by Joseph Vogel
Such work may have showcased a darker, less “sweet” version of Jackson, but it certainly wasn’t barren or boring. As music critic Jody Rosen pointed out: “Though he aimed bigger and broader than any pop star before or since—he wanted every single person in the world to buy his records—he never compromised. His music is the strangest and darkest ever to achieve blockbuster success; by comparison, Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, and Madonna are positively milquetoast.”
Jackson, however, had a way of balancing this darkness with blasts of light, elation, and wonder. Even in his later works there are still moments of unadulterated joy: songs that simply make you want to dance, like “You Rock My World”; songs that capture the essence of being in love, like the retro-soul classic “Butterflies”; or songs that exude pure nostalgic bliss, like “Remember the Time.”
In this way, Jackson’s work is notable for how it presents the entire spectrum of human emotion, from extreme vulnerability to empowerment; from despair to ecstasy. One way to understand his body of work is to consider William Blake’s classic collection of poems, Songs of Innocence and Experience, in which there is a similar constant interplay or tension between “contrary states.” Jackson was a master of paradox. Just when one settled into a seemingly secure “state,” the ground shifted. The artist liked to keep his audience on their toes, never knowing what was around the next corner.
Moving through Jackson’s catalog, then, is a turbulent ride, though we certainly encounter familiar and recurring themes. We find songs about seduction and deception (“Billie Jean,” “Dangerous”); songs rooted in the Gothic/horror tradition (“Thriller,” “Is It Scary”); media critiques (“Leave Me Alone,” “Tabloid Junkie”) and social critiques (“Black or White,” “They Don’t Care About Us”); classic love songs (“Rock with You,” “Remember the Time”); songs about loneliness (“Who Is It,” “Stranger in Moscow”); and his humanitarian anthems (“Man in the Mirror,” “Heal the World”).
Yet if there is an overarching thread to Jackson’s work, it is its persistent dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and its attempt to provide some kind of escape or antidote, or spark a transformation. It is a fundamentally romantic paradigm—a journey from brokenness and alienation toward wholeness and transcendence. “Many of his most affecting performances,” observed author Jeff Chang, “were about distance and displacement, the desire to be somewhere else, the inability to return to a lost past.” We see this throughout Jackson’s catalog. He’s searching for the world that he comes from in “Childhood”; he doesn’t know whether to live or die in “She’s Out of My Life”; he’s trapped in “Leave Me Alone”; he’s uncertain in “Will You Be There”; he’s abandoned in “Stranger in Moscow.”
These are the realities of what Jackson calls the “wounded world”: the result of the disconnect people feel from each other and their environment. They are narratives of estrangement and sadness. “I used to dream,” he sings in “Earth Song.” “I used to glance beyond the stars / Now I don’t know where we are / Although I know we’ve drifted far.” In “Jam” he is “conditioned by the system.” And in “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ” he is “Stuck in the middle / And the pain is thunder.”
Yet Jackson always believed the music could get him out—and that he could take his listeners with him. Thus, in “Startin’ Somethin’,” there is a remarkable finale in which Jackson cries out, “I know I am someone!” before leading the collective chant that ends the song. Likewise, in “Man in the Mirror,” introspection morphs into outward-looking compassion, as his call-and-response with the choir symbolically connects the artist with the larger community. Not every song provides this type of cathartic breakthrough. However, in principle, it was what Jackson believed music could accomplish.
BREAKING BARRIERS
Given the nature of his artistry, it should come as no surprise that among Michael Jackson’s greatest achievements is breaking barriers: institutional, racial, cultural, national, and otherwise. Before Jackson, America had a long history of marginalizing African American artists and musical styles. This marginalization was enforced and reinforced in a number of ways: from airplay to awards to recognition in print. Yet many successful black artists before Jackson blazed trails: Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder.
None, however, reached the heights of Jackson, who at the peak of Thriller-mania even eclipsed the popularity of Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Thriller not only broke down racial barriers on MTV, but also just about every other apparatus of the entertainment industry (radio, print, award shows, publishing). For African Americans, Jackson’s success was an enormous source of affirmation and achievement. The music they had invented was finally being recognized at the highest level. As music critic Greg Tate put it: “Black people cherished Thriller’s breakthrough as if it were their own battering ram [against] apartheid.”
His success wasn’t meaningful only to African Americans. “Even though rooted in black experience,” wrote cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson, “he felt it would be a crime to limit his music to one race, sex, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or nationality. Michael’s art transcended every way that human beings have thought of to separate themselves, and then healed those divisions, at least at the instant that we all shared his music.”
From his groundbreaking 1980 short film The Triumph, a sci-fi–inflected story about racial harmony, Jackson aimed for this borderless, cosmopolitan universality. “From a child to older people,” he explained, “from the farmers of Ireland to the lady who scrubs toilets in Harlem…I want to reach every demographic I can through the love and joy and simplicity of music.”
