Up Against The Wall, Michael. Now, Spread 'em!

John McWhorter said he has been telling friends for fifteen years that Michael Jackson would not live past fifty, although he didn't expect to be so precisely on the mark. An overdose, a botched medical procedure, or maybe just something as fortuitous as a car accident.

That is, I sensed nothing as mundane as a death wish or as common as self-destructive tendencies. It just always seemed to me that there was something unreachably and definitively absent about the man. For all of the eclat, there seemed to be nothing actually there - surely, before long he would just blow away.

I was no more immune than anyone else to feeling a loss oddly incommensurate with the fundamental evanescence. I grew up hearing the boy-child version of Michael crooning the Jackson Five's hits in that creamy falsetto, and in college, he helped me cope with the drudgery of my dining hall job as one cut after another from Thriller became a hit and played endlessly on the P.A. system. Almost every song on that album had the precious quality of bearing hundreds of listens - to this day, who in America doesn't jump to the dance floor upon hearing the opening vamp of "Billie Jean"?

Apparently even Iraqis do: the New Yorker told us recently that Michael Jackson is preferred music among Iraqi prisoners. How many other American pop songs of 1983 get them moving? People not born in 1983 can do snippets of the dance Michael did in the marvelous Thriller video. Ever try to do a moonwalk? Even if you got kind of good at it, Michael Jackson doing it can still take your breath away.

In the early eighties there was a good deal of talk about him as the world's greatest entertainer - and it was a rare instance where the hype was more than that. People used to say it about Al Jolson - but the modern viewer is baffled as to what all the fuss was about. They said it about Sammy Davis, Jr. too - and while he holds up better than Jolson, nothing he did makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. With Michael, there was The Voice, The Moves, and a whole somehow greater than the sum of the parts.

The problem was that as he got older, parts seemed to be all there was; the whole became increasingly difficult to perceive. The skin bleaching was strange enough - and his telling Oprah that it was vitiligo and expecting to be believed even stranger. Here was a black man - and one who was a megastar — actually using the kinds of products that look so peculiar and degrading in ancient black newspaper advertisements today. And then the facial surgery, which made him look not only whiter but more feminine.

The question, which he never even ventured an answer to, was why. Who was this personnage supposed to be? White? Gay? Perhaps we were to allow that he was just being "him." But leaving unanswered just who that "him" was supposed to be was, most charitably interpreted, too far ahead of our times. It left him a faintly gruesome cipher.

Or, why the high voice? As males mature their voices deepen: "High Talkers" of the kind depicted in the Seinfeld episode are vanishingly rare. Michael's castrato-style vocal tone was an affectation, more alteration, as it were, although likely one that became so much a habit for him that it was, in essence, him. How many men do you know who talk in a light falsetto 24/7?

One cannot help noticing a possible connection with Jackson's vaunted identification with children and his desire to inhabit the realm of childhood as an adult. And plenty of us are kids at heart - but most of us don't talk like them.

Here we will recall certain unsavory allegations as to how concretely and in what fashion Jackson was interested in connecting with children, especially non-female ones. It is unnecessary to dwell on the issue at this juncture, but what we did know is that he went through decades of adulthood without any outwardly apparent normal romantic relationship with anyone.



His relationships with his wives were rather oddly formal and brief - when Lisa-Marie Presley made sure we knew that their relationship included sexual relations, what was key was that she would feel the need to let us know that.

Never did we see Jackson with her or the other wife cavorting and consorting in the fashion of Brangelina or, in better days, Jon and Kate. These were "wives," not wives - recalling in Michael's earlier days his purportedly "dating" Brooke Shields. Today having become real to us with her memoir of postpartum depression, Shields back then was a rather saliently blank model and sort-of actress - for him, a kind of paper doll, i.e. "date."

Who did Michael Jackson really connect with? He was not one for hanging out with men or women of his age group, for example. Ask most people who Michael Jackson's best friend was and the answer would be Elizabeth Taylor. However, open up your laptop and start with a blank page. Your job is to script a scene between Jackson and Liz Taylor. How would you begin? What in the world did they ever say to each other?

During an interview with Barbara Walters, holding hands with then-wife Presley, Jackson mentioned that his father had sometimes scared him so badly that he regurgitated into his mouth. The childhood was horrific, in a way that would have left most people scarred. Jackson's response was apparently to seek a childhood he never had - but doing so as a grown man can only mean spending your life playing a part, even if you no longer know you're doing it.

