The South Wing

the ruins movie

There are a lot of crotchety blowhards in the media who like to tag younger generations with something pithy: Beatniks. Boomers. Generation X. But the current group of oldies are having a hard time with people born in the ’80s. Are they Generation Y? The Me Generation? Millenials? Boomerangs? Lazy Good-For-Nothing-niks?

The biggest impediment for otherwise keen labelers when it comes to this lost generation is that kids born circa 1980 are radically different, culturally, than those born 1990 and later. I was born in 1981; I didn’t even hear of the Internet until I was in 7th grade (and didn’t really use it until a year later). My youngest brother, born in 1990, came of age with the Internet. There is a radical difference in how we learned to approach, absorb and collect information, and this irrevocably demarcates one generation of Americans from another.

But there’s another factor separating us ’80s kids from those dewy-eyed young’uns from the ’90s: Michael Jackson.

When MJ died today, suddenly and of cardiac arrest at the age of 50, millions of people around the world began mourning the loss of their King of Pop while others morbidly started cheering the death of a child molester. For my generation, though, Jackson wasn’t just a tabloid joke. He was our childhood.

Growing up, Michael Jackson was inescapable. Turn on the radio, and “Thriller,” “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” or “Bad” would be playing. Flip on the television, and there was MJ, dictating the terms of the music video to all musicians, videographers, and creative-types–and if you weren’t watching MTV, MJ would show up hawking Pepsi. Go to Chuck E. Cheese’s for a party and if they weren’t playing MJ over the in-house sound system, then Chuck E. and Jasper and Mr. Munch were parodying one of his videos on the monitors placed around the Galaga and Skee-Ball machines. Oh, and speaking of parodies, let’s not forget “Weird” Al Yankovic and “Fat” and “Eat It.” You ain’t fat! You ain’t nothin’! You ain’t nothin’!!!

Kids everywhere tried perfecting the “Thriller” dance and the Moonwalk to impress friends and members of the opposite sex. We bought albums, cassettes, cassingles, T-shirts, toys, posters, and video games, and obsessed over when the full version of that MJ movie with the rad “Smooth Criminal” video was going to air. To this day, whenever “Smooth Criminal” is played at a wedding or club I try to mimic that epic tilting move MJ and his dancers do in that video, and every time I’m dumbfounded that it’s humanly possible to tilt so far without falling.

Michael Jackson is forever imprinted on the make-up, memory, and–dare I say–soul of those of us who grew up in the early-to-mid-’80s. He was culture–regardless if you were a fan of his music. I was always more partial to Prince, in my generation’s version of Beatles vs. Stones, but there was no denying MJ’s moves, talent, and effect on the world around you.

But for the next generation, the one my youngest brother belongs to, Michael Jackson isn’t the King of Pop. He’s Jacko, the King of Tabloids. Jacko helped create the modern American tabloid apparatus (along with Princess Di and OJ Simpson), and his cultural impact is ignominious and infamous and scandalous.

He’s the eccentric freak who dyed his skin and got too much plastic surgery. He’s the recluse who holed himself up in his bizarro Neverland Ranch with Bubbles, his pet monkey, and llamas and roller coasters and possibly Elizabeth Taylor and Marlon Brando.

Jacko is the accused pedophile who lured kids to his ranch and took advantage of them. He’s the weirdo dad who named his child Blanket and covered all of his kids’ faces with surgical masks and dangled one of them off a German hotel balcony. He’s the horror show whose nose fell of during one his endless court proceedings.

The King of Pop was a positive force on culture; Jacko a gross, sad, exploited celebrity past his prime. MJ in the ’80s was an icon, someone kids could listen to and watch and say with all sincerity, “I want to do that when I grow up!” MJ in the ’90s was a laughingstock, fodder for cheap and uninspired late-night talk-show jokes, and the antithesis of a role model.

I don’t know how much clearer a line in the generational sand you can find that the one separating the two sides of Michael Jackson’s career. On one side is Generation MJ; on the other… the Millenials?

Yes, Michael Jackson was strange and weird and eccentric and out there and possibly from another planet. But my memories — my generation’s memories — aren’t just tabloid headlines sleazed up to catch the eye of the grocery store shopper. They’re of anxiously waiting for the premiere of the new video; they’re of watching him perform on the MTV Video Awards; they’re of trying to find the best shoes in which to do the Moonwalk.

Michael Jackson’s latter-day troubles are inseparable from his legacy. But so is his impact on me and an entire generation of kids. To us his sudden death is devastating, not only because it means we’ll never get that long-promised comeback, but because it signals something profound: the end of our youth.