by Syl Mortilla
‘The Dance’ (as Michael referred to it in his book, Dancing the Dream), was Michael’s lifeline. Fred Astaire described him as “an angry dancer”, and Michael - after suffering a uniquely oppressed childhood - did indeed have a great deal to be angry about. But just imagine what a better world we would live in if all rage was expressed like this?! In Michael’s song ‘Blood on the Dance Floor’, it’s not coincidental that such a contrast exists between the guttural vox of the verses and the orgasmically unleashed vocals of the bridge, with its ecstatically sung lyric, “To escape the world I got to enjoy that simple dance”.
Dancing was how Michael meditated. Like he said, “Dancing is important, like laughing, to back off tension. Escapism ... it's just great".
And - as I intimated before - give me learning to dance like Michael over prayer or yoga anytime. As a teenager bullied at school, Michael gave me the refuge of his dance, and for this I shall be eternally grateful to him.
So, the years progressed, and I continued to try and honour my hero. Every opportunity I had, I’d show off the arsenal of moves I’d accumulated over the years.
I became a psychiatric nurse, with one of my initial placements being undertaken in a respite centre for people suffering with schizophrenia. As I did the early rounds one day, I observed one of the residents dancing in his room. I couldn’t hear the music he was dancing to, as he was wearing headphones so as not to disturb anyone. I continued on my round, then returned to the office. Whereupon, the senior nurse asked me to report on what the residents had been doing. I told her all I had seen, at which point she instructed me to write in the care notes of the ‘dancing resident’ that I had witnessed peculiar behaviour.
I asked her what that had been.
I continue dancing to this day. I doubt I’ll ever stop. I imagine I’ll be putting on shows when I’m elderly and in a nursing home. Or at least dancing in the privacy of my own room (when my parents - finally - won’t be able to intrude). The nurses will say I’m senile. I’ll refer them to the man with schizophrenia I once worked with.
Prior to an evening out, dancing around the house is perhaps the most enjoyable part of the process - a ritualistic prescient for what will inevitably come to pass on some unsuspecting dance floor. It’s a warm-up, a practice.
For what has got to be the best party trick in the world.
Got the point?
Good.
Let's dance.
CHAPTER ONE
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Michael’s art comprises a third of the triumvirate of topics that people discuss about him. The others being his legal tribulations, and his face.
The last occasion I saw Michael’s face in the flesh, someone had just hit him.
Precisely whereabouts upon Michael’s person is open to dubiety, though AEG Executive Randy Phillips - a man instrumental in convincing Michael to become involved in the doomed This Is It venture – flagrantly acknowledges the occurrence of the physical assault in an email exposed in the legal courts, during the trial in which Michael’s mother’s attempted to garner the truth behind why her son had died. Phillips also freely admits, in the same email chain, that he screamed at Michael “so hard the walls were shaking”. In a further email within the same conversation, Phillips remarks “we still have to get his nose on properly.” Whether this concern was meant literally or facetiously isn’t clear. Regardless, it appears that Michael was being bullied.
There exists a close-up photograph of Michael’s face taken during the ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ rehearsals for This Is It, which unarguably displays the image of an agonised human being. Yet, it was used to promote the posthumous movie’s release – apparently as proof that Michael was “in shape”. It has since been copyrighted – hence, limiting its distribution. This Is It was an empty hearse. This Is It was nothing less than an international snuff movie that took cynical advantage of Michael’s unrivalled levels of fame in order to rake in the dollars.
Randy Phillips had hit an evidently terrified and extremely vulnerable man. A man once worth billions of dollars, who had somehow found himself so heavily in debt that he had no option but to obey orders; a man that merely wanted to be able to afford a house for his children to live in; a man that had been whipped into shape to entertain an insatiable public since he was just five years old.
Michael’s face was talked about a lot that week of the O2 appearance. The press conference announcing his much-anticipated return to the stage provided the media with all the pictures they needed to satisfy their perennial 'count-and-compare' cosmetic surgery feature quotas.