By the early 1990s, Jackson was playing to sold-out audiences across the globe: Moscow and Warsaw, Tokyo and Manila, Mumbai and Bangkok, Cape Town and Barcelona. His songs were played in every corner of the world. His lyrics were often better known than those of national anthems.
After the Thriller era, his reputation changed, particularly in the United States. Jackson remained the biggest entertainer in the world, but he became increasingly polarizing. The artist had always been “different”; people often forget how unlikely it was that mainstream America ever embraced a man who wore makeup, spoke in a high voice, dressed in sequins, and lived in a miniature Disneyland.
Yet as the 1980s wore on, Jackson’s eccentricities became more apparent and pronounced, including his ever-changing physical appearance—and Americans, in particular, had a difficult time processing it. He was discussed far less as an artist and more as a curiosity or spectacle. By the mid-1980s, the “Wacko Jacko” label began to take hold. In 1993, perceptions of the pop star took a much more disturbing turn, when Jackson was accused of sexual abuse (these allegations are discussed in more depth in chapter 5). While the case was ultimately settled out of court with Jackson adamantly maintaining his innocence, it irrevocably changed his life, career, and reputation.
For fans and admirers, however, Jackson acquired a new cultural role in these later years. He was the archetypal maligned and misunderstood artist, perpetually at odds with the world around him. He spoke to those who felt marked, different, weird, “other”—those who didn’t fit in. While the media mocked him and comedians made him a punchline, friends and fans saw him as the victim of a cruel and callous culture. Jackson, they said, was a gentle, sensitive soul. Steven Spielberg once described him as a “fawn in a burning forest.” Jackson himself often reinforced this delicate persona. He was the innocent man-child, forever compensating for his lost childhood, the seraphic singer who received inspiration from the branches of his giving tree.
Yet in the 1990s, he increasingly used his work to strike back at the society that scorned him. He embraced the darker side of romanticism—the Gothic—to express both his own internal demons and the horrors he saw in the outside world. In his 1997 musical film Michael Jack
son’s Ghosts, for example, the citizens of Normal Valley seek to drive Jackson, the eccentric outsider, out of town (an allegory of the dynamics surrounding the 1993 allegations of sexual abuse against him).
In the final two decades of his life, then, Jackson played a less mainstream but still compelling cultural role, as many of his songs—among them, “They Don’t Care About Us,” “Little Susie,” “We’ve Had Enough,” and “Earth Song”—spoke to and for the neglected, wounded, marginalized, and oppressed. Most of these songs were overlooked or maligned by critics, who preferred his calls to the dance floor over his more social and political material.
DEATH AND REBIRTH
It took something unexpected—and tragic—to finally begin to put Michael Jackson’s artistic and cultural significance into perspective. On a Wednesday morning in June 2009, thirty years after Off the Wall had launched his solo career, Michael Jackson died in his home at the age of fifty.
The news sent shock waves around the world. Word spread rapidly via social media, television, radio, and online news sites. Traffic was so overwhelming that many websites—Wikipedia, Google, TMZ, and the Los Angeles Times—temporarily froze or crashed. “Today was a seminal moment in Internet history,” said a spokesperson for AOL. “We’ve never seen anything like it in terms of scope or depth.”
The global response to Jackson’s death was simply without historical parallel. It was bigger than Elvis’s, bigger than Lennon’s; bigger even than Pope John Paul II’s and Princess Diana’s. Media experts estimated that Jackson’s memorial was watched on TV or online by an astounding one billion people.
Meanwhile, within hours of the tragic news, Jackson’s music and videos began flying off the shelves. In the week following his death, nine of the top ten positions on the Billboard Catalog Albums chart in the United States belonged to Jackson, a feat never before accomplished. By the next week, he occupied the top twelve positions. He also became the first artist to top the Billboard 200 with a catalog album (Number Ones appropriately stayed at #1 for six weeks).
On iTunes and other online retailers, the King of Pop similarly reigned supreme, shattering record after record for digital sales. In the United States, no artist had ever sold one million downloads in a week; in the week following his death, with stock wiped clean in brick-and-mortar stores, Jackson had $2.6 million in record sales. Across the world, Jackson’s songs and albums reached #1 in every country with digital charts, including Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Argentina, and Germany.
By the end of 2009, Jackson had sold more than eight million albums in the United States and an estimated thirty million worldwide in a matter of months, not only becoming the bestselling artist of the year by a landslide, but also surpassing even his own stratospheric sales records from the glory years of Thriller. These staggering numbers didn’t even account for other channels—streaming on sites like Pandora and Spotify, Jackson marathons on radio and TV, and the estimated fifteen billion Jackson-related views on sites like YouTube.
Then there were the full-magazine commemorations in Rolling Stone, Billboard, People, Time, and Newsweek, among dozens of others; the TV documentaries and tributes; and, eventually, the millions of people who went to theaters that fall to watch Michael Jackson’s This Is It, a film about the artist’s final concert rehearsals that grossed over $260 million, becoming the bestselling music film of all time.
