As a songwriter, singer and dancer, Michael Jackson was an undoubted genius and the most important pop-music figure since Elvis Presley. As a man, his tragedy was that he was denied a childhood and, in his untimely death, was deprived of a full adulthood too
THE CHILD STAR deprived of a childhood has become the adult deprived of adulthood. The tragic irony of Michael Jackson’s untimely demise at the age of 50 is that in three weeks he was supposed to have been launching a spectacular comeback with a series of shows at London’s 02 Arena. Now, in keeping with the pattern established by the early deaths of Elvis and John Lennon, the comeback will be huger than anyone could ever have expected.
Expect next weekend’s album and singles chart to feature the undisputed King of Pop at No 1 as people rush to the shops to commemorate him in the only way they see fit: by listening again to the mesmerising sounds of arguably the most unique performer in popular music history.
Jackson had already postponed the opening night of his comeback in London by a week because he was concerned about his physical fitness and his ability to recreate his trademark exhilarating dance moves. It is not inconceivable that his strenuous fitness routines of the last few weeks precipitated yesterday’s fatal heart attack. “I don’t know how I’m going to do 50 shows. I’m not a big eater – I need to put some weight on,” he said just last week. All 750,000 tickets for his first live shows in over a decade had been sold.
For someone who set the bar so high in terms of the quality of his live performance and its stunning choreography, Jackson – as the professional he has been since six years of age – was determined that these new shows would not be anaemic imitations of his now legendary Thriller-era live appearances but performances that would somehow re-establish him as a global music phenomenon.
But the squeeze was always on: it’s no secret that the star had severe financial problems (“he’s a millionaire spending like he is a billionaire,” said one aide) and he needed to do this run of shows which would have netted him a minimum of €50 million. But he has had serious health problems.
His body had been ravaged by demanding dance routines and he had talked openly about his addiction to various prescription drugs. There was also talk of a serious lung complaint and continuing complications arising from his many plastic surgery procedures. When he last appeared in front of the media – to announce the comeback shows in London a few months ago – his frame was skeletal and his skin was pallid. He barely made it through the two-minute press conference.
Even the show’s promoters were uneasy about Jackson’s ability to carry off the shows – a complex insurance policy was drawn up and it is understood that the singer had to provide a medical report before any contracts were signed. Bookmakers offered odds that he wouldn’t even make the first concert date.
ALL THIS WILL be forgotten over the coming weeks as the image of the unnaturally transformed and bizarre-looking 50-year-old is replaced by that of the fresh-faced young black man who reshaped the musical landscape. There simply is no gainsaying his massive musical contribution although some, both inside and outside the music industry, remain repelled by the allegations of child abuse that were made against Jackson.
Jackson’s life, even as a child, never resembled anything approaching “normality”. Born into a working-class family in Indiana in 1958, he was fast-tracked into the family business – the child pop group that comprised Michael and his siblings: The Jacksons. Defying the then colour bar in the US music industry, the wholesome-looking all-singing, all-dancing Jacksons were nationwide pop phenomena and at the age of six Jackson was a semi-professional who would be asked for his autograph by adult fans. Jackson has talked about how his father physically and verbally abused him as a child and how he developed an eating disorder (provoked by a fear of his father’s discipline) by the age of seven.
Before he was a teenager, Rolling Stonemagazine had singled him out as the "the main draw" in the now-named Jackson Five and remarked very favourably on the child's "piping voice, grown-up hoofer and vocal inflections similar to Sam Cooke, James Brown, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder".
Even at this stage his record company had decided that it would put all its chips on his solo career and he was assiduously groomed as a superstar-in-waiting. He began releasing solo albums that were musically innovative in how they fused soul, r'n'b and pop. His Thrilleralbum of 1982 was a revelation – an edgy amalgam of diffuse musical styles that became the biggest-selling album of all time (with over 100 million copies sold).
Thrillermanaged to satisfy both the musical purists and casual one-album-a-year fans. All pop is rooted in black music stylings and what Jackson and producer Quincy Jones managed to do was to join the musical dots between "black" and "white" music. Time magazine wrote on its release: "Jackson is a one-man rescue team for the music business. A songwriter who sets the beat for a decade. A dancer with the fanciest feet on the street. A singer who cuts across all boundaries of taste and style and color."
Though MTV never admitted this as official policy, the station at this time did not play videos by black artists. With the global success of Thriller, the station had no choice and Jackson became the first black musician it featured.
Jackson has talked about how it was at this time, with his face appearing on television screens and magazines all around the world, and when he first became painfully self-conscious about his appearance. A pigmentation disorder (perhaps stress-related) called vitiligo caused his skin to form irregular white patches and the treatment for it effectively left his skin “depigmented” – hence its ghostly look. It always distressed the man who could remember not being served in “white-only” restaurants as a child that he was accused of trying to become white.
He first went under the plastic surgeon's knife after Thriller'ssuccess – having a rhinoplasty procedure ("nose job") and a cleft (supposed to be "cute-looking" but anything but) inserted in his chin.
He had numerous follow-up "corrective" plastic surgeries – to the extent that he became virtually unrecognisable from how he appeared on the cover of Thriller.