***
The story goes that Michael’s first taste of rhinoplasty was as a result of an accident on stage during 1979’s Destiny tour, when Michael was twenty-one years old. This may well be true. However, it was also around this time that Michael wrote a recently unearthed motivational guidance note to himself, in which he stated,
“MJ will be my new name... I want a whole new character, a whole new look. I should be a totally different person. People should never think of me as the kid who sang ‘ABC’, ‘I Want You Back’. I should be a new, incredible actor/singer/dancer that will shock the world.”
Theories abound behind why Michael would want to alter his face as drastically as he did, with the most popular one being that he suffered with the psychological condition Body Dysmorphic Disorder, as a result of his having been the most photographed child on Earth. However - by his early twenties, Michael had already conquered the world. Maybe he then wanted to conquer it as someone else.
Michael began drawing pictures of elfin faces next to photographs of himself with the number ‘1998’ next to it (a good example is in his autobiography, Moonwalk). And, although it’s true that Michael would sign many things with the curiosity-stoking ‘1998’, it holds a certain poignancy when viewed with hindsight alongside these seeming future self-portraits.
Perhaps there swirled a perfect storm of ambition, enforced rhinoplasty and the onset of the pigment-destroying disease vitiligo. Perhaps it was borne as a logical consequence of an insecure, innate perfectionist who had spent decades of his life rehearsing in front of mirrors. Perhaps Michael embraced and harnessed this tempest to create and control his Barnum-esque whirlwind. The transformation became a double-edged sword, however: it helped sate his desire for a cemented and easily recollected place in the memory of infinity - but at what price for his public palatability? Though the inherent irony of the backlash against the mutable complexion and shape of Michael's face, is that he did more to benefit race relations than anyone else in human history. Well, him and his friend Madiba Mandela.
***
The final days of Mandela were a familiar circus to those of us all-too au fait with the mechanics of the parasitic press; with their orgy of audacity and mendacity in their slavering anticipation of the corporeal death of a hero. Hundreds of people - comprised of fans, media and the merely curious - gathered outside a building, chanting a man’s name: singing for him, holding vigils, whilst the man inside the building suffered. As the great man’s granddaughter, Ndileka Mandela, put it, “[They] want a pound of flesh. In the absence of facts, [they] speculate.”
Thankfully, not all of the comparisons between Madiba and Michael are so painful.
Pictures of meetings between Michael and Mandela portray two bona fide heroes in enthusiastic embrace: brothers in arms. Imagine the charge in that room? Perhaps the most telling example of the bond between the two benevolent behemoths, however, is the quote from President Mandela describing Michael as “a close member of our family.” Michael reciprocated this love during the 2005 child molestation trial, with the words: “Mandela’s story is giving me a lot of strength”.
The colossal cultural strides that these men took, bridged gaps between religious and politi
cal differences; they stood as flaming torches amongst humanity: their fuel of humility starkly illuminating the darkness of jealousy - a jealousy manifest through their being globally slandered as miscreants. As Mr. Mandela stated, “The path of those who preach love, and not hatred, is not easy. They often have to wear a crown of thorns.” The two men were uniquely civilised human beings – evolutionary cusps, perhaps evidencing better than anything else an eventual spiritual progression for humanity. They invited us to celebrate the ecstasy of diversity; they personified Goethe’s poetic claim that “Colours are light’s suffering and joy”. If they were terrorists, they were terrorists of love.
There is a historical poignancy in these men dying in such close chronological proximity to each other. Signs of their time. The annual commemorations will be desperately and appropriately sad: morose celebrations of the life of the humanitarian entertainer stirring an emotive groundswell in preparation for the celebrations later that year of the life of the humanitarian politician - two giants among men that stood steadfast in the face of violent adversity, in their perceived-as-idealistic beliefs in peace. But handcuffed with this grief, must be the recognition that upon these two dates every year, our collective mass of mutual understanding evolves and multiplies exponentially.