It was sad to see. The essence of Michael Jackson as an actual human being was so elusive that it was especially flabbergasting to hear him, when making a public cri de coeur against his prosecution for child molestation, actually referring to something as immediate as an examination of his penis. More typical was his appearance on an early episode of the Simpsons - in the guise of an obese white man — and uncredited. Concealment as always, not really there or of this world, albeit in the world spotlight.

This quality of his was such that his career was likely over long ago. Thriller was perhaps the last moment when hit pop music for people beyond tween-age could be so basically innocent and unprobing of the individual soul. Even back then, part of the charm was the arrangement - his vocal skills acknowledged, Jackson didn't write or orchestrate that opening vamp to "Billie Jean" nor did he create the dense festival of sonic joys under "P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing),"which are certainly part of the reason I have now purchased Thriller three times.

But even by Bad in 1987, Michael's crotch-grabbing in the video of the title song was a "bad" move indeed. It was fake - looking more like Diana Ross every year, he looked about as plausible taking a page from increasingly popular rappers as Bonnie Raitt would have. It wasn't him - at a time when pop was more and more about exploring the self. As time went by the hit singles were fewer and farther between. "Scream" from the HIStory album in 1995 was the last song of his that got around in any real way.

Six years later when Invincible never really rang the bell in the old way, Jackson interestingly cried racism (against Tommy Mottola). But if anything, the problem was that by then the question as to his own blackness was decidedly abstract. Or at least, he wasn't "real" as it was put by then. By 2001 black rappers were all over the pop charts with cuts about themselves, in da club, in da car, in da hood, in da honeez, all up in dat bizness, whatever - rap is all about the "I" as some more literary-minded aficionados have it.

But "I" is exactly what Michael Jackson never wanted us to see, if he even knew what it was himself. Interestingly, a Michael Jackson circa 1980 would be a smash on American Idol today - but would likely fail to get much of anywhere afterward like Taylor Hicks and Ruben Studdard. Winning over a cross-section spectrum of American call-in voters today requires a certain faceless, generic quality that does not translate into stardom in the real-world market of niches and attitude. Jackson was on his way to becoming a nostalgia act.

Michael Jackson's was an entirely constructed self. The temptation to call this "quintessentially American" in the vein of the story of our President's quest for self-definition must be resisted. The self that Michael Jackson constructed was a mask. Fittingly, Jackson was last officially sighted in public through the window of his van, wearing, as apparently was his custom, a veil over his mouth - i.e. a mask over the mask.

Michelangelo said that when he sculpted the David statue, David was already inside the block of marble and his job was just to take away what was not David. Jackson worked against nature's endowment just as diligently, but surely the pale wraith he became was not something that had been waiting to see the light of day. Rather, what Jackson seemed to find was a negation, a mangling of personhood - what else can we say of someone attending a court date for child molestation in his pajamas? The irony is that despite this man's towering stature as a keystone of American popular music's history, there is surely a part of all of us that sees the man as more fortunate resting in peace. (Jackson: Man Who Wasn't There by John McWhorter)

Michael Joseph Jackson was an American recording artist, entertainer, and businessman. The seventh child of the Jackson family, he debuted on the professional music scene at the age of 11 as a member of The Jackson 5 and began a solo career in 1971 while still a member of the group. Referred to as the "King of Pop" in subsequent years, five of his solo studio albums have become some of the world's best-selling records: Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991) and HIStory (1995).

In the early 1980s, he became a dominant figure in popular music and the first African-American entertainer to amass a strong crossover following on MTV. The popularity of his music videos airing on MTV, such as "Beat It", "Billie Jean" and Thriller—credited for transforming the music video into an art form and a promotional tool—helped bring the relatively new channel to fame. Videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" made Jackson an enduring staple on MTV in the 1990s. With stage performances and music videos, Jackson popularized a number of physically complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk. His distinctive musical sound and vocal style influenced hip hop, pop and contemporary R&B artists.

Jackson has donated and raised millions of dollars for beneficial causes through his foundation, charity singles and support of 39 charities. Other aspects of his personal life, including his changing appearance and behavior, generated significant controversy, damaging his public image. Though he was accused of child sexual abuse in 1993, the criminal investigation was closed due to lack of evidence and Jackson was not charged. The singer has experienced health concerns since the early 1990s and conflicting reports regarding the state of his finances since the late 1990s. Jackson married twice and fathered three children, all of which caused further controversy. In 2005, Jackson was tried and acquitted of further sexual abuse allegations and several other charges.

