by Joseph Vogel
INTRODUCTION
A GREAT ADVENTURE
Michael Jackson often explained his creative process as an act of recovering something that already existed. He was a “courier,” bringing these songs into the world, a medium through which the music flowed. He cited Michelangelo’s philosophy that inside every piece of stone or marble was a “sleeping form.” “He’s just freeing it,” Jackson insisted. “It’s already in there. It’s already there.”
As an artist, then, his work was about liberation. He wanted to free what was bound, awaken what was dormant. He wanted to break through barriers and limitations—any obstacle in the way of his ambition or imagination. He wanted to invigorate the body, mind, and soul. This is what music did for him personally, and it was the effect he intended to generate in his audience as well.
For millions around the world, this is exactly what he accomplished. To admirers, he was always far more than a mere celebrity or pop star. He was music incarnate. It charged through him like an electric current. Fans often spoke of feeling overwhelmed with joy, transported, empowered, connected, inspired. After witnessing a concert on his Bad World Tour in 1988, Newsweek journalist Jim Miller described him as possessing “the breathtaking verve of his predecessor James Brown, the beguiling wispiness of Diana Ross, the ungainly pathos of Charlie Chaplin, the edgy joy of a man startled to be alive. The crowd gasps and screams….”
“In person you felt he was almost breakable,” reflected actress Anjelica Huston (who worked with Jackson on his 1986 film, Captain EO). “But then this thing happened when he would start to work: your heart would beat faster and the hair on your arms and the back of your neck would stick up as he literally took your breath away. I think he was the most electrifying performer I’ve ever seen.”
Jackson sometimes compared the reciprocal energy of a performance to a Frisbee—“You hold it, you touch it, and you whip it back.” Audiences, he believed, were more than passive spectators; they were a vibrant community, composed of all ages, races, religions, and cultures, standing shoulder to shoulder, temporarily bound up in the collective spell of his music, imagining the world anew. “You can take them anywhere,” he effused.
This was his gift as an artist: his ability to fully dissolve into the stories, the emotions, and the magic of his music—and to take people from all walks of life with him. He called this creative bond many things over the years: escapism, entertainment, showmanship, art. But ultimately, for Jackson, it was about sharing and receiving love.
AN UNUSUAL EDUCATION
In one of his later, lesser-known recordings at Motown—“Music and Me”—Michael Jackson sang what might be one of the most poignant songs of his entire career. Even though he was still a teenager, it was about a long, deep, sustained love and commitment. Yet it wasn’t to a girl or even a friend; it was to his craft. “There have been others,” he sings soulfully, “but never two lovers like music, music and me.”
That love affair began at a very young age. Jackson was the beneficiary of an unparalleled—albeit unusual—musical education. By the time he turned twenty-one, he had already learned about his craft firsthand from some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century: James Brown, Berry Gordy, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones, Paul McCartney. “The greatest education in the world,” he once said, “is watching the masters at work.” All their tricks, expertise, experiences, and advice were intimately passed along, and Jackson actively absorbed them.
This education began in the context of a vibrant music scene in the civil rights–era Midwest. Just south of Chicago in Gary, Indiana, music was all around him—at the schools, in the clubs, out in the streets, and in his own small house at 2300 Jackson Street. His father, Joseph, played in a blues band called the Falcons, which often jammed and rehearsed in their living room. “I was raised on R&B,” Michael recalled. “My father’s group played the Chicago sound of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but he was open-minded enough to see that the more upbeat, slicker sounds that appealed to us kids had a lot to offer.” Meanwhile, the artist remembers his mother’s, Katherine’s, love of country music. She would sing songs to him like “You Are My Sunshine” and “Cotton Fields.”
When Jackson and his brothers first began performing, they modeled themselves after the sound and choreography of 1960s soul groups like the Temptations and the Miracles. Later, as the group honed its act on the famous “chitlin circuit,” Jackson had front-row seats to legendary acts like Jackie Wilson, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and the O’Jays. “I carefully watched all the stars,” Michael recalled, “because I wanted to learn as much as I could. I’d stare at their feet, the way they held their arms, the way they gripped a microphone, trying to decipher what they were doing and why they were doing it.”
