And the whole world has to answer right now

[venta]

A variable morning, so far. As soon as I arrived in work I was offered an apple-based pastry. Well, jointly offered with onebyone, so I had to share it, but half a pastry is better than no bread.

Things went downhill then, though, when I realised there was no Marmite in the kitchen. My toast remained resolutely non-evil. There wasn't even any marmelade. I had to put blackcurrant jam on my toast. Furthermore, ach made a truly (and uncharacteristically) nasty pot of tea, which further detracted from my breakfast experience.

Life has improved slightly since then, though. Pot of tea II (made by me) is much better, and I've just been brought a chocolate cookie from the biscuit tin upstairs.

OK, now I've updated you on my comestibles for the morning, on to the real issue:

Michael Jackson's on trial for sex offences against children at present. If you don't know that, er, well done for being even more oblivious to the news than I usually am.

Although actually, now I come to think of it, Radio 2 news managed to avoid mentioning it at all this morning, even in their newspaper-roundup. Good for them. Though I did have to hear quite a lot about the state of the M20, and Kent in general.

However, Jackson's been doing quite a good job of getting in the news at present. The coverage I've heard so far has been suggesting that things look a little bleak for him. If he is guilty (or, more accurately, if he is convicted), then paedophiliac crimes are something which that wise animal, The Public, tends to find very hard to forgive.

So far, radio stations that I've caught have mostly been taking the piss out of the case, and out of Jackson (not difficult), but not really coming down strongly on one side or the other. I want to know if radio stations are still playing his records - can anyone report any hearings of Jackson records in the wild since the case started ?

I guess, in theory, we've already had this dilemma with Gary Glitter[*], but I'm not sure I spent much time listening to stations which played Glitter Band records anyway. In fact, I'm not even sure I'd recognise any.

I remember someone commenting that they were surprised, given the controversy, that end-of-year figures last year showed that Jackson's music was selling well. I think it was either one of the earlier albums that featured high in the chart, or a best-of. I had a theory to account for this, which I believe everyone else dismissed:

Michael Jackson is, in my mind, two people. There is the artist of the 80s, who presented us with albums like Bad and Thriller and danced like a demon. A little odd, certainly, but harmless and entertaining and the purveyor of fine pop.

Then there is the current Jackson, who's veered from eccentric into lunatic. He's a living caricature of himself, made a plastic doll by surgery and a monster by the tabloids. At some point (in my mind, around the time of Black and White) his music vanished off into the leftfield and hasn't been seen in Credibility Street since.

I simply don't connect the two. If someone suggested I ought to boycott Jackson's music on moral grounds because of the current furore, I'd probably feel quite happy buying a copy of Off The Wall. To me, they're just not the same person. Is this dichotomy peculiar to me, or do other people share it ?

[*] "he's a bad, bad man"

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Buy the decent Jackson albums secondhand

I'd say that if you're going to boycott the purchase of something, you generally shouldn't buy it secondhand either. Of course it depends on the reason for the boycott, but if it's to prevent the owner getting the money, then the fact that you buy one secondhand could very easily cause someone else, who looks for it secondhand and fails to find that copy because you bought it, to buy it firsthand instead.

Trade in secondhand unethical goods also in general encourages the introduction of new goods into the market, which is why for example the CITES ban on international ivory trading includes secondhand ivory. That's a bit less of an issue with CDs, of course.

[smiorgan.livejournal.com]

I'd support shooting Michael Jackson so I could extract his tusks, of course.