One of the few artists to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, his other achievements include multiple Guinness World Records—including one for "Most Successful Entertainer of All Time"—13 Grammy Awards, 13 number one singles in his solo career—more than any other male artist in the Hot 100 era—and the sales of over 750 million albums worldwide. Cited as one of the world's most famous men, Jackson's highly publicized personal life, coupled with his successful career, has made him a part of popular culture for almost four decades.

Inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984, Jackson has had a notable impact on music and culture throughout the world. He broke down racial barriers, transformed the art of the music video and paved the way for modern pop music in his own country. Jackson's work, distinctive musical sound and vocal style have influenced hip hop, pop and R&B artists, including Mariah Carey, Usher,Britney Spears,Justin Timberlake and R. Kelly.For much of his career, he had an "unparalleled" level of worldwide influence over the younger generation through his musical and humanitarian contributions.

Throughout his career he received numerous honors and awards, including the World Music Awards' Best-Selling Pop Male Artist of the Millennium, the American Music Award's Artist of the Century Award and the Bambi Pop Artist of the Millennium Award. He is a double-inductee of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, once as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1997 and later as a solo artist in 2001. Jackson was also an inductee of the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2002. His awards include multiple Guinness World Records (eight in 2006 alone), 13 Grammy Awards, 13 number one singles in his solo career—more than any other male artist in the Hot 100 era—and the sale of over 750 million albums worldwide, making him the world's best selling male pop artist.

Queues for a Michael Jackson concert in Berlin in June 1988.He is characterized as "an unstoppable juggernaut, possessed of all the tools to dominate the charts seemingly at will: an instantly identifiable voice, eye-popping dance moves, stunning musical versatility and loads of sheer star power". In the mid-1980s, Time described Jackson as "the hottest single phenomenon since Elvis Presley". By 1990, Vanity Fair had already cited Jackson as the most popular artist in the history of show business. Daily Telegraph writer Tom Utley called him an "extremely important figure in the history of popular culture" and a "genius". His total lifetime earnings from royalties on his solo recordings and music videos, revenue from concerts and endorsements have been estimated at $500 million; some analysts have speculated that his music catalog holdings could be worth billions of dollars. Cited as one of the world's most famous men, Jackson's highly publicized personal life, coupled with his successful career, has made him a part of popular culture for almost four decades.

The King of Pop, Michael Jackson is dead. He took to the stage as a child star and went on to set the world dancing to the thumping rhythms of his music for decades, died Thursday, TMZ website reported. He was 50.

"We've just learned Michael Jackson has died," TMZ said.

"Michael suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon and paramedics were unable to revive him. We're told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back," the entertainment site said.

There was no official confirmation of the reported death and spokespersons for Jackson could not be reached for comment.

Earlier, the Los Angeles Times said that the singer had been rushed to a Los Angeles-area hospital by fire department paramedics who found him not breathing when they arrived at the singer's home.

The newspaper said paramedics performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation at the scene before taking him to the UCLA Medical Center hospital.

Jackson had been due to start a series of comeback concerts in London on July 13 running until March 2010. The singer, whose hits include "Thriller" and "Billie Jean," had been rehearsing in the Los Angeles area for the past two months.

The shows for the 50 London concerts sold out within hours of going on sale in March.

Jackson started out as a child star in the band "The Jackson 5" more than 40 years ago.

He has lived as a virtual recluse since his acquittal in 2005 on charges of child molestation.

There have been concerns about Jackson's health in recent years but the promoters of the London shows, AEG Live, said in March that Jackson had passed a 4-1/2 hour physical examination with independent doctors.

Thurgood Marshall. Mr Civil Rights.


Thurgood Marshall did more to improve the life of the damned, the
dispossessed, and the downtroddened than any other attorney in the 20th
century. He fought for the underdog in American society as an attorney
and as a justice of the U. S. Supreme Court. As chief counsel for the
NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund for over 25 years, he fought
Jim Crow segregation in the snake pits and hell holes of the solid
South.