It was a remarkable reascent for the King of Pop, made even more so considering the context. Jackson hadn’t released an album in eight years; he had only performed two concerts (at Madison Square Garden in 2001) in the past decade; and his last major public appearance had been his 2005 acquittal, following months of lurid headlines and assumed guilt. Even with the remarkable interest in his planned This Is It concert series at the O2 Arena in London, most industry experts saw his brand as dead. While his fans remained ardent, it had been a long time since the general public had thought of him as anything other than a curiosity, a punch line, or worse.
Now he was once again the biggest artist on the planet. In a 2009 retrospective for The Atlantic, Hampton Stevens argued that he was “the most influential artist of the twentieth century.” Elvis Presley and the Beatles were enormous, Stevens acknowledged, particularly in the United States. But Jackson’s cross-cultural influence was unparalleled.
In the wake of his death, this global reach was on full display. Spontaneous tributes and vigils sprang up from Los Angeles to London, Kenya to Korea. Many people lit candles and cried; others sang and danced. In the Philippines, fifteen hundred Cebu inmates in a high-security prison reunited for a dance routine of “Thriller” that had become a YouTube sensation. In Iran, protestors of a repressive regime blasted “Beat It.” In Ethiopia, nearly every taxi played his music for weeks as citizens remembered his efforts on their nation’s behalf through “We Are the World” and USA for Africa.
Back in Gary, Indiana, the industrial city of Jackson’s birth, thousands converged to pay their respects at his first home on 2300 Jackson Street. People brought flowers and pictures, letters and candles. They did the same at his old Neverland Ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley and at his final Holmby Hills residence in Los Angeles.
What seemed to surprise the media the most was the emotional outpouring. His death reminded many people of what he had meant to them. In the United States, the response was especially pronounced in the African American community. That relationship had been complicated over the years, particularly as people tried to make sense of the changes to his physical appearance. But now that he was gone, many felt like they had lost a close family member. “From Compton to Harlem,” wrote journalist Greg Tate, “we’ve witnessed grown men broke-down crying in the ’hood over Michael; some of my most hard-bitten, 24/7 militant Black friends, male and female alike, copped to bawling their eyes out for days after they got the news. It’s not hard to understand why: For just about anybody born in Black America after 1958—and this includes kids I’m hearing about who are as young as nine years old right now—Michael came to own a good chunk of our best childhood and adolescent memories.”
In Brooklyn, filmmaker Spike Lee put together the first of what would become an annual summer celebration of the King of Pop. In Harlem, the Apollo Theater placed a tribute to Jackson on its marquee, as thousands of people—grandparents, parents, and children alike—came together to grieve and remember; each generation knew and sang along to his hit songs.
In death as in life, then, the artist’s music crossed barriers, connected people. “It was a moment,” wrote music critic Rob Sheffield, “that summed up everything we loved about Michael Jackson, as every car, every bar, every open window seemed to throb with the same beat, as if Jackson had successfully syncopated the whole world to his own breathy, intimate, insistent rhythmic tics.”
MAN IN THE MUSIC
Over the ensuing days, statements and tributes came pouring in from world leaders, fellow artists, protégés, and friends. “He will go down in history as one of our greatest entertainers,” said US president Barack Obama, who also wrote a private letter of condolence to the Jackson family. Former South Korean president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kim Dae-jung called Jackson “a hero of the world.” In Rio de Janeiro, Mayor Eduardo Paes announced that the city would erect a statue in Jackson’s honor. South African civil rights icon Nelson Mandela, who collaborated with Jackson on several human-rights projects and charities, called his friend “a close member of our family. We had great admiration for his talent and that he was able to triumph over tragedy on so many occasions in his life.”
The admiration extended to Jackson’s peers. “It’s so sad and shocking,” said Paul McCartney. “I feel privileged to have hung out and worked with Michael. He was a massively talented boy-man with a gentle soul. His music will be remembered forever and my memories of our time together will be happy ones.” Fellow pop icon Madonna likewise spoke of her deep admirat
ion for Jackson as both an artist and a human being. “In a desperate attempt to hold on to his memory, I went on the Internet to watch old clips of him dancing and singing on TV and onstage and I thought, ‘My God, he was so unique, so original, so rare. And there will never be anyone like him again.’ He was a king. But he was also a human being and, alas, we are all human beings and sometimes we have to lose things before we can truly appreciate them.”
In Barcelona, U2 paid tribute to Jackson while on tour, dedicating “Angel of Harlem” to the singer before segueing into “Man in the Mirror” and “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” as ninety thousand fans sang along. From the Glastonbury Festival in England where she was performing, Lady Gaga sobbed over the news, later praising Jackson as revolutionary and one of her biggest influences. In the subsequent weeks, recognition came from nearly every corner of the entertainment industry: from filmmakers Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese; from hip-hop moguls Jay-Z and Kanye West; from guitar heroes Slash and Eddie Van Halen; from contemporary stars Britney Spears and Beyoncé; and from a long list of old friends, including Brooke Shields, Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Ross, Berry Gordy, and Quincy Jones, among hundreds of others.