Do me a favor. Go on YouTube and find the footage of Michael Jackson singing “Who’s Lovin’ You” on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He is eleven years old. It is one of his first times on national television. In the intro, he looks and sounds like . . . well, like an eleven-year-old with a decent ability to ham it up. He does a jokey spoken preamble about how kids can understand the blues, too, because he once fell in love with a girl in the sandbox, toasted their love during “milk break,” and broke up during finger painting. Halfway through, he forgets his lines and freezes, looking back at his older brothers for help. It’s an alarmingly vulnerable moment, one only possible in the era of live television. You feel bad for him. It suddenly doesn’t seem right that a kid should be made to perform live in front of an entire country. Yet he somehow finds his way back and stumbles through.
When the music starts, we see something else entirely. The first note he sings is as confident, sure, and purposeful as any adult could ever be. He transforms from nervous child at a talent show into timeless embodiment of longing. Not only does he sing exactly on key but he appears to sing from the very bottom of his heart. He stares into the camera, shakes his head, and blinks back tears in perfect imitation of a sixties soul man. And it feels, for a moment, as though there are two different beings here. One is a child—a smart kid, to be sure, and cute, but not more special than any other child. He is subject to the same laws of life—pain, age, confusion, fear—as we all are. The other being seems to be a spirit of sorts, one who knows only the truest expression of human feeling. And this spirit appears to have randomly inhabited the body of this particular mortal kid. In so doing, it has sentenced him to a lifetime of indescribable enchantment and consummate suffering.
The details of that life are well covered in Steve Knopper’s new book, “MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson.” Knopper, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, takes a journalist’s approach to the story, chronicling M.J.’s journey from a working-class family, in Gary, Indiana, to unequalled fame and riches and, finally, to a deformed, reclusive, and obsessive middle age, hemmed in by leeches and ne’er-do-wells. In its broad outlines, the story doesn’t deviate from the standard rock-biopic script: man with a gift becomes man with a burden. But, unlike the rags-to-riches tales of Hollywood, Jackson never finds redemption. There is no long walk down the hallway to adoring fans chanting his name at a final show. Instead, he sinks lower and lower, until death finally finds him, millions of dollars in debt, battling a crippling addiction to painkillers, attended to by a shady doctor who administered the insane doses of anesthesia that Jackson came to rely on in order to sleep.
The banality of his demise is striking. All that really happened is that he was great, and those around him became fixated on how much money he could make. Having never learned how to be a responsible adult, he made terrible choices about how to handle his otherworldly power. The bigger he got, the more people he cut out of his life, until about 1990, when, in Knopper’s telling**,** everyone who genuinely cared for the young, pre-“Thriller” Jackson had been forcefully denied access to his life. “Michael began to run perilously low on people who could tell him what not to do,” Knopper writes.
Perhaps this set of circumstances is what allowed some of Jackson’s more dubious behaviors to continue unchecked. Everyone knows about his pathological relationship with plastic surgery, which turned him from classic man to plastic man right before our eyes. It is estimated that he underwent dozens of procedures, many of which were botched or of shoddy quality. He lightened his skin and, over the years, his public explanations for doing so varied. He claimed to suffer from vitiligo, which causes skin to lose its pigment in patches—a condition his autopsy confirmed, though that explanation had always been met with skepticism from the black community. (Vitiligo can arise spontaneously or be inherited; it can also be triggered by bleaching.) Whether or not the disease was behind the dramatic change in his skin color, Jackson surely was motivated, at least in part, by a belief common to Americans: that light skin, thin lips, small noses, and straight hair represent the most perfect example of beauty.
This is the complexity of Jackson’s relationship with blackness. He had most physical evidence of it sliced out of his body—but his music and work are filled with an abiding appreciation for the music, art, and deeply powerful soul of black folks. From the “Nigeria 70”-inspired breakdown in “ABC” to his 1991 solo album, “Dangerous,” on which he eschewed the jazz and melodic direction of his earlier work in favor of Teddy Riley’s urban R. & B. club beats, to outright pro-Africa songs, like “Liberian Girl,” Jackson’s debt to African and African-American culture was always clear. “Of course he loved being black,” Riley told Rolling Stone. “We'd be in sessions where we'd just vibe out and he'd say, 'We are black, and we are the most talented people on the face of the Earth.' I know this man loved his culture, he loved his race, he loved his people.” Perhaps even more surprising for the casual M.J. fan is the clear-headed speech he delivered, in 2002, to a majority-black crowd, at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, in Harlem. “I know my race,” he said. “I just look in the mirror—I know I’m black.” The crowd erupted.
