Michael Jackson’s death feeds the mob

We all ‘want a piece’ of celebrities such as Michael Jackson, and when they die we get our chance — just like the Ancient Greeks and their sacrificial animals

When I heard that 18,000 people were cramming into the Staples Centre in Los Angeles to bid farewell to Michael Jackson, I thought, “mneh”. In 1827 Beethoven had 20,000 people following his hearse through Vienna. Admittedly Jackson beat Beethoven on the number of people waiting outside, and there are no accounts of elephants padding around the church during Beethoven’s funeral service, as there have been with Jackson, but then there was no Google News in 1827. Still, there are stories of people snipping off bits of Beethoven’s hair, even before his death; and, in later years, following the custom for geniuses (Haydn, Einstein), Beethoven’s body was exhumed for further examination. In line with this, the whereabouts of Jackson’s brain remains a mystery.
To paraphrase Britney Spears: we “all want a piece of” celebrities; and when they are dead we have a better chance of getting it. President Obama was quick to point out that Jackson was even larger in death than in life. (In fact, the President wasn’t as quick as some would have liked: he faced complaints that he should have meditated on the death sooner and longer.) When the famous are alive they offer themselves to us, and we can cherish them for what they deliver; but when they are dead they are ours. Even when they are dying, in cases such as Jade Goody and Pope John Paul II, we can follow the decline hour by hour. Even so, the death itself remains a special moment. Then we can find out what prescription drugs Jackson or Heath Ledger was on; who benefited from Michael Hutchence’s will; how small Napoleon’s penis really was.
Often, in our society, people seem to be squeamish about this fascination with famous death, as though there is something undignified about it: speakers queue up on the Radio 4 Thought for the Day slot to lament the noxious influence of celebrity culture on our children; licence payers complain that the BBC is spending too much time on the Jackson funeral; journalists manage to write whole columns about how the death is being covered. (Surely it’s time for a column about how many columns there are about Jackson’s death.) But behind all this awkwardness, and the rhetorical trickery by which commentators find ways of talking about Jackson’s death while maintaining the appearance of not wanting to, there lies a more ancient impulse that is impossible to shift.
To find it, we can look to Ancient Greek civilisation and its sacrificial rituals. In those days, when an animal was to be sacrificed, water was sprinkled on its head. This made the head move — which was taken as the animal’s assent to what was to happen. Next came a high-pitched scream from the women who were present; and after the slaying came a divvying up of the flesh. This wasn’t like a barbecue, where everybody got a rib; the carcass was cut up into equal portions, regardless of whether it was fat or lean, shoulder or rump. Who got which bit was decided by taking lots (as were the tickets to the Jackson memorial). All this sounds like a metaphor. Surely we don’t really cut up celebrities as though they are animals? Maybe not, but aspects of the ritual crop up in our own dealings with people. The detail of Beethoven’s hair is a significant one. A priest would snip off some tuft of the beast. Walter Burkert, the great authority on ancient sacrifice, writes of this moment: “Blood has not yet been spilt and no pain whatsoever has been inflicted, but the inviolability of the sacrificial animal has been abolished irreversibly.” As with Beethoven’s hair, or, for that matter, Spears’s (which, after it was sheared off, briefly appeared on eBay), or victims at the scaffold or the guillotine, this is the moment when we can say, “They’re ours”.
And if the connection seems forced, then it is a connection that the Greeks made themselves, especially in their tragedies. In Aeschylus’ play Agamemnon, the chorus compares the doomed Cassandra to an ox going to sacrifice. Euripides explores the idea even more clearly. His play Iphigenia at Aulis is a version of what happened when Agamemnon was deciding to sacrifice his daughter so that the gods would send the winds that would take the invading Greek fleet to Troy. At first Iphigenia is incensed, but when she has lived with the idea she starts to accept it. She doesn’t want her individual life to obstruct the collective glory of the Greek army, and the chorus assures her that she will be glorious too: “And for this, immortal fame, / Virgin, shall attend your name.”
This is a moment that explains how fame works. Somebody remarkable, or royal, or beautiful, or gifted, is celebrated by those around him or her. Then those devotees dispatch the famous person somehow. We have a range of ways to get rid of celebrities. Killing them is perhaps the most extreme, but it happens: think of Socrates, or Caesar. The Ancient Greeks would ostracise their great men — a process by which they would exile a dignitary for ten years. When the Athenians banished the Olympic victor Megacles, the poet Pindar wrote: “I grieve that fine deeds are repaid with envy.”
Allowing the famous to live in selfdestructive luxury is another method. In his enormous study of ritual and sacrifice, The Golden Bough, which he published in 1890, Sir James Frazer managed to compile many examples of human beings going to the altar having enjoyed a set period of feasting and pleasure, from Aztec Mexico to Ancient Rome. Ever since, we have been able to follow ruinous hedonism in stars such as Amy Winehouse or Lord Byron. Another way to get rid of them is to forget all about them: the beauty, or the talent, or the athletic fitness that made someone glorious will inevitably fade as death approaches, and in our affections we will replace one luminary with another.
The observation that “we build them up to knock them down” has become a truism, and something we say in self-reproach, but it’s hard to see how else fame could operate. Many of the sacrifices and slaughters that Frazer collects take the form of “killing the king” — of removing or destroying someone a tribe has previously held in awe. Communities would consider these necessary acts in order to rejuvenate the leadership that drew them together. Frazer provides an account of the rain-maker who is central to the Dinka tribe that lived in the south of Sudan, and tells us that this figure is never allowed to die “a natural death of sickness or old age”; if so, “the tribe would suffer disease and famine”. So, when he feels his power fading, he allows his people to bury him alive. At its purest, the fame ritual works when the famous know that their time has come and they yield their place to the next magical personality.
Does Jackson fit into this pattern? Did we kill the King of Pop? Well, it’s difficult to fit him into any pattern, and if people felt that they had taken any part in the collective, ritualised offering-up of Michael Jackson, they’d probably want to wash their hands of it. Nor can we see him giving up like the Dinka rain-maker; he was all set to make an audacious comeback, after all. And yet there was something desperate about the way in which he clung to youth — both his own and other people’s — and sought to preserve it in himself; and about his retreat into Neverland, the ranch with the otherworldly name that invokes the boy who would never grow up. It was as if he was staving off that moment when his own youth would pass and he would no longer be any use to the tribe. And that’s the part that fits a pattern. One of the most enduring images of Jackson will remain that of the pale figure with the misshapen eyes and the skin that barely covered his nose. It creepily conjures up Frazer’s discussion of Aztec sacrifice: “In ancient Mexico the human victims who personated gods were often flayed and their bloody skins worn by men who appear to have represented the dead deities come to life again.”
Fame: From the Bronze Age to Britney by Tom Payne is published by Vintage at £10 on August 6. To order it for £9 inc p&p call 0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst. Payne will be discussing his book at the Port Eliot Litfest today (Round Room, 4pm)