(Left to Right, Jackie Robinson, with Thurgood Marshal, Special Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Inc. Fund, and Roy Wilkins, Executive Director of the NAACP)

In July 1944, LT Jackie Robinson was riding on a bus on the Army base at Camp Hood, Texas with a light complexioned Black woman, the wife of a fellow Black officer, he was asked to move to the back of the bus. Jackie Robinson refused and was arrested by U. S. Army military police. Later LT Robinson faced court-martial charges for refusing to move to the back of bus. He felt threatened.
Jackie Robinson wrote to the NAACP for "advice and counsel". Assistant Special Counsel Edward Dudley wrote back, "Please be advised that we will be unable to furnish you with an attorney in the event that you are court-martialed. However, if following the court-martial you feel that you have received an unfair sentence, kindly communicate with us at your earliest convenience, enclosing a copy of the court record, and we will be happy to review same in order to determine whether we can make representations onyour behalf before the Judge Advocate General's Board of Review in Washington, D.C..(Jackie Robinson, An Intimate Portrait, by Rachel Robinson and Lee Daniels,p. 31, published 2009, by Abrams Books, NY, NY.)

Thurgood Marshal won 29 of 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court; and,
he should have won all of them. In a perfect and just world, he would
have. His record of successful cases before the high court stands
today unparalleled in American judicial history.
President John F. Kennedy appointed Marshall to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 1961. A group of Democratic Party Senators led by Mississippi's James Eastland held up his confirmation, so he served for the first several months under a recess appointment. Marshall remained on that court until 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him Solicitor General.

President Lyndon
baines Johnson appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1967 where he
served for 34 years.



When he traveled in the South, Thurgood Marshall never confronted "Jim
Crow" headon; that is, he never sat in railway stations or lunch
counters reserved "for whites only". However, in forays down South he
could not always avoid person danger. In 1946 in Columbia, Tennessee,
along with other defense counsels, he drove 200 miles round-trip daily
from Nashville,TN to the trial in Colunbia,TN. There was no safe place
for a Black lawyer to stay in Columbia, TN. At one point police
officers picked him up and took him alone in their car, and charged
him with drunk driving. Carl Rowan wrote a detailed newspaper article
about how the police tried to lead Attorney Thurgood Marshall to the
banks of a nearby river where a lynch mob had a noose hanging from a
tree, ready to lynch him. Brave armed Black citizens came to his
rescue. A courageous white magistrate smelled his breath and
proclaimed him sober and he was able to return to Nashvill. (Crusaders
in the Courts, by Jack Greenberg, 1994, Basic Books, Harper Collins,
p. 31,32)

In the Jim Crow segregated South, he was so revered in Black America
that people mostly spoke of him in whispered tones. He is easily the
most important American of this century. He rose from an humble birth
to a position higher than any Black American before him. He built his
reputation slowly in jerkwater southern towns where he was outnumbered
but never outmatched and never outgunned in the legal arena. In
virtually every case he was fighting for the right against a twisted
white justice system administered by southern judges and sheriffs who
had few second thoughts about beating in black heads.

Thurgood Marshall was the only Black leader in America during the
Civil Rights era who could say that he defeated segregation where it
really counted; that was, in the courts. He legal strategy was based
on the U. S. Constitution. He forced civil and constitutional rights
to be extended equally to the poorest and blackest American citizens
as well as poor whites. The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King would
never have won his first victory, the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott,
if Thurgood Marshall and his legal team had not first won a Supreme
Court ruling outlawing segregation on the city buses. Battles were
fought in the streets, but the victories were won in the courts.

Also, it was Thurgood Marshall who argued the case of Brown v. Bd of
Education before the Supreme Court. This case ended segregation in
public schools.

Thomas G. Krattenmaker, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown
University Law Center, said it best. He said, "when I think of great
American lawyers, I think of Thurgood Marshall,, Abe Lincoln and
Daniel Webster. In the 20th Century only Earl Warren approaches
Thurgood Marshall. Marshall is certainly the most important American
lawyer of the 20th Century."

Drew Days, a former law professor at Yale University Law School, said
that "Thurgood Marshall was the living embodiment of how far we as
Americans have come on the major concern in our history-race- and how
far we still have to go. He was the conscience of this nation. In the
law, he remains our supreme conscience."
(Thurgood Marshall, Justice For All, by R. Goldman and D. Gallen, 1992
bt Caroll & Graf Publishers, Inc, Ny,Ny, 141,142.)










The Black middleclass developed as a result of the efforts of Thurgood Marshall. Those who drunk from the cup of plenty and savoured the elixir of success owe it to the drive, dedication and determination of Thurgood Marshall.

Koko Taylor, a Force of Nature has been silenced!
CHICAGO – Koko Taylor, a sharecropper's daughter whose regal bearing and powerful voice earned her the sobriquet "Queen of the Blues," has died after complications from surgery. She was 80.