There was always such contradiction in the backlash against Michael’s change in skin colour. Yet, as a statement from the Vatican upon his death put it, his “surgeries elicited a personal rather than ethnic redefinition.” After all, Michael ultimately became of almost translucent - rather than of white Caucasian - appearance: a translucence that transcended barriers imposed by racial identity.
The philosophies of Nelson Mandela and Michael can be our global antidote to cynicism. They taught us that there is no weapon as abundant or as robust as love, and that the good fight is worth fighting for. They taught us all to be brothers in arms.
***
The turbulence and brutality of the world and its press empires that were prejudiced against Michael manifested in his creating his home of Neverland. It is where he sought refuge. Though this is not to say that Michael shied away from conflict. On the contrary, Michael possessed an admirable courage to confront, yet preferring to do so using peaceful means. Indeed, any examples of Michael’s arrogance were always borne of a reaction to his being treated unjustly: the HIStory statue that was floated down the Thames; the persistence in surrounding himself with children; the ever-increasing size of his white socks. Cornered animals seek to make themselves appear bigger.
In response to the attempt to have his freedom taken from him, Michael chose the recently Communist countries of Eastern Europe as a foundation for the HIStory campaign. He opted to promote freedom through the portrayal of his stark individualism, in countries entrenched in the active homogenisation of its people by their governments. With the irony being Michael’s demeanour expressing a homogenisation of so many cultural differences: an embodiment of universality traversing not only the boundaries of race and gender, but also of age.
Michael implored us to "harmonise all around the world". His philosophy for a successful society appeared to be one that is celebratory of each person's individuality, with the primary motivation of each individual being the potentiation of their fellow human being through means of reciprocated assistance, and the acceptance of the unbridled freedom of each individual to achieve this.
That - in the mirror of each individual, society finds its reflection.
***
To say Michael was a liberal is perhaps an obvious statement. Yet as with most people, there existed elements of his persona which didn’t comfortably fit within this moniker. One particular area in which Michael wouldn’t typically be identified as a ‘liberal’ is in the issue of foetal abortion, something he was quite clearly opposed to in his song ‘Abortion Papers’, in which he sings, “Those abortion papers / Signed in your name against the word of God / Think about life / I’d like to have my child”.
Although – conversely - in the Thriller track ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’, Michael unapologetically states, “Don’t have a baby, if you can’t feed your baby”. Perhaps Michael was liberal to the militant point of acknowledging the right to freedom for foetuses, as opposed to the freedom of the mother and father that conceived them. This would make sense, considering his adoration of children and ideology of fulfilling potential.
During the eighties and early nineties, Michael was twice entertained at the White House by the Republican Party (though this may well have been mere opportunism by the presidents in question: they had the chance to meet Michael - and they took it). However, although content to be entertained by the Republicans for reasons of self-promotion, it was the Democrats for whom Michael opted to actively entertain and raise funds for.
And Michael’s private behaviour was certainly not conducive with the eighties mantra of greed and excess, what with his record-breaking philanthropic ventures and penchant for purchasing from charity shops. This was a trait that had been instilled in him since his poverty-stricken childhood, and one of the many behaviours inherited from his stoic but gentle mother, Katherine. As part of the riposte to the public relations catastrophe that was the Martin Bashir interview, Living With Michael Jackson, Michael released his Private Home Movies documentary. It was a collection of candid footage of him over the years. One segment shows a Thriller-era Michael being filmed in a car on the way to Alabama with his brothers, in which, after his suggestion that they pay a visit to the Salvation Army, Michael is endearingly forced to defend his predilection for a bargain, arguing,
“…don’t laugh. You find good stuff… That other places would sell real expensive… I’m tellin’ ya… You gonna be hittin’ them soon when the depression hits ya.”
