by Syl Mortilla
“Before you judge me try hard to love me / Look within your heart, then ask / Have you seen my childhood?”
In the same way that one need not necessarily have been the biggest star on the planet in order to experience instances of pressure, one neither had to have been the biggest star on the planet to have suffered a stolen childhood. The Double A-side singles of ‘Scream’ and ‘Childhood’ were two sides of the same coin.
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Michael liked to draw attention by using contrasting sounds in his work: on the Victory album the ballad ‘Be Not Always’ was followed by the funk-rock track ‘State Of Shock’; on Bad, ‘Speed Demon’ was followed by ‘Liberian Girl’; on Dangerous, ‘Heal The World’ followed ‘Can’t Let Her Get Away’; on HIStory, ‘Tabloid Junkie’ followed ‘Childhood’; on Invincible, ‘Speechless’ was followed by ‘2000 Watts’. In live performances, ‘She’s Out Of My Life’ was followed by ‘I Want You Back’. As a technique for pricking the ears, it was certainly effective. Michael also used the approach within stand-alone songs. During live performances, too - in ‘Working Day and Night’, for example, Michael thought nothing of following a white rock female guitar solo with a spurt of slap-bass. Indeed, subtle segues are found few and far between in Michael’s work, though when they are, they are devastating. Suddenly discovering oneself somehow immersed in the unbridled joy of ‘Rock With You’ after its transition from the anguish of ‘I’ll Be There’ on the Bad tour is an experience of absolute beauty.
Michael embodied balance. It was an intrinsic feature of his dance: pointing in one direction whilst thrusting his hip to the other side, before repeating the move the other way; grabbing his crotch whilst simultaneously incorporating the sign of the cross; walking forwards and backwards at the same time; and – the very embodiment of the philosophy – the toe-stand.
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There are those that criticise some of the tactics Michael deployed in his efforts to promote his idea of the healing power of love. However, Michael had the talent and work ethic to back up his propaganda machine. All the promotion in the world will only get you so far without the requisite talent and industry. Besides, what’s wrong with the use of any technique, when the message being promulgated is to love one another? As far as role models go, there is none better.
Throughout the eighties, Michael was that rare public figure: encouraged to be liked by parents, with this encouragement enthusiastically reciprocated by their children. He was a true unifier. It’s hardly surprising a world governed by greed and funded by hate chose to bring him down. But in doing so, they martyred him.
Michael’s success was down to his mastery of all the components of being a superstar: he combined his otherworldly talent with his transient physicality as a means to an end, to remain relevant-yet-enigmatic in an effort to further his fame, and hence his message. In spite of all the change, there was an immutable undercurrent that ran through all his conduits of conveyance - that an appreciation of the wisdom of children is the essence of, and answer to, world peace.
CHAPTER THREE
Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
In order to get close enough to the microphone when recording songs, the child Michael stood atop an apple box. From this elevated position, he conveyed a supernaturally precocious ability for perfectly expressing the joy of romantic love.
The paradox of Michael’s back-catalogue is that the themes present in his childhood material (having been written by adults) were mature beyond his years, whilst the ideas he explored in his self-penned adult work were more akin to those that would inspire a child.
As a child, Michael could merely imagine what romantic love was like, yet he managed to relay its emotions with a visceral conviction. His song ‘With a Child’s Heart’ is advice on attempting to assuage the tumultuousness of life by approaching each day with the carefree attitude of youth. Contrasted with the other songs of his childhood career, in which he effortlessly relays the euphoria of adult love, the song ‘With a Child’s Heart’ anomalously drips with the tangible pain of a subconscious awareness of the irony in the words he is singing. As Michael said during an interview in 1980,
“When I was small I didn’t really know what I was doing, I just sang and it just came out sounding… pretty good.”
The formative Jackson 5 years left no-one in doubt with regards Michael’s capacity for conveying emotion through his voice. Though it was not until Michael left Motown, that we were requited with this voice singing songs that he had authored himself. With ‘Blues Away’ came the epiphany - many artists never write a song as important as this in their entire career. Yet, this track - from the eponymous The Jacksons album - their first after unshackling themselves of the artistic constraints that bound them at Motown - was a mere taster; a tantalising teaser of what was to come.
Whereupon one need look no further than Destiny - the subsequent Epic release from The Jacksons.
