Remembering Michael Jackson: The service is a thriller

In the days after his death, Michael Jackson's mother reportedly worried that if her son's funeral was too long delayed, his soul might wander the earth. In a more secular sense, that is exactly what has been happening. Remembering Jackson -- debating his legacy, listening to his music, trying to make sense of his life -- has become the world's favorite activity. The shape of Jackson's shadow grows only more complicated as these thoughts and memories accrue.

Tuesday's public memorial at Staples Center could have performed the function such events often do, channeling all the different stories into one narrative, helping make the emotions that Jackson's death has generated feel neater and easier to digest.

Instead, the service (or was it a concert? Or a political event?) operated on several levels at once. Yet its two hours of music and eulogies made for many poignant and even wrenching moments, its incongruities adding up to the only reasonable response to an artistic giant whose meanings were always multiple and often contradictory.

Focus for a minute on just one musical offering: the rendition of "Smile" by Michael Jackson's eldest brother, Jermaine. Following a bravely personal remembrance by Brooke Shields, Michael's friend and fellow former child star, Jermaine took the stage wearing one silver glove and a red rose to sing this simple tune, which was cowritten by Charlie Chaplin and served as the theme for his much-beloved film "Modern Times."

Where to start in interpreting what happened in the four or so minutes while Jermaine Jackson sang?

There was the personal pathos of the older brother, whose own youthful success was so dramatically eclipsed by his sibling's, and who in recent days has told the media that he wishes he had died instead of Michael, singing in a voice eerily reminiscent of the one now lost. Jermaine nearly broke down near the end, right after the line, "What's the use in crying"; the fans' applause lifted him back up.

Then there was the song itself, a gentle admonition to cancel negative emotions behind a careful mask -- a particularly loaded message in light of the history of African American music, with its roots in the tangled history of blackface minstrelsy. Michael Jackson was hardly the first black pop star to deploy an often unreadable smile: one thinks of Louis Armstrong, and of that earlier crossover star, Nat King Cole, who similarly broke down barriers but was sometimes criticized for being too assimilationist.