Michael’s contemporaneous musical peer, Prince - on the other hand - was a screaming true blue, as evidenced on his Around The World In A Day album, on which he sings, “Whoever said that elephants were stronger than mules?” I like to imagine an agenda at one of the two great pop artists’ many clandestine meetings (one of these occasions at least occurring over a game of Ping-Pong), involving a conversation in which they decided to separate the two political polarities of the time – the communist and the capitalist – and schemed to work in cahoots in promulgating a message of universal peace. After all, there was a mutual admiration between them, with both paying tribute to each other’s work: Prince’s covers of ‘Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough’ (original percussion on the record courtesy of longtime Prince collaborator, Sheila E) and ‘Shake Your Body (Down To The Ground)’ occasionally feature in his concert set-lists; whilst Michael paid homage to Prince by using his music in the band intermission on the Bad tour, as well as incorporating the refrain “Let’s work!” - from Prince’s track of the same name - into some live versions of the ‘Billie Jean’ dance breakdown. In Moonwalker, there is a joke about Michael’s chimpanzee Bubbles choosing to wear a Prince T-shirt.
Michael’s response to the 1993 allegations was a lesson in socialist propaganda: the robot from Moonwalker, fresh from annihilating hundreds of faceless clones, mutated into the Stalin-esque HIStory statue; the teaser for the associated album was a direct lift of Hitler’s Triumph Of The Will; the ‘Earth Song’ video was clearly influenced by the 1972 Soviet propaganda video, Ave Maria; the spoken outro to ‘Stranger In Moscow’ translates as “Why have you come from the West? Confess! To steal the great achievements of the people, the accomplishments of the workers.”
Michael had much more to do with the fall of the Berlin wall than anyone had ever thought. The Stasi were so worried about his influence that they ran a covert operation on him during his visit. Notes in a file created by the East German secret police describe how Michael had been watched as he toured Berlin. The Stasi spied on his visit to the Berlin East / West border checkpoint, observing that:
“three cars pulled up to the border crossing, with many unknown male and female people. Among the people was the USA rock singer Mi
chael Jackson. Accompanying him at all times was a female person, about 25 years old, 165 centimetres tall, with a slim build."
Namely, Karen Faye.
The Stasi were concerned that the Bad tour concert Michael gave in Berlin in June of 1988 – a little over a year before the wall fell - would act as a catalyst for an already increasing level of disestablishment behaviour. The secret police worried that the "youths will do anything they can to experience this concert, in the area around the Brandenburg Gate… youths are planning to provoke a confrontation with police." The amount of foreign media that would be present for the concert flagged the situation up as a potential national security threat.
It was common knowledge that Michael was performing in front of the Reichstag that evening, a mere few hundred metres from where the crowd had assembled. Thousands of young people congregated to hear him. Violent clashes between East German youths and police ensued.
The HIStory tour performance of ‘Black or White’ celebrates the fall of the wall, its climax featuring the destruction and collapse of a symbolic wall of speakers. ‘Earth Song’ on the same tour incorporates a tank rolling onto the stage at its conclusion. The significance of these visual symbols for the audiences in Eastern Europe, considering the contemporaneous events of that region, cannot be understated.
***
And lest we forget the controversy surrounding ‘They Don’t Care About Us’.
Michael’s use of the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Kike’ in ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ resulted in his being forced by Sony Music to mask the offending terms. Which he did by utilising what was tantamount to a sonic scribbling out. And in the very act of making these alterations so obvious, he managed to explicitly express his disgust at the enforced censorship. Footage shot during the recording of ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ shows a silhouetted Michael angrily throwing equipment around a studio. Ensuing variations of the track – released on later compilations – replaced the ‘trashing’ sound Michael had cut over the censored words, with an equally auditory jarring repetition of the lyrically arrhythmic word from the first part of the line – “Kick me, kick me / Don’t you black or white me.” The song is thus forever both scarred and sanctified by this intentional lack of proper rectification. Or – to paraphrase Michael’s adlib at the denouement of said track – “it’s there to remind us.”