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Materials > Readings > Michael Jackson |
Michael Jackson at 40
By Barney Hoskyns, The Independent, 1998
What saddens me about Jackson's nightmarish nineties decline is that we've forgotten what an extraordinary entertainer he was. I'm not just talking about 'Billie Jean' and the famous moonwalk. I'm talking about footage of an eight-year-old Michael rehearsing a blues song with his brothers in which the tiny dynamo's sheer chutzpah takes the breath away. I'm talking about the Jackson 5 yelping and twirling their way through 'I Want You Back' on Top of the Pops. The boy was mesmerising.
But perhaps that is part of the problem. If you've been groomed to simulate adult passion and eroticism at such a tender age, how do you cope when those feelings actually show up in adolescence and hormones start coursing through your confused, elongating body? And what do you do when, twenty years later, those feelings haven't gone away?
It doesn't help coming from a family ruled by a despotic father, a man intent only on turning his children into successful entertainers. Of course, we teenybopping fans knew nothing of the violence behind the happy Motown smiles when the famous Five went through the expertly-choreographed motions of 'ABC' and 'The Love You Save'. In the seventies, nobody knew (or admitted) that dysfunctional families existed.
Years later, when black-sheep sister LaToya spilled all the beans, and even Michael confessed to having been beaten by his father, we shook our heads and said we'd always known there was something a bit iffy about the Jacksons. But we didn't know. We were just happy someone showed the Osmonds how to do it right.
The brothers were one of the last homegrown Motown successes, a product of the conveyor-belt system bluntly christened 'The Corporation'. When the legendary label began to go off the boil in the mid-seventies, the group exited Berry Gordy's empire and made so-so dance records ('Enjoy Yourself', 'Show You The Way To Go') for Epic. By 1977, Michael was chafing at the bit, wanting out but trapped by loyalty to his less talented siblings. Delivering him from this quandary was the movie version of Broadway musical The Wiz, in which he played the Scarecrow. It was on the set of this flick that Jackson first bonded with jazz/soundtrack veteran Quincy Jones, The Wiz's musical director.
When the furiously exciting, Jones-produced 'Don't Stop ('Til You Get Enough)' first burst on to the radio in the late summer of 1979, it was obvious that Michael Jackson was going to be a star, and probably a superstar. This was a new Michael Jackson, a Michael who wasn't going to fade out like all the other child stars, a Michael who knew he could make it up there with the great movie idols. Hell, maybe he'd even be as big as Mickey Mouse.
The first solo album, Off The Wall, swung cleverly between smooth dance-pop ('Rock With You', 'Off The Wall') and fragile, saccharine balladry (especially 'She's Out of My Life', the song with the is-it-real-or-is-it-fake tears). Released at the tail-end of disco, it took the Motown crossover principle into a new era: the eighties, a time when black rhythms and plastic soul mannerisms would boss the sound of American pop. Challenged only by Madonna (and maybe Prince and Springsteen), Michael Jackson would rule that decade.
Late 1982 saw the release of Thriller, the biggest-selling album in pop history. Never has a single album so dramatically catapulted an entertainer into the stratosphere, or so comprehensively upped the stakes for the music business as a whole. Before Thriller, Michael stood a chance of making it through his career with his marbles intact; after it, sanity ceased to be an option. How good does Thriller sound in 1998? It doesn't sound bad. 'Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'' is no 'Don't Stop', but it's still a fabulous dance track. 'Beat It' and 'Thriller' were always overrated, but 'Billie Jean' is as radical as it ever was - an incontrovertible argument for Jackson as auteur. The Toto-produced 'Human Nature' remains a shimmeringly pretty ballad.
Good or lightweight, Thriller would never have been the pop Godzilla it was without the crucial performance Jackson gave on the Motown 25th Anniversary TV show in May 1993. Here, before an audience of millions, he sang 'Billie Jean' and unveiled his unforgettable "moonwalk". A spectacle of pure narcissistic grace, it captivated the pop universe. Rolling Stone writer John Swenson once made the point that Jackson's dancing wasn't - like James Brown's - physical. It was metaphysical, "a graceful illusion". To be sure, Michael wasn't the first African-American singer with a eunuch-high voice and supernaturally skinny physique. He was, however, the first superstar entertainer who looked like an alien.
Jackson's creepy, extraterrestrial appearance (and habits) were the key to both his success and his undoing. And when we, as a global pop culture, made him a megastar, it was partly because he looked and moved like a beautiful android, a boy-god ET. Thanks to the repeated scrapings of expensive scalpels, his features were neither negroid nor Caucasian. If anything, he began to resemble one of those asexual uber teens in Japanese Manga comics - which for Michael may be the next best thing to looking like Diana Ross, his mama-mentor in the late seventies and early eighties.
The surgery aside, there was the whole side issue of Jackson's dramatic skin whitening, leading to rumours that he'd bleached it. From being a lanky black beanpole with a spongy Afro and a downy moustache, he was slowly turning into a pale geisha girl with a button nose and silky ringlets. Inevitably this was seen as a betrayal of his blackness, even of his masculinity. When he later sang "It don't matter if you're black or white", it sounded like a cop-out: post-Rodney King, it unavoidably did matter. In fact, Jackson almost certainly suffers from some form of vitiligo, a condition which leads to loss of skin pigment. Indeed, he first met Debbie Rowe - his wife and the mother of his children - when she worked as a dermatology nurse and treated him in the early eighties. What remains unclear is whether Michael, in an effort to make the pallor of his skin uniform, used the bleaching agent Benoquin on the areas of his body not affected by vitiligo. On most sufferers, the effects of the disease look much patchier.