Not even ten years old, Jackson would stand to the side of the stage in theaters like the Regal, the Uptown, and the Apollo, watching, absorbing, and learning. “Most of the time I’d be alone backstage,” he recalled. “My brothers would be upstairs eating and talking and I’d be down in the wings, crouching real low, holding on to the dusty, smelly curtain and watching the show. I mean, I really did watch every step, every move, every twist, every turn, every grind, every emotion, every light move.”
The biggest revelation to young Michael Jackson was the “Godfather of Soul,” James Brown. As Elvis Presley was to a young John Lennon, so James Brown was to Jackson. Jackson, however, had the added advantage of seeing his idol up close and in person. “After studying James Brown from the wings,” he recalled, “I knew every step, every grunt, every spin and turn. I have to say he would give a performance that would exhaust you, just wear you out emotionally. His whole physical presence, the fire coming out of his pores, would be phenomenal. You’d feel every bead of sweat on his face and you’d know what he was going through. I’ve never seen anyone perform like him.”
It wasn’t just Brown’s performing and dancing that Jackson incorporated into his act. Brown’s trademark rhythmic singing, his staccato vocals (short syllables, grunts, screams, and exclamations), and his pure elemental funk are all over Jackson’s music. Jackson, of course, adapted and fused Brown’s style with that of others, but Brown was unquestionably Jackson’s biggest early influence.
Jackson’s musical education continued at Motown, where he was surrounded by legends like Marvin Gaye, Gladys Knight, and Smokey Robinson. As a young boy, he was especially enthralled by Diana Ross, with whom he lived for several months upon arriving in Los Angeles in 1970. “She was art in motion,” he later wrote. “I watched her rehearse one day in the mirror. She didn’t know I was watching. I studied her, the way she moved, the way she sang, the way she was.” Ross often took Jackson to art museums, teaching him about artists like Michelangelo and Degas, and buying him pencils, paint, and art pads to practice his own work.
As a young teen, Jackson also sat in on studio sessions with Stevie Wonder, watching him record some of his classic albums, including Songs in the Key of Life. “He would always come into the studio curious about how I worked and what I did,” recalled Wonder. “ ‘How do you do that? Why do you do that?’ I think he understood clearly from seeing various people do the music scene that it definitely took work.” Jackson and Wonder became lifelong friends, collaborating on a handful of songs. Jackson referred to Wonder as a “musical prophet.”
During Jackson’s years at Motown, there were many other important influences who helped shape his natural ability: Suzanne de Passe, the Jackson 5’s early manager, choreographer, stylist, PR instructor, and unofficial nanny; a group of talented songwriters and producers called “the Corporation,” which included Deke Richards, Freddie Perren, and Alphonzo Mizell; and Hal Davis, who wrote many of the Jackson 5’s and Michael’s Motown songs, from “I’ll Be There” to “Dancing Machine.”
Yet, arguably, no one had as profound an impact on young Michael Jackson’s development as the cre
ator of Motown Records himself, Berry Gordy. Gordy taught Jackson perfectionism (for better or worse) and meticulous attention to detail in the studio. If a song took more than a hundred times to get right, they would record it more than a hundred times. It was exhausting training, especially for a young boy; but Jackson learned. “I’ll never forget his persistence,” he later wrote. “I observed every moment of the sessions where Berry was present and never forgot what I learned. To this day I use the same principles.”
Yet perhaps Gordy’s biggest impact on Michael was instilling in him the ambition for crossover, chart-topping, world-conquering achievements. Gordy was a savvy, shrewd executive who felt black music could (and should) reach a mass, multiracial, even international audience. Though some felt this was primarily a commercially motivated ambition that sanitized or mainstreamed black music, there is no question that it revolutionized an industry that was, at the time, still highly racially segregated.
