But what did he do this year to earn the top honor? That's the beauty of it. He didn't do anything except open up his Neverland Valley Ranch gates and invite a BBC news crew in to tape his daily routine. In doing so, he reminded everyone just how amusingly and astonishingly fucked up he truly is.
Yes, you sat riveted in front of your TV set for two hours as some David Frost wannabe named Martin Bashir followed an international megastar as he climbed trees and purchased gaudy bling even Liberace would find tacky. You also watched the footage of Jackson dangling his swaddled newborn from a balcony in Berlin. Yes, you saw all of that, your jaw numb from constantly falling on the floor, your eyes transfixed at the glorious dysfunction of it all, your brain trying to take in all the madness at once. And the questions you must've asked yourself as you winced and cringed at every wrong turn Jackson made: Does he honestly expect us to believe that he's had only two nose jobs? Does he really believe he's Peter Pan? How the fuck could he name his kid Blanket?
It's a testament to Jackson and his cornucopia of eccentricities that he can still keep a nation in thrall even when he has absolutely nothing to promote or publicize. No CD. No music videos. No 3-D movie playing exclusively at Disney World. Just him, at his kooky, nutty prime.
Jackson can gin up more controversy with a two-hour British documentary, shown over here last spring on ABC as Living with Michael Jackson, than Eminem could muster with his last two albums. (Maybe it's because we all believe that Eminem, deep down, isn't really that disturbed, while Michael constantly furnishes us with documented proof that he is.)
It's even more amazing considering that around that time, pop music icons left and right found themselves mired in conflicts that were far more career-shattering: Pete Townshend arrested on suspicion of collecting Internet child porn; R. Kelly also arrested on child porn charges (again!). And then there was Phil Spector, who after practically half a century of threatening to shoot and/or kill everyone he's come in contact with (including ex-wife Ronnie Spector, John Lennon and various Ramones), now stands accused of having carried out one of his threats.
But somehow the Jackson documentary managed to eclipse all of those scandals, and he did it without committing a single crime that anybody knows of. You see, everyone has a special place in their hearts for Michael, the maddest genius of them all. After all, this is a person we have literally seen grow up, from a shy, talented boy from Gary, Indiana, to a shy, talented man from -- well, wherever the hell he thinks he's from right now. So whenever there's fresh tabloid fodder about Jacko, the public greets it with a combination of shock, amusement and disappointment. How can somebody we've seen mature from the baby-brother kid singer into the undisputed King of Pop slide into his middle-age years crazier than a shithouse rat?
"Why, Michael, why?" people must've screamed at their TV sets when they saw him escort his children from a hotel, wearing masks that look like they've been stolen from the set of Eyes Wide Shut, or when they heard him declaring that he still enjoys "sharing" his bed with children that aren't his own. It often appears as though he's engaged in some kind of cold war-style "crazy race" with Prince, his equally reclusive, longtime pop-culture rival and fellow member of the self-appointed royalty.
But all of that makes us lose sight of what's important here. Sure, it's easy to call Jackson a raging freak, a 44-year-old man-child who is the living embodiment of arrested development. And maybe it's fun to talk about how Michael has morphed into a giddier, high-pitched, kid-loving version of Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard (he certainly looks like an old, washed-up hag nowadays), but you can't say it's been enjoyable seeing Jackson's musical credibility disintegrate along with it. To paraphrase what Rolling Stone's resident black guy Touré said on the NBC "news" special Michael Jackson Unmasked, we can take Michael Jackson the eccentric, as long as Michael Jackson the musical genius comes with the deal. And the latter Michael hasn't been a part of the package for a long, long time.