Should it matter? Doesn't the man have a right to look the way he wants? Well, yes. It's only that in the nineties the terrain of black American pop culture has been so fraught with issues of racial credibility. At a time when hip hop was busy confronting the harsh reality of African-American life, Jackson's white skin symbolised his drift from that reality. As rap gave birth to a suburban hinterland of nouveau White Negroes, Michael became the ultimate Black Honky.
All this - the skin-blanching, the oxygen chambers, the chimpanzee companions - might mean less if Michael Jackson had continued to make valid music. With the release of Bad in 1987, it was clear that he had in some way lost touch his own talent. The album was a work of bad faith, the sound of expensive technology thrown at useless songs in a vain effort to keep up with the innovations of Prince, principal pretender to Jackson's crown. Unfortunately, Jackson chose to release Bad in the same year Prince released Sign O the Times, the high watermark of the miniature Minneapolitan's career.
By the time the even more comically-titled Dangerous appeared in 1992, Michael Jackson was a dead issue for pop culture. Sure, he remained a megastar around the world - as much of a capitalist icon as Ronald McDonald (or, indeed, Mickey Mouse) - but Dangerous was simply a feverishly overproduced effort to keep pace with the glossy trickery of New Jack Swing. Jackson's singing had become a catalogue of irritating quirks: squeaks and hiccups which had once been incidental but now topped and tailed every line. Worse still were Michael's frenzied efforts to sound tough, as risible in their way as his crotch-grabbing and car-smashing in the John Landis video for 'Black or White'. It was difficult to believe in Mikey the Stud when everyone knew he preferred to spend his time with llamas and Macaulay Culkin.
Nor was it just pre-pubescent thespians who were seen with Jackson: non-celebrity "buddies" were often invited to sleep over at the singer's Encino mansion. If Michael genuinely had no sexual interest in these boys, it was naive to think no one would attempt to use such sleepovers as a chance to extort money from him. The timing of the Jordan Chandler allegations, in August 1993, couldn't have come at a worse moment: Jackson had just founded the Heal the World Foundation to raise awareness of children's suffering. A month later, LaToya - that perpetual thorn in the Jackson family's side - told the press her brother had often spent nights with young boys in his bedroom.
Perhaps what most scandalised America about the whole affair was the discovery that Michael Jackson was a sexual being at all. For so long we'd grown used to an idea of him as a sexless Peter Pan that suddenly to see him as a man trying to get his rocks off did not compute. When he talked of the extensive examinations police had conducted on his body in December 1993, it was hard not to feel a shiver of pity. On the other hand, it stuck in the craw that he was able to buy his way out of the hot water simply by paying the Chandler family $26 million. Nor did his charade of a marriage to Lisa-Marie Presley in August 1994 inspire any feeling except contempt.
It also stuck in the craw that when Jackson returned to the pop fray two years later, it was with the hideously self-important double album HIStory, Past Present and Future, Book 1. Half greatest hits, half insipid new material, the set did little to re-establish Michael as the pop messiah he evidently thought he was, instead revealing the grotesque scale of his self-delusion. (A sixty-foot plaster statue of Jackson was towed along the Thames before being exhibited in various European cities.) The climactic moment of this hubris was, of course, Jarvis Cocker's disruption of Jackson's performance at the 1996 Brit Awards. In the cool new world of Pulp and Oasis, the King of Pop - hoisted on to the Brits stage as a crucified pop Christ - had become the Emperor of Schlock.
Where Thriller had spent a total of 37 weeks at No. 1, HIStory was in the U.S. Top 20 for a mere two months. Even this was a result next to the fate of last year's crass Blood on the Dancefloor, an album of mechanical dance remixes of HIStory tracks that barely shifted 150,000 copies in America. Only outside America - especially in the far-flung Far East, where thirteen-year-old boys are rather less idealised than they are in the United States - did Michael's special brand of kitsch still have any mileage.
Jackson's career trajectory is a uniquely American tragedy. In a country where black singers and sportsmen are marketed as gods, this ageing wunderkind has been worshipped to near-death, then sacrificed on the altar of fame. Two decades before Jim Carrey's Truman forced America to ponder its life-at-one-remove voyeurism, Jackson's life was already a non-stop freak show. Consider the disjunctive effect of seeing yourself as a cartoon every Saturday morning: no wonder the guy feels like ET.
It's a tragedy that's symptomatic of McDisney culture, a culture entranced by stardom but systemically designed to destroy the lives of those it blows up into cartoon colossi. As America's entertainment becomes progressively more unreal, the stars who survive will be those who never had any inner lives to start with - virtual icons like Rei Toei in William Gibson's 1996 novel Idoru. Michael Jackson will look like a throwback to the age of vaudeville.
Me, I'm still wondering what happened to the little tike who sang 'Ben'
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