Gordy’s blueprint was important, then, not only because it created a climate for artists like Jackson to be accepted by white and international audiences, but also because it was built on an ideology of inclusion that Jackson would go on to adopt wholeheartedly. For the rest of his career, he refused to be pigeonholed by race, genre, nationality, or anything else. Music, he felt, was universal. And a black boy from Gary, Indiana, could be its king.
This philosophy was a big part of why Jackson was later drawn to Quincy Jones. Jones, he explained in a 1980 interview, was “unlimited musically”: he did everything from jazz to film scores to R&B. He was also “all colors,” which meant to Jackson that his work wouldn’t be boxed in as “black music.”
While Jackson was rooted—musically and otherwise—in the African American tradition, his range of influences grew far beyond any one race or ethnicity. “I love great music,” he explained. “It has no color, it has no boundaries.” Jackson’s own early musical interests ran the gamut from funk pioneers like P-Funk and Sly and the Family Stone to folk groups like the Carpenters and the Mamas & the Papas; from balladeers like Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand to disco sensations like the Bee Gees.
From a young age, Jackson also loved classical music, including composers like Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Prokofiev, Beethoven, Bernstein, and Copland, as well as contemporary film composers like John Williams and John Barry. Jackson was particularly fond of romantic and impressionistic pieces that contained strong melodies and emotional color. To Jackson, music was always very visual; he was often drawn to pieces that were associated with films or musicals, or that evoked some kind of visual presentation, such as Debussy’s Arabesque No. 1 and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. The influence of classical music permeates Jackson’s work, and at times even comes through as preludes to his own compositions.
Jackson loved experiencing art for its own sake (what he often called “the magic”), but he also wanted to understand its “anatomy.” He wanted to understand everything about the way it worked, its history, what had withstood the test of time, and how to take it somewhere new.
By the time he started Off the Wall, although still a teenager, he already had more than a decade of experience learning from some of the best musicians and songwriters in the industry. Jones described him as a “sponge.” “He wanted to be the best of everything—to take it all in,” Jones said. “He went to the top model in each category to create an act and persona that would be unequaled.”
A WORLD OF IMAGINATION
In a note penned around 1985, Jackson wrote about “dissect[ing] all the big selling records. Know what’s selling then study it.” He continued: “Like on Off the Wall and Thriller, Q and I must sit down and listen to each Top 10 album in its entirety. Make Q stay up to date. Study the greats and become greater.”
The note was written in preparation for the Bad album but was indicative of an approach that persisted throughout his career. Michael Jackson always had his finger on the pulse of the music industry—both as a fan and as an artist searching for new sounds and ideas. This not only included “hits” or music in similar genres. “I have all kinds of tapes and albums people would probably never think were mine,” he once said. That collection included artists as wide-ranging as Zapp, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Yes, Grace Jones, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd, Hall & Oates, and Nine Inch Nails.
Jackson was hugely influenced by both the mystique and artistry of the two major pop phenomenons that preceded him: Elvis Presley and the Beatles. According to collaborators, he would watch films on Presley—including the 1981 documentary, This Is Elvis—over and over again, and study how the pop star generated such hysteria. He adored the music of the Beatles. “The melodies. They are so lovely…structured so perfectly,” he told the Los Angeles Times. It was no accident that he ended up working with Paul McCartney and later purchasing the legendary ATV/Beatles catalog.