There was a concurrent deterioration in his behaviour: he developed “eccentric” habits (although at least half of the more bizarre claims about his lifestyle are merely tabloid invention) and he desperately seemed to be trying, as an adult, to reclaim a childhood he never had.
He lived in a glorified amusement park, spoke in a squeaky child’s voice (that’s not his real voice by the way, it’s an affectation) and surrounded himself with children.
In a music industry more used to the vices of drink and drugs, Jackson was indulged as being benignly weird. But “eccentricity” spilled over into “sinister” in 1993 when a 13-year-old boy, Jordy Chandler, accused the singer of child molestation. The charge was dropped, however, when Chandler later refused to testify against his “best friend Michael”. It is alleged that Jackson paid Chandler’s family €20 million to have the charges dropped. His friends, who later quizzed him about why, if he was innocent of the charges, he paid out $20 million, report that Jackson said he just wanted the case to go away because a trial would do irreparable damage to his music career. In the wake of the Chandler incident, Jackson developed a drug addiction and his childhood bulimia re-manifested itself.
Shortly after, in what many at first took to be an April Fool’s joke, it was announced that Jackson had married Elvis Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie. The unlikely alliance was believed by many to be an attempt at rehabilitating his image in the public eye. The couple divorced two years later. To this day, Lisa Marie Presley says the couple married out of love – telling this journalist once that she and Jackson enjoyed “a normal sex life”. Jackson went on to marry a nurse, Debbie Rowe, with whom he had a son, Michael, and a daughter, Paris.
When the couple divorced in 1999 she handed over full custody of the children to Jackson. Again, the rumour was that a large sum of money changed hands. Jackson also has another son, known as “Blanket” (real name Prince Michael II), conceived through artificial insemination (he has never revealed the mother’s identity). It was Blanket who he so recklessly dangled over a hotel balcony in Berlin a few years ago.
By this stage of his life, he had dried up as a creative force. He would never rescale the heights of hi s Thrillerand Badperiod and his last ever album, 2001's Invincible, was a tepid and unloved affair. Tours came and went and there were still coruscating stage routines but that was all soon to be relegated to footnote status by the screening in 2002 of a documentary in which Jackson was interviewed by the journalist Martin Bashir.In the programme (an attempt to capture the "real" Michael Jackson), the singer said that he shared his bed with a 12-year-old-boy, Gavin Arvizo. When Bashir expressed no little surprise – given previous allegations – the singer artlessly said these were just "innocent sleepovers". A few months later – after, according to Jackson, he stopped financially supporting Arvizo's family – he was charged with seven counts of child molestation on Gavin Arvizo. The trial was a media circus and Jackson was eventually acquitted of all charges. A mental health professional who studied Jackson's psychological profile surmised that he was not typical paedophile material but instead had regressed to being a 10-year-old boy. It was some reflection of the celebrity culture we live under that during the trial all of Jackson's albums re-entered the charts due to huge sales and, even as he was walking daily into the courtroom, parents would be holding up their young children (normally white, normally young boys) and shouting: "Please take him Michael; he will be your new friend."
Only his die-hard fans (of whom there are many) believed that Jackson was a “victim” – betrayed by those closest to him for financial gain. For everyone else there was the troubling evidence of a middle-aged man admitting he shared his bed with young boys.
He never toured or recorded anything of real substance following the Arvizo case. There were sporadic sightings of him in different locations around the world behaving strangely – in Las Vegas last year he was seen walking the streets in his pyjamas. There still was a way back musically after the court case (the music industry tolerates all forms of egregious behaviour by its main players) but Jackson was a busted flush.
It was the loss of his beloved Neverland mansion in California last year (due to financial difficulties) that by all accounts prompted his live comeback shows. With no new material to push, these shows were only going to be “greatest hits” affairs, done out of economic necessity. But even the most cynical observer couldn’t stifle the thrill that this magnificent performer could still dazzle and daze – that he somehow could recreate that moment of light entertainment shock and awe when he famously debuted his trademark “moonwalk” dance at a Tamla Motown concert in 1983. To the millions who applied for 02 tickets, his appearance, the state of his health and all the disturbing allegations simply didn’t matter when weighed against the chance of seeing the most important and influential musical figure since Elvis Presley.
The music industry will now have its Princess Diana moment. Meanwhile, the record-pressing plants are already working overtime to service the public need for Jackson product, and before the weekend is out, all the over-priced “commemorative” tat will be hitting the shelves to get one last return from a man who has been public property and a financial cash-cow for the majority of his life.
But do try to look again at that famous rendition of Billie Jeanat the Tamla Motown Concert of 1983. It is one of the most stunning and electrifying pieces of music television ever. As a writer, singer and dancer he was a genius. And this shy young man from Indiana was responsible for demolishing a reprehensible colour bar in the music industry.
As for all the assorted “lifestyle” issues – to paraphrase Yeats: you simply can’t separate the singer from the song or the dancer from the dance. Indeed, Jackson represented a “beauty born out of its own despair”. F Scott Fitzgerald got it right all those years ago: “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
