by Joseph Vogel
PRAISE FOR JOSEPH VOGEL’S
MAN IN THE MUSIC
“Joseph Vogel has brilliantly cracked the DNA, the code of the work, the artistry of Michael Joseph Jackson. I want to stress the word artistry because people have forgotten or never understood that’s what MJ is, that’s what he worked at day and night. This is the book I have been long awaiting, a pointed, intelligent dissection of an epic body of work. Vogel breaks it down album by album, song by song. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
—SPIKE LEE
“Don’t be surprised if it makes you go back and listen…with a whole new outlook on the King of Pop.”
—ZACK O’MALLEY GREENBURG,
author of Michael Jackson, Inc.
“This is the kind of book about Michael Jackson’s music, artistry, and creativity that really needed to be written—and Joseph Vogel has done it and done it very well. I am absolutely floored by Joe’s in-depth research and perceptive insight into what made Michael the one-of-a-kind, record-breaking King of Pop. And—amazingly enough—even I learned a lot!”
—J. RANDY TARABORRELLI,
author of Michael Jackson: The Magic, the Madness,
the Whole Story, 1958–2009
“[Man in the Music] celebrates Michael’s songs and artistry in a wonderful journey through his music.”
—JERMAINE JACKSON
JOSEPH VOGEL
MAN IN THE MUSIC
Joseph Vogel’s work has been featured in The Atlantic, Slate, Forbes, The Guardian, Huff Post, and PopMatters, among other publications. He has appeared in numerous documentaries, including Bad 25 and Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall, both directed by Spike Lee. He wrote the liner notes for the posthumous Michael Jackson album Xscape and contributed the entry for Thriller to the National Recording Registry for the Library of Congress. Vogel is an assistant professor at Merrimack College in Massachusetts.
ALSO BY JOSEPH VOGEL
This Thing Called Life: Prince, Race, Sex, Religion, and Music
James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 2019
Copyright © 2011, 2019 by Joseph Vogel
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover form in the United States by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., New York, in 2011.
Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to The Estate of Michael Jackson for permission to reprint previously published material:
Excerpt from Moonwalk by Michael Jackson, originally published by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1988. Copyright © The Estate of Michael Jackson.
Excerpt from Dancing the Dream by Michael Jackson, originally published by Doubleday, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 1992. Copyright © The Estate of Michael Jackson.
Portions of this work originally appeared in the following publications:
The Atlantic: “ ‘Gone Too Soon’: The Many Lives of Michael Jackson’s Elegy” (June 25, 2012); “How Michael Jackson Made ‘Bad’ ” (September 10, 2012); “Michael Jackson’s ‘Blood on the Dance Floor,’ 15 Years Later” (March 21, 2012); and “The Misunderstood Power of Michael Jackson’s Music” (February 8, 2012). • The Guardian: “Black and White: How Dangerous Kicked off Michael Jackson’s Race Paradox” (March 17, 2018). • PopMatters: “Revisiting 1991: A Cultural Turning Point: Michael Jackson, Dangerous, and the Reinvention of Pop” (September 28, 2011). • Slate: “The Return of the King” (May 13, 2014).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Vogel, Joseph, 1981– author.
Title: Man in the music : the creative life and work of Michael Jackson / by Joseph Vogel.
Description: Second edition. First Vintage Books edition. | New York : Vintage Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018056754
Subjects: LCSH: Jackson, Michael, 1958–2009—Criticism and interpretation. | Popular music—United States—History and criticism.
Classification: LCC ML420.J175 | DDC 782.42166092 B—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018056754
Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525566571
Ebook ISBN 9780525566588
Cover design by Olivia M. Croom
Cover photographs: front © Sam Emerson; back © Dave Hogan/Getty Images
Author photograph © Kevin Salemme
Photographs © The Estate of Michael Jackson
www.vintagebooks.com
v5.4
ep
Dedicated to
Prince Michael,
Paris,
and
Prince Michael II
Deep inside, I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental, symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form all of creation is sound and that it’s not just random sound, that it’s music….Music governs the rhythm of the seasons, the pulse of our heartbeats, the migration of birds, the ebb and flow of ocean tides, the cycles of growth, evolution, and dissolution. It’s music, it’s rhythm. And my goal in life is to give the world what I was lucky to receive: the ecstasy of divine union through my music and my dance.
—MICHAEL JACKSON
If I’m a musical architect then let me build monuments with sound.
