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RayBramford
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Post subject: This is timely!
 Posted: Feb 08, 2008 - 12:44 PM
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Joined: Feb 10, 2005
Posts: 813
Status: Offline
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.....given I compared some of my similarities with Jacko at the weekend.
This just came into my inbox:
thriller 25
Twenty-five years ago, we watched a man walking down a deserted street, the paving stones glowing with light with each step he took. This was no ordinary man. This was a superstar about to become a megastar. This was Michael Jackson, shortly after releasing Thriller, an album that has now sold 104 million copies worldwide: the best-selling album of all time. There’s every chance there’s a copy ‘knocking about’ somewhere in your house, even if it’s only on cassette.
This Monday, the record company will – perhaps inevitably – release a special anniversary edition, Thriller 25, featuring both remixed and previously unreleased tracks. But no amount of repackaging can restore to us the innocence with which we listened to the original. A lot has changed since 1983. Jackson is now 50 and wears reading glasses. We are all older and, if not wiser, certainly more cynical. And we have been given more insights into his world than has been good for us, and surely more than has been good for him. We’ve been fed a steady diet of speculation about his nose, his skin colour, his palatial mansion, his sexual activities, his pet chimpanzee. We now remember him less for his music and more for the time he dangled his baby son over a hotel balcony.
Where did it all go wrong?
Were we offered some Faustian bargain with Jackson (and, later, Britney Spears and others) that meant we could no longer simply appreciate gifts of entertainment but needed to possess those who presented them? And they, unable to resist the demands of fame, gave themselves to us. Then we saw their fragility and were encouraged to deride them; they were left as hollow people and none of us was satisfied. Is this the price of fame, a price we all pay? And is this something akin to what Jesus was talking about when he spoke of how we might gain the whole world yet lose the very core of who we are – our soul (Mark 8:36)?
Our countercultural plea to our heroes may well need to be: ‘Please, don’t forfeit your soul! That will leave us all poorer.’ After all, isn’t it better for us to be content with grateful appreciation of these people’s gifts – and better for them to save their life for the One for whom alone – Mark 8:35 – it is worth losing it?
Neil Hudson |
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Preston Vineyard :: A door of hope
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