relevant career was before my time, so while I’ve always liked his music my experience with him is more about his degeneration into freakiness than as an entertainer. The Michael Jackson of my recollection is the one who diddled little boys, wore a surgical mask and dangled his children over balconies.

Prevailing opinion seems to be that the guy was weird and yeah maybe he poked his pecker into some underage pooters, but his skill and talent as a musician and entertainer are what the world is really going to miss. R.I.P, King of Pop.

Personally, I think that’s BS. Well, I didn’t think it was BS when I first heard the news, because that was my initial reaction. But after rolling it around in my head for a few days and reading some old articles about Jackson and the constant swirl of scandals he found himself in, I’ve arrived at the BS conclusion. It seems to me that famous entertainer Michael Jackson didn’t die last week, but last decade. The only guy we lost last week was a certifiable freakshow who constantly thumbed what was left of his ruined nose at societal conventions, squandered more money on voodoo healers than you will ever see in your lifetime, and got away with it because he was sitting on half the Beatles catalogue.

The truth is that Michael hadn’t had a serious hit in at least 15 years and that he has spent most of that time right on the verge of a comeback that would never happen. Saying that he was the product of a ruined childhood and an abusive bastard father cheapens the experiences of every productive member of society who had abusive bastard fathers but decided to rise above it rather than use it to excuse their shortcomings.

The music didn’t die last Thursday. Whatever music this man was going to give us, he had already given us. It would have been a tragedy if he’d died in 1984 and deprived the world of Bad and Dangerous. Want an example of an entertainer who died tragically just as he was starting to give something awesome to the world? Billy Mays.

I guess what I’m saying is that everything I love about Michael Jackson is still here, in the world, and that in my mind it’s been so separate from him for so long that it’s like a different entity. It’s not like everyone’s copy of Thriller magically evaporated when he was rushed to the hospital. I’ll always love the man’s music, and the sooner we get a triple pack of it up in Rock Band, the better.