—MICHAEL JACKSON
CONTENTS
Preface to the 2019 Vintage Edition
Introduction: A Great Adventure
1 : OFF THE WALL (1979)
2 : THRILLER (1982)
3 : BAD (1987)
4 : DANGEROUS (1991)
5 : HISTORY (1995)
6 : BLOOD ON THE DANCE FLOOR (1997)
7 : INVINCIBLE (2001)
Epilogue: The Final Years
Appendix: Demos, Outtakes, and Other Songs Recorded by Michael Jackson
Acknowledgments
Notes
Illustrations
PREFACE TO THE 2019 VINTAGE EDITION
Michael Jackson’s influence on popular culture is difficult to overstate. His sound, style, dancing, and trademarks are all over our contemporary landscape—in the United States and around the world. From his days at Motown Records with the Jackson 5 to the barrier-breaking success of Thriller to his ill-fated This Is It comeback concert series, he was a unique, ambitious, singular talent.
Like many kids who came of age in the ’80s, I grew up with Jackson’s music. I listened to “Beat It” on my Walkman; I blasted “Man in the Mirror” for inspiration; I wore out my VHS tape of Michael Jackson: The Legend Continues, mesmerized by his iconic performance of “Billie Jean” in Motown 25. As a teenager, I came to appreciate him on a different level. Songs like “Stranger in Moscow” spoke to my loneliness; tracks like “They Don’t Care About Us” spoke to my sense of social justice; and anthems like “Earth Song” spoke to my concern for the future of our planet. For me, Jackson’s music was far different—and more interesting—than traditional pop fare. The subject matter, the scope, the depth, the emotions all went far beyond typical pop sentiments. Yet, strangely, for such an important artist, very little had been written about his creative work prior to his death in 2009.
That was particularly true of books on the icon.
Compared to artists of similar impact—Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Bob Dylan—the gap was striking. There were two books by the artist himself—the autobiography Moonwalk (1988) and Dancing the Dream (1992), a collection of poems and reflections. There was Nelson George’s early account The Michael Jackson Story (1983) and his subsequent return to that era in the excellent Thriller: The Musical Life of Michael Jackson (2010). There was J. Randy Taraborrelli’s seminal biography Michael Jackson: The Magic, the Madness, the Whole Story (1991, 2010). And there were a handful of others—some cultural criticism, some fan-created, some tabloid driven. But nothing explored his work in a comprehensive way.
Many publishers were skeptical that a book focused on his artistry would sell, even with the surge of interest following his death in 2009. Jackson, they said, simply didn’t have the kind of audience that the Beatles or Dylan or Springsteen did. Sure, he could sell a lot of records, but not enough people wanted to read in-depth explorations of those records.
Fortunately, not every publisher felt the same, and my book made its way into the world in the fall of 2011. I didn’t know what to expect. But as it turned out, there was indeed a passionate readership waiting for a book like Man in the Music. Some were longtime, diehard Jackson fans; some had become interested in the artist after his death; some were simply curious to get a different perspective on the pop star.
What was most rewarding was that for the first time in print, Jackson’s creative work was front and center. Man in the Music was not about the artist’s private life (although it does recognize that his personal life informed his work). It did not foreground the cosmetic surgery or hyperbaric chamber or countless other controversies. It was about Michael Jackson the artist: how he operated, what he sought to communicate, how his work interacted with the culture in which it was created and released. A figure of Jackson’s stature deserved that treatment long before I wrote my book.
The first edition had a great run, but for years after its publication I was anxious to tweak, revise, and improve it. So I went back to work. Over the years, I had accumulated an enormous library of Jackson-related materials. My Google docs were packed with interviews, notes from the artist, obscure articles, track sheets, session calendars, and other pieces of the puzzle.
In addition to my own work, a wave of new books, documentaries, think pieces, academic articles, and monographs on Jackson were released. Filmmaker Spike Lee directed two critically acclaimed documentaries, Bad 25 (2012) and Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off the Wall (2016). Scholar Susan Fast published an outstanding book-length treatment of the Dangerous album as part of Bloomsbury Academic’s popular 33 ⅓ series. Forbes journalist Zack O’Malley Greenburg published an insightful book (Michael Jackson, Inc., 2014) on Jackson’s business acumen. Rolling Stone writer Steve Knopper published a compelling new biography (MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson, 2015).
In addition to this new content, musician and journalist Questlove taught a “classic albums” class on Jackson at New York University. Scholar and author Mark Anthony Neal began offering a regular course on the artist at Duke University, titled “Michael Jackson & the Black Performance Tradition.” Meanwhile, an array of new platforms arose dedicated to exploring his life and work, including Michael Jackson Academic Studies, The MJCast, and Dancing with the Elephant. I am grateful to so many fellow Michael Jackson authors, biographers, researchers, and fans for their contributions and insights (their names, too many to list here, are cited in the acknowledgments).