Taylor died Wednesday, 3 June 2009, at Northwestern Memorial Hospital about two weeks after having surgery for a gastrointestinal bleed, said Marc Lipkin, director of publicity for her record label, Alligator Records, which made the announcement.

"The passion that she brought and the fire and the growl in her voice when she sang was the truth," blues singer and musician Ronnie Baker Brooks said Wednesday. "The music will live on, but it's much better because of Koko. It's a huge loss."

Taylor's career stretched more than five decades. While she did not have widespread mainstream success, she was revered and beloved by blues aficionados, and earned worldwide acclaim for her work, which including the best-selling song and tunes such as "What Kind of Man is This" and "I Got What It Takes."

Taylor appeared on national television numerous times, and was the subject of a PBS documentary and had a small part in director David Lynch's "Wild at Heart."

"What a loss to the blues world," said Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy. "She was one of the last of the greats of Chicago and really did what she could to"Wang Dang Doodle" keep the blues alive here, like I'm trying to do now."

In the course of her career, Taylor was nominated seven times for Grammy awards and won in 1984.

Taylor last performed on May 7 in Memphis, Tenn., at the Blues Music Awards.

"She was still the best female blues singer in the world a month ago," said Jay Sieleman, executive director of The Blues Foundation based in Memphis. "In 1950s Chicago she was the woman singing the blues. At 80 years old she was still the queen of the blues."

Born Cora Walton just outside Memphis, Taylor said her dream to become a blues singer was nurtured in the cotton fields outside her family's sharecropper shack.

"I used to listen to the radio, and when I was about 18 years old, B.B. King was a disc jockey on WDIA and he had a radio program, 15 minutes a day, over in West Memphis, Arkansas and he would play the blues," she said in a 1990 interview. "I would hear different records and things by Muddy Waters, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Sonnyboy Williams and all these people, you know, which I just loved."

Although her father encouraged her to sing only gospel music, Cora and her siblings would sneak out back with their homemade instruments and play the blues. With one brother accompanying on a guitar made out of bailing wire and nails and one brother on a fife made out of a corncob, she began on the path to blues woman.

Orphaned at 11, Koko — a nickname she earned because of an early love of chocolate — at age 18 moved to Chicago with her soon-to-be-husband, the late Robert "Pops" Taylor, in search for work.

"I was so glad to get out of the cotton patch and stop pickin' cotton, I wouldn't of cared who come by and said, 'I'll take you to Chicago,'" Taylor recalled in a 2004 interview with The Associated Press.

When she first entered the city, she thought, "Good God, this must be heaven," Taylor said.

Setting up house on the South Side, Koko found work as a cleaning woman for a wealthy family living in the city's northern suburbs. At night and on weekends, she and her husband, who would later become her manager, frequented Chicago's clubs, where many the artists heard on the radio performed.

"I started going to these local clubs, me and my husband, and everybody got to know us," Taylor said. "And then the guys would start letting me sit in, you know, come up on the bandstand and do a tune."

The break for Tennessee-born Taylor came in 1962, when arranger/composer Willie Dixon, impressed by her voice, got her a Chess recording contract and produced several singles (and two albums) for her, including the million-selling 1965 hit, "Wang Dang Doodle," which she called silly, but which launched her recording career.

From Chicago blues clubs, Taylor took her raucous, gritty, good-time blues on the road to blues and jazz festivals around the nation, and into Europe. After the Chess label folded, she signed with Alligator Records.

In most years, she performed at least 100 concerts a year.

"Blues is my life," Taylor once said. "It's a true feeling that comes from the heart, not something that just comes out of my mouth. Blues is what I love, and blues is what I always do."

In addition to performing, she operated a Chicago nightclub, which closed in November 2001 because her daughter, club manager Joyce Threatt, developed severe asthma and could no longer manage a smoky nightclub.

Survivors include her daughter; husband Hays Harris; grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Funeral arrangements will be announced, the label said.

Taylor was a mentor and inspiration to the next generation of female blues singers, said 30-year-old blues singer Shemekia Copeland, who first met Taylor when she was 15 at a club in New York.

"When I saw her, I couldn't speak," said Copeland, the daughter of late blues artist Johnny Copeland. "You can't ask a woman who sings blues right now who influenced them and not say, 'Koko Taylor.' If she didn't pave the way for us we couldn't do this."