Your blackness is not a result of your skin but of the experiences that that skin brings to you. It is deepened when you watch Rodney King get beaten nearly to death on television by police officers, as Jackson must have, along with the rest of us, in March, 1991. It is awakened again when you start to think about how many of the black artists who enriched your employer died broke and forgotten (something Jackson spoke about in the Harlem speech). M.J.’s blackness was something that he couldn’t escape. This may be why black people continued to accept and root for him despite what, on the surface, appeared to be his rejection of us. No matter what he became, we knew the struggle and pain that made him so. We knew the mid-century racism, and the desperate, dominating father. We knew the whoopings that were part discipline, part violent and selfish abuse, and part twisted grooming for a world that would do its best to deliver an even more savage psychological beatdown. We know that American racism creates such a vast array of insanity among its victims that even Michael Jackson, twisted, bizarre, and impossible to comprehend, makes perfect sense in its context.
But there is more about Jackson that we did not know. You can’t write about him without acknowledging that he was an accused child molester—indeed, this sometimes seems to be all that people under the age of thirty know about him. Knopper does his best to examine every piece of evidence in the public record, and concludes that it is more likely that Jackson did not commit the crimes he was accused of. But Knopper’s judgment is far from conclusive. No matter how it is read, this part of the story is sordid and sickening. One of the parents who levelled charges against Jackson demanded payment and a three-picture screenwriting deal by way of settlement. The mother of another child continued to encourage her son to stay with Jackson long after she claimed to have become suspicious.
Of course, if he was innocent, Jackson’s own weirdness, his complete inability to understand normal social boundaries, is largely to blame for the public shit show that ensued. In the now-infamous Martin Bashir documentary “Living with Michael Jackson,” Jackson volunteers, unprompted, that he loves sharing beds with children. “I sleep in the bed with all of them,” he says. “Then we wake up at, like, dawn, and go in the hot-air balloon. . . . It’s very right. It’s very loving. That’s what the world needs now. More love. More heart.” Bashir challenges him, asking sarcastically, “The world needs a man who’s forty-four sleeping in a bed with children?” Jackson replies, “No, you’re making it all wrong. That’s wrong, because what’s wrong with sharing a love?”
Who is this person? If he is a predator, then there is no way that anything else he did, no matter how moving, can be honored. But what if he is simply a person who believes completely and desperately that genuine and honest love is the only important thing there is? This is what makes us obsess over the horror of Michael Jackson. We must know whether he is an angel or beast. The concerts in front of millions, the humans reduced to tears at the mere sight of his hand, the way his voice can soften the hardest and most frightened parts of us—these things convince us that he is the former. But maybe that version of him is simply too fanciful, too naïve for us, mired as we are in the muck of our human struggle. Maybe we cannot or will not accept the existence of the kind of unblemished love he claimed to represent.
We have a deep and consuming desire to capture the divine and somehow align it with our human selves. Jackson was a vehicle for something divine, and so, perhaps, we find it pleasing to tether him more firmly to our world, by proving that he is exactly as shoddy and vulgar as we all are.
What if he had been born somewhere else, to a different family? Anywhere else. Say, a small fishing town in Mexico. There he would be, this child. Preternaturally gifted, with an ability to touch people with his voice. A way of imitating love and heartache in song. He would sing for people from an early age. They would love him and celebrate him. He might get special treatment as the one who can make mothers cry and fathers shake their heads slowly and choke back tears. But he would also remain a kid. He would run and play with other children. He would work with the rest of the family on whatever the family did. On the fishing boat with the other young men. At the family store. Maybe running a guesthouse for travellers. He would grow into a man. Maybe he would play songs on guitar. Maybe girls would love him. Maybe he would marry one. Maybe he would have trouble being faithful. Maybe he would drink too much. Maybe he would have kids of his own and teach them the songs he knew growing up. Maybe people would always be touched somewhat by the light in his eyes, but it would fade as he grew. Maybe he would grow old and a little thick around the middle from beer and age. Maybe he would teach his grandchildren to sing songs and weave fishing nets. Maybe they would only be partially interested, having discovered YouTube and Twitter, but their parents would scold the younger ones to respect their grandfather. Maybe, when he died, it would be only the old folks who remembered that he had been a beautiful singer in his younger years.
I wish this had happened to Michael Jackson. I wish he had been talented enough to make people happy, but nothing more. It would mean, of course, that we would never have got to have him, but he would have had himself. I have a son of my own now. He’s twelve. He recently told me that one of his earliest memories is of coming home from school to find the television on, trumpeting the news that Jackson had died. I can picture my son at that age, wide eyes like dark moons; soft, simple skin; the tiniest and most perfect hands; centuries of soul packed layers deep in his little voice. He reminded us, in fact, of a young Michael Jackson. Probably many children, in a certain light, remind people of a young Michael Jackson. My son remembers walking into the kitchen and seeing his parents, grown, weary, and old, embracing each other and crying as though they were the babies. He did not understand why.
Now I think I do. We were not crying for the loss of Michael Jackson, the Plastic Freak, pained, megalomaniacal, and frail. We were crying for the inevitable loss of all of our childhoods.