I am especially indebted to Michael Jackson’s collaborators, including Quincy Jones, Rod Temperton, Bruce Swedien, Greg Phillinganes, Louis Johnson, David Williams, Paulinho da Costa, John Robinson, Johnny Mandel, Jerry Hey, Buz Kohan, Steve Porcaro, Jeff Porcaro, David Paich, Steve Lukather, Michael Boddicker, Matt Forger, Brad Sundberg, Bill Bottrell, John Barnes, Chris Currell, the Andraé Crouch Choir, Bryan Loren, George Del Barrio, Teddy Riley, Brad Buxer, Michael Prince, Chuck Wild, Jimmy Jam, Terry Lewis, David Foster, Dallas Austin, Rob Hoffman, Dr. Freeze, Babyface, and Rodney Jerkins. Not only did many of these individuals talk to me for hours about their time working with Jackson for the first edition; many also helped with my follow-up questions as I prepared this second edition. This book would not be what it is without their invaluable stories, insights, notes, session calendars, demos, track sheets, and other important documents.
So what’s different about this new edition?
First, it contains many more behind-the-scenes details from the studio. From further research and conversations with those who worked closely with Jackson, I was able to fill in a lot of gaps and present a much more accurate timeline in terms of how, when, and where his albums were made. This is perhaps the most important addition. I felt it was crucial to make the history as vivid and accurate as possible.
Second, I’ve tried to set the record straight where possible. There is a lot of mythology surrounding the work of Michael Jackson; it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction. I got some things wrong in the first edition, which have been corrected and fleshed out here, based on my most credible sources. Sometimes collaborators tell conflicting stories or remember things differently. In those cases I have either told both sides or gone with what makes the most sense, given the evidence available.
Third, it truly focuses on the music. The first edition was mostly about the music but also included information on Jackson’s short films and performances. Ultimately, I felt that coverage was too thin, so I decided, for this book, that it would be better to use that space to go more deeply into the music. This book, then, is entirely about the songs and albums—not the short films, tours, performances, business dealings, or other activities. If any of these other things are mentioned in the book, it is simply to provide context.
And fourth, it omits any assessment of posthumously released work. Posthumous albums are notoriously difficult—by nature they can never be what the artist would have created. The 2010 album Michael—reviewed in the appendix of the first edition of Man in the Music—was particularly challenging because of the controversy surrounding the so-called Cascio tracks—songs submitted by Eddie Cascio and James Porte shortly after Jackson’s death (three of which appeared on the album). Given the serious questions surrounding the origin and authenticity of the vocals on those tracks, I do not acknowledge or assess them in this book. More broadly, this book does not review any of Jackson’s work after Invincible—the last studio album he saw to completion. The epilogue does mention music he was engaged in during his final years, but those songs are not explored or assessed; their mention is merely intended to give a sense of what the artist was working on.
But the overarching concept of the book remains much the same as the first edition: an album-by-album exploration of Michael Jackson the artist. The goal was to make it all come to life: the historical context, the creative process, the work in the studio, the vitality of the songs. That last point is important. Sometimes in fixating on the minutiae, the power and meanings of the music are lost. I didn’t want this to be a trivia book, nor did I want to impose my own interpretations too strongly onto his music. That is why I draw from an array of other critics. Ultimately, as with the first edition, I try to present Jackson’s music to the reader with as much curiosity and openness as possible. As historian Carl Van Doren put it: “The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts into his work. The measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there.”
The year 2019 marks ten years since Jackson’s death. It was expected to be a celebratory moment, yet that has been complicated, to say the least, with the release of the controversial 2019 HBO documentary Leaving Neverland, in which new allegations of sexual abuse have been leveled against the artist. Important information, conversations, and contexts surrounding those allegations are currently being examined and will no doubt continue. I have researched and grappled with them personally. The people I interviewed for thi
s book talked to me for hours, on and off the record, about Jackson. They spoke candidly about his flaws, his virtues, his habits, his struggles. But none gave any indication of the Michael Jackson portrayed in Leaving Neverland. I say that not as conclusive proof of his innocence but simply to represent the perspectives of my sources.
Given my area of focus—Jackson’s creative work—this book will not attempt to render a verdict on the accusations for the reader. However, chapter 5 offers an account of the 1993 allegations, since they are contextually important for the HIStory album. The 2005 trial, in which Jackson was acquitted, is likewise covered in the epilogue.
Whatever one concludes about his personal life, Jackson’s art will live on, like the work of countless other controversial icons, from Charlie Chaplin to Elvis Presley, Walt Disney to Alfred Hitchcock, Miles Davis to John Lennon. How he is viewed, at least for the foreseeable future, will vary widely from person to person, culture to culture, and, perhaps, generation to generation. As James Baldwin observed in 1985, very few figures in modern history have attracted as much polarizing attention. For more than half a century, Jackson has been a lightning rod for questions about race, gender, sexuality, innocence, guilt, truth, deception, media, fame, childhood, identity, capitalism, art, and genius. It is a complicated legacy that will no doubt take many more books to begin to unpack.
Man in the Music is a historical account of his music and how people have responded to it. It is the story of how a young black boy from Gary, Indiana, honed his craft in a cramped living room, in the wings of stages, in the studios of Motown, and went on to become one of the most influential artists of all time.
Joseph Vogel
(2019)