Elvis Has Just Left The Building

Zappa! thou should'st be living at this hour.

Satire tends to stop at the water's edge when it comes to the recent death of the good, the bad and the ugly. Jade Goody, of whom there was much to be said to the detriment, still flutters in angel's wings with a halo, and now there is another angel (possibly black, possibly white) fluttering beside her in the firmament. How wrong was Shakespeare when he wrote that "The evil men do lives after them; / The good is oft interred with their bones."

Frank Zappa, of course, also died prematurely: shortly before his fifty-third birthday. Unlike those of Goody and Jackson his life was not beset with even the shadow of scandal, but such was his relentless irreverence that he was minded to scourge the famous even when more prudent tongues fell silent. Back when the worst thing you could say about Michael Jackson was that he had too much plastic surgery, Zappa sang about it. Almost certainly, he would have sung about the other stuff as well.

And why not?

My sticking point with Jackson is not that he shares a sub-genre of adolescent comedy with Gary Glitter but this. Imagine that a trusted friend of yours, a man in his 40s whom you had known many years, told you that he occasionally shared his bed with a child unrelated to him. Then imagine that his reason for doing so was merely preference, recreation ... personal enjoyment. Imagine your reaction: incredulity? bewilderment? suspicion? condemnation?

Not, surely, worshipful indulgence.

Yet Jackson was not the trusted friend of the majority of the people now sobbing on television to the delight of the news editors. Even before he ran into scandal, he was regarded as a bizarre eccentric: a man more properly described as infantile than childlike. Even at his best (and it is for once not an exaggeration to say that his best was great) his strengths did not lie in singing or songwriting. The only ability that he held to an extraordinary degree was to command a stage and dance.

The bathos is all there in his title. King of Pop. What next, The Emperor of Ice-Cream?

Of course, thanks in no small part to Quincy Jones, Jackson did record some great singles. To be honest, I've always had a soft spot for "Rock and Roll parts 1 & 2", "I'm the Leader of the Gang (I Am)" and even "I Love You Love Me Love" as well. And we certainly owe a debt of gratitude to Phil Spector for the many classics in which he played a part, although our debt does not quite extend to unlocking his cell door.

Much more was proved against Spector and Glitter than was ever proved against The Artist Formerly Known As Wacko.

But, as tributes flood in, I wouldn't recommend that we let all our former doubts get washed away in the flood.