The stars were oddly aligned yesterday, weren't they?  Now, for some reason known only to the gods the storied King of Pop and the once and future angel* are forever linked in our minds. 

Unfortunately for Farrah, the brutal hierarchy of fame that had proved insurmountable in life came into play even in her death.  It was best put by Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News last night: "On this night when we were preparing a remembrance of Farrah Fawcett, suddenly word arrived from Southern California... that Michael Jackson had died." And that was the extent of his eulogy for Farrah.

But it's certainly understandable.  Farrah was a 70s teenage masturbation fantasy.  There's not much mystery in that.  Yes, later she did The Burning Bed, and her candidness in the face of her struggle with cancer, even if it was mixed with celebrity cheese, set her somewhat apart, but the arc of her career was familiar enough that it didn't ever quite transcend the banal.

Jackson was a prodigy (that's indisputable — his vocals for the Jackson Five were way beyond anything we've heard since from a child performer), and evolved into such a singular persona — he seemed the very embodiment of the pop archetype.  There is hardly anyone who doesn't know his name.  It was impossible not to have an opinion of him.   

Though it would be wrong to make comparisons, some might plausibly be made.  Both were trying to recapture a moment in time through bad plastic surgery — Fawcett: an actual moment (which makes her vanity less interesting, but her decline more poignant); Jackson: a dream moment he had obviously glimpsed and fixed his sights on long ago of sometime in a future where he would finally bend the world — and the flesh — to his will. 

Once Jackson's journey of physical transformation really took off, his music career was finished — he would coast on a limited repertoire of physical and vocal gestures, but not imbue them with the form or function of ritual.  They did not represent a creative obsession, but rather a marketing tool.  Brand Michael. 

The existential project of one of the world's most extreme make-overs eclipsed any and all other creative endeavors for him.  Was he on the cusp of a comeback?  No.  The music career was a means to a greater end.  All of the ups and downs of the typical pop career only disrupted a perfectly linear task whose end was immortality.  He was distilling, refining, in pursuit of that dream moment — that eternal moment — when he would finally become what he really was.

The rejection of the notion that what we are born with is what we must live with and the doomed attempt to transcend it — this hybrid quasi-religious American-dream pop-journey — complete with persecution complex — is what resonates so deeply with some, and why we can't simply write Michael Jackson off, even though his work has been lackluster and derivative since 1982.

In the end, neither Michael nor Farrah captured their moment, of course. And now, as fate would have it, they share this one.
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* A previous version of this post contained an off-color reference to Farrah's anal cancer, which was probably in very poor taste and was certainly very bad karma for me.  At any rate, I removed it.  For those who were offended, who obviously look to me as a paragon of good taste and decorum in the face of our ever tasteful and decorous pop culture, I offer my sincerest sympathies, and urge you to demand an anal pap at your next annual physical.