This vast reservoir of musical knowledge comes through in his songs. For “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ” he included an African chant, inspired by Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa”; on “Little Susie” he used a section from French composer Maurice Duruflé’s choral work, Requiem, Op. 9; on “2 Bad” he sampled hip-hop pioneers Run-DMC. As music critic Greg Tate observed, Jackson was willing to pull from “anybody he thought would make his own expression more visceral, modern, and exciting.” What made Jackson unique as an artist, however, is that many of his influences were anything but hip and contemporary. When asked what his biggest inspiration was for Thriller, he didn’t answer Prince or the Police; he said it was nineteenth-century Russian composer Pytor Ilyich Tchaikovsky. “If you take an album like Nutcracker Suite,” he explained, “every song is a killer, every one. So I said to myself, ‘Why can’t there be a pop album [like that]?’ ”
Jackson was also a devoted fan and student of theater and cinema. He loved Broadway musicals as well as Hollywood musicals, including The Sound of Music, Singin’ in the Rain, West Side Story, and Phantom of the Opera. Jackson’s love of show tunes often put him at odds with traditional rock critics, who felt he could be too “theatrical.” But that influence persisted throughout his career, from the choreography of “Beat It” to the orchestration of “Childhood.”
Jackson’s film obsession went far beyond musicals. He enjoyed horror, sci-fi, comedy, drama, and animated films. He consumed everything produced by Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, as well as Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, and Tim Burton. He would watch films, such as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, The Elephant Man, and To Kill a Mockingbird, over and over again. “In film, you live the moment,” he explained. “You have the audience for two hours. You have their brain, their mind—you can take them anyplace you want to take them. You know—and that idea is mesmerizing to me—that you can have the power to move people, to change their lives.”
Jackson’s passion for film generated many obsessions. He was enamored of Shirley Temple and Elizabeth Taylor (the rumors of “shrines” to both were true). He boasted a bigger cartoon collection than Paul McCartney (a mutual passion the two discovered they shared in the early ’80s when they worked on songs together). He could watch the Three Stooges for hours on end. He famously claimed he “was Peter Pan,” so great was his sense of kinship with J. M. Barrie’s iconic boy-hero. While he read and watched just about every iteration of the story ever made (and nearly starred in his own version to be directed by Steven Spielberg), his favorite visual telling was the classic 1953 Disney film.
His deepest artistic kinship, however, might have been with cinema legend Charlie Chaplin, a similarly paradoxical figure who rose out of poverty to become the biggest entertainer of his age. One can find Chaplin’s movements, stylizations, and combination of exuberance and pathos throughout Jackson’s work. Jackson fell in love with Chaplin as a young teenager, and dressed up as him for numerous photo shoots going back to the late 1970s. He famously covered his song �
��Smile” in 1995.
Not only did Jackson watch and listen to these figures; he read about them. Jackson was a voracious reader—a passion he credits to his personal tutor, Rose Fine, who traveled with the Jackson 5 for nearly a decade, overseeing their education. From his childhood until his final years, Jackson would visit bookstores and come home with stacks of books. His personal library contained more than twenty thousand titles, including biographies, poetry, philosophy, psychology, and history. Jackson read about African American history, about Edison and Galileo, about different religions and mythology. He read novels by J. M. Barrie and Charles Dickens. He read poetry. He famously required his managers to read the biography of P. T. Barnum and frequently quoted passages from biographies of Michelangelo and Einstein.
When Jackson made an album, then, he was drawing from an immense mental storehouse. It was a diverse, vibrant world of imagination that, to Jackson, was just as important as regular day-to-day life, if not more so.
MERGING MEDIA
In no small part because of these diverse influences, Jackson’s own work was characterized by fusion: of different eras, different styles, different media, and different genres. This makes assessments of his work rather challenging. The song “Black or White,” for example, contains elements of classic rock, hip-hop, and pop, defying simple categorization. The video, likewise, draws from sources as disparate as Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. In addition, it is a dance routine that incorporates numerous styles, from tap to hip-hop to modern dance. For each piece, then, there is a long foreground that makes his work feel simultaneously familiar (because it is historically informed) and fresh (because it is fused in such unique and creative ways).
Particularly prominent in Jackson’s work is visual representation. More than any recording artist before him, we “see” Michael Jackson’s songs through their accompanying short films. It is almost impossible to hear tracks such as “Thriller,” “Bad,” and “Smooth Criminal” without visualizing Jackson’s costumes, choreography, and cinematic narratives.