The word is that Chris Brown is grabbing headlines for something he can be proud of, reportedly stealing a show (albeit a show whose top two award recipients apparently weren’t even in attendance) with his Michael Jackson tribute performance, dedicated to the King of Pop who passed a year ago. Last night’s 2010 BET Awards featured several performances, but it was Browns dancing, singing and crying that’s the talk of the show. Introduced by Jermaine Jackson, Brown finally got his chance to honor Jackson, after being passed on last year for his well documented issues involving Rihanna. He danced to a number of Jackson songs, including ‘Remember the Time’, Smooth Criminal’ and ‘Billie Jean’, but emotions got the best of him when he sang ‘Man in the Mirror.’ Check out the video below and tell us what you think.

Earlier today we posted for the full winners list for the night, which was topped by the Lady Gaga and Beyonce collabo ‘Video Phone’.

     There’s this particular busker on the streets of Ann Arbor. He’s been there at least a decade now. I don’t remember the date I first saw him, or even the year. But I remember the sight.

     He was in the alley between the failing mini-shipping mall and the restored movie palace. He’d positioned himself a strategic distance from the alley mouth, so when you walked by on the street all you saw was a human silhouette. He was a lean, compact man, African-American, he had a boombox going, and he danced. My God, did he dance. He had all the moves. He had the hips and the hands, he had that dramatic quick rise to the toes (and how the hell does he just stay there, even for a just a heartbeat?), He worked the hat and of course, he did the moonwalk. All in shadow, all to a soundtrack of the original music, so he didn’t have that Elvis-Imitator “mmm…close but not quite,” problem that makes so many of those acts look sad, or ridiculous. He could just dance to that unmistakable, infectious music while a bunch of us gathered around. We laughed, and we watched. We tossed dollars in the hat, and we applauded.

     This is as close as I ever got to Michael Jackson.

     This is another one of those columns I wasn’t going to do (I am going to get around to Men in Science Fiction and Pride & Prejudice & Zombies real soon. Promise). I knew, shortly after I heard the announcement of his death I’d hit the point where I am now; where I’m shutting off the radio because I just don’t want to hear about it anymore, and where the song I’m humming is not one from Thriller or Off the Wall, but from the opening of the musical Evita:

     “Oh, what a circus, oh what a show…”

     And being stuck with the realization that this, sadly, is what happens when fame takes down a talented life.

     It’s been a bad week for the ranks of the famous. As of this writing, we’ve seen the death of a sidekick (Ed McMahon), a Professional Beauty (Farrah Fawcett), two actors (Karl Malden and Gale Storm) and a pitch man (Billy Mays). But Jackson’s death has swept all the others off the stage. He was held to be a member of a different order, that most rarefied sort of person who was not just insanely famous but was truly accomplished. The man was very good at what he did. What he did wasn’t always my thing, but anybody who had Fred Astaire calling him up to praise his dancing, who outsold every other pop musician, up to and including the Beatles, and who made a sensation out of an overly-long song in praise of horror movies…that person has something you can’t argue with.

     Which brought on the other song that’s been running through my head all week, this one from Pink Floyd’s, The Wall,

     “Welcome my son, to the machine…”

     That fame does bad things to people is not going to be news to anyone reading this. That it has been doing so for a long time is likewise not news. The poet Lord Byron had random groupies showing up on his doorstep in 1814. Charles Dickens got mobbed on the streets of New York City. Silent Movie queen Mary Pickford got mobbed on the streets of London. We know all about what happened to Elvis, and the Beatles. The bazaar combination of isolation and over-exposure, of becoming a resource rather than a person, or at least, believing that’s what you’ve become, eventually creates a desperate need to shut down. But you can’t shut down, because you’re on camera, or on stage, you’ve got commitments, people are depending on you. Besides, if you’re not out there, where you’ve worked so hard to be, how do you know who you are? How do you know that you are? The man’s in the mirror, or he’s reflected in the eyes of the audience or in the printed words on the page.

     The musical A Chorus Line nailed it:

     “All I ever wanted, was the music, and the mirror, and the chance…”

     Take away the mirror, take away the audience, where is the man to go?

     Jackson was part of another dubious tradition in American popular culture; theater as a way out of poverty. He was, underneath the flash and the label of rock star, an old-school song and dance man. The ghosts of Vaudevillians shaking their heads the day his father took him and his brothers to the talent competition. Mary Pickford, Jimmy Cagney, W.C. Fields, Mae West, not to mention Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Josephine Baker, were just a few of the people who worked tirelessly to get on the show-biz circuit because it was a viable way to keep eating. The Marx Brothers’ mother Minnie put her five sons on the stage literally to make the rent. The usual pop-culture portrayal of stage parents as maniacs who want to live through their children. There’s a depressing amount of truth to this, but there’s that other side, where the reason for dragging through the lousy dives, the impossible hours, the terrible conditions because there doesn’t seem to be any other way out of a poor life, or worse than poor.

     “Welcome my son, to the machine…”

     But like the greatest of those song-and-dance men from a previous era, Jackson really had something. He had a stage presence that shone. Raw talent honed diamond bright by hard work. The hype took and it held because there was so much real to hype.

     But then came the rest of it. Isolation and power and the drum beat of hearing about yourself from every possible source will make any human crazy. The behavior that was at least suspect, at worst criminal, the body hacking that might have been trauma left over from the Pepsi-commercial burns, or might have been hatred of an aging, disobedient body or a bit of both.

     And it was sad. And it was tawdry. And it was feeling bad for the kids. And it was unsuspected but not surprising to learn again that the human frame can only take so much, and the music died, again, and the circus came to town.

     So, last Sunday, with Pink Floyd and Evita playing in the back of my mind, I was downtown. I went to grab some lunch across the street from the restored movie palace. And I heard it. There was the music, rising out of the alley. And there was the busker. Heavier now, a bit slower, not doing the toe stand anymore, but still working it from the shadows with the music ringing around; still attracting a crowd — college kids, tourists, parents with children on their shoulders — all laughing and taking photos and applauding and tossing a couple bucks in the hat. He was still putting on a good show, and letting the music and the dance make the day something more, something with style and shine and a little bit of magic.

     That is something to leave behind. Is it worth such a shortened life? I don’t know. But it is real, and it is worth celebrating.

     “I’ll be there…”

     “Oh, baby, give me one more chance…”

     “I wanna rock with you, all night. Dance the night away…”

     “‘Cuz this is thriller…”

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