El siglo XX, dice El Mundo, ha perdido con M. Jackson a su "último mito". Pobre siglo XX. Hubo en él genios musicales comparables a los de centurias anteriores, pero el único "mito" que le quedaba era un cantante de música pop con talento para el baile. La cultura popular produce "mitos". O se producen "mitos" para la cultura popular. No son incompatibles ambas direcciones. Pero hay metáforas incompatibles con la realidad y algunas están apareciendo, en un frenesí de a ver quién da más, a propósito de la muerte de Jackson.

En la parte anglosajona del fenómeno, el término no ha sido "mito", sino "icono". Respecto de todo ello escribe un comentarista que no ha perdido la cabeza:

I think part of it is the narcissism of our celebrity culture. Here was a guy so many of “us” read about in People magazine for so long. His passing, therefore, isn’t a loss in the sorrowful sense of the word, but in the selfish one. It’s a loss of an interesting subject, a creature to gossip about and to fill a few minutes on E! or Entertainment Tonight.

Everyone likes to invoke Lord Acton’s axiom that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” But nearly everyone forgets that he coined this phrase not to indict powerful men, but to instruct the historians who write about them. Historians tend to forgive the powerful their transgressions. Likewise, journalists (for want of a better word) tend to forgive the famous.

[...]And while we’re at it, his relatively early death wasn’t “tragic.” He was one of the richest people in the world. He spent his money on perpetual childhood and he was perpetually with children not his own.

Meanwhile, in the last ten days, we’ve seen or heard of remarkable people who’ve given their lives for freedom in Iran. We’ve heard of innocents killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. In the last decade, America has lost thousands of heroes in noble causes and thousands of innocent bystanders who were denied the simple joys of life through no fault of their own. Those deaths are tragic, and we're hard pressed to think of more than a handful of names to put with the long line of the dead.

If anything, Michael Jackson’s life, not his death, was tragic.

[...]Every channel says this is a sad day for America. I agree. But not for the same reasons.

Some quick thoughts on Michael Jackson, Jonah Goldberg, National Review