Michael Jackson's posthumous career has got off to a flyer. Thriller and two greatest hits packages each sold more than 100,000 copies in the US in the days immediately following his death. In the UK, 43 of his songs are in the top 200 singles, with the singer set to score his first number one in six years this weekend with “Man in the Mirror”.
It's no consolation for the felled King of Pop but his death has sparked the revival he hoped to achieve with those ill-fated comeback concerts in London. The King of Pop is dead, long live the King of Pop.
Like millions of others, I was moved to revisit his songs after he died, and even tried popping a few Jacko-style moves to “Thriller” in the privacy of my kitchen: lurching spins, malfunctioning moonwalks, uncoordinated grabs at the crotch. With luck the neighbours weren't watching.
Being reminded of Jackson at his peak brought home the loss. So did television footage showing the 11-year-old Michael singing The Jackson 5's irresistible “ABC”. Yet underneath the poignancy and nostalgia there was also a sneaky feeling of liberation, as if it were easier to enjoy the music now that a declining and troubled Jackson was no longer around to complicate it by association.
His death was premature but his artistic afterlife stretches ahead. An unfinished album he was making will presumably see the light of day. Any stray piece of Jacksoniana is liable to emerge: home-taped duets with Liza Minnelli, musical larks with Bubbles the chimp. Expect it all to appear in a “definitive” box set for Christmas.
The music industry is adept at recycling the past. Jackson joins a pantheon of revenant stars whose legacies have been adroitly exploited by record companies. The likes of Johnny Cash and the Notorious BIG are like great silver mines that continue yielding treasure long after their period of greatest activity. Slain rapper BIG had more hits posthumously than in life, while new Johnny Cash albums continue to appear almost six years after the country legend's death.
We can expect numerous posthumous releases under Jackson's name, yet no matter how opportunist they are the switch in focus back to his music will ultimately work to his advantage. The gargantuan peculiarities of his personal life will fade in memory while his songs continue to ring out afresh. When Madonna said in tribute to him that the “world has lost one of its greats, but his music will live on forever,” she was half-right. In Jackson's case the music won't just live on: it will thrive.
“Beginnings are always troublesome,” George Eliot said wisely, adding that “conclusions are the weak point of most authors.”
Seriously bad endings grate like toothache. All I remember of the 1990 Vietnam flick Jacob's Ladder is leaving the cinema with a bitter sense of being fleeced by a denouement that revealed the story as a dying US soldier's hallucination. The same wretched cliché roused soap fans' fury when Dallas brazenly redesignated an entire season of episodes as a dream in order to explain the cliff-hanger reappearance of the supposedly dead Bobby Ewing. Viewers deserted in droves.
Eliot, a keen practitioner of ambiguous endings in her novels, claimed that bad endings weren't just the result of bad writing, but that “some of the fault lies in the very nature of a conclusion, which is at best a negation”. A good book is finished with a pang of sadness as its world passes away: it is like a little death.
Attempts to bypass the mournful business of endings include James Joyce's circular linkage of opening and closing sentences in Finnegans Wake and the looping tones of minimalist composers such as Terry Riley. In my opinion, the only art form to have really solved the problem is the pop song.
There are those songs that end with a crash of drums, the dying whine of a guitar, a neat resolution of the beat. Others employ the trick of the fade-out, the action of the song continuing but the volume gradually decreasing, not so much ending the song as banishing the listener from it. The effect resembles a door slowly swinging shut on some ongoing scene of revelry, leaving us standing alone in silence outside.
The fade exists outside recorded music. It's used in films, as when Hannibal Lecter melts into holidaying crowds in the Caribbean at the end of The Silence of the Lambs. Even novels have attempted it: Bleak House, which opens with “Fog everywhere”, finishes on an unfinished sentence that constitutes a kind of foggy literary fade-out.
Pop songs are the true home of the fade-out, however. Admittedly laziness or lack of imagination frequently play a role, as in songs that march stolidly through verse and chorus before fading away through failure to imagine an ending. But the best possess a tantalising charm.
A personal favourite is Blur's “Coffee and TV”, which ends with guitar and keyboards in playful, unresolved dialogue as the volume reduces. It's as if it is continuing on in its merry way, with no ending in sight, while the listener is left behind, longing fruitlessly to join in. It is a teasing hint of an imaginary immortality. Once again the music lives on.