The opening track - the bassline bonanza that is ‘Blame It on the Boogie’ - is the sole song on the record not written by the brothers (though, coincidentally, it was penned by a Michael Jackson namesake). The album palpably throbs with both joy and heartbreak. The autobiographical nature of the lyrical themes are prescient of the standard ideas we would come to recognise in Michael’s solo work, referencing as they do: insecurity and success as bedfellows; the escapism of dance; and the loneliness of being misunderstood.
Concerning the latter theme, the song ‘Bless His Soul’ is perhaps the most touching: not merely in the context of the Destiny album, but also when considering Michael’s canon of work as a whole. The bridge contains the refrain, “The life you’re leading is dangerous,” with the melody in that final word ‘dangerous’ reminiscent of the chorus of the title track that Michael would record thirteen years later. What with the theme of ‘Bless His Soul’ addressing how, “You gotta start doing what’s right for you / ‘Cos life is being happy yourself” - and how when not living by this philosophy, life becomes “dangerous”, the mirroring becomes poignantly prophetic. Of course, when Michael eventually did begin living how he desired, his life became very dangerous indeed.
The Jacksons’ ensuing release after Destiny was the album Triumph. The short film for the opening track features this Michael-penned voiceover:
“In the beginning, the land was pure – even in the early morning light, you could see the beauty in the forms of nature. Soon, men and women of every colour and shape would be here too – and they would find it all-too easy not to see the colours, and to ignore the beauty in each other. But they would never lose sight of the dream of a better world that they could build together – in triumph.”
It is spoken as the camera pans across a gorgeous vista of daybreak over a deserted landscape. The conclusion of the voiceover is the signal for the horns to ignite the iconic rhythm of The Jacksons classic, ‘Can You Feel It’.
In spite of the short film’s inclusion in a 2001 poll listing the 100 Greatest Music Videos, the spectacle that is the ‘Can You Feel It’ promo is nowadays often overlooked. However, in 1981 - the year of its release - the short film’s state-of-the-art visual effects popped the eyes and dropped the jaws of anyone that saw it, as demonstrated quite clearly by the host’s gasp of disbelief when introducing its premiere on American Bandstand. Prior to ‘Can You Feel It’, the accepted format of music videos had been that of a band in a studio, pretending to sing and perform their instruments in front of a static camera. The conception and execution of the ‘Can You Feel It’ project was nothing short of revolutionary. It was a vanguard; it was the work of a visionary.
(The MTV Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award was named after Michael in 1991, in honour of the culture-altering contribution that was his dedication to promoting the music video as a credible artistic medium. Still, between the years of 1993 and 2005, the award was only intermittently presented. 1997 was one of the years in which it was – when Mark Romanek was grant
ed the prize, after having directed the short film, ‘Scream’. However, since 2005, when Michael was cleared of the child molestation allegations, the eponymous award has been a frequent feature of the MTV Video Music Awards show. MTV would do well to remember that they would not even exist if it were not for Michael.)
Upon leaving Motown, The Jacksons created their own production company – Peacock Productions. They explained their choice of name for this venture by saying,
“Through the ages, the peacock has been honoured and praised for its attractive, illustrious beauty. Of all the bird family, the peacock is the only bird that integrates all colours into one, and displays this radiance of fire only when in love. We, like the peacock, try to integrate all races into one through the love of music.”
The peacock feather is utilised in the ‘Can You Feel It’ video, as an emblem of hope that descends upon humanity, after the light of the sun is extinguished by an eclipse. The anti-racism theme is encapsulated by the lyric, “Because the blood inside of me / Is inside of you”. It is a reminder that regardless of our race, in sufferance we all cry the same coloured tears.
In 1980, Michael mused,
“You go to our concerts and you see every race out there – waving hands, and they’re holding hands, and they’re smiling, and they’re dancing – all colours. That’s what’s great. That’s what will keep me going.”
The significance of a group of black men - products of the decade that brought an end to racial segregation in the United States - wielding their substantial influence cannot be understated. Their message was to encourage progression – that, in spite of their forefathers having suffered the torture and inhumanity of slavery, any ambitions of world peace involve every one of us moving forward, celebratory of our differences, but united. Accusations were levelled at The Jacksons that the video was a mass Jehovah’s Witness promotion and recruitment attempt. And that’s cynicism for you. Nonetheless, a connection does indeed exist between Christianity and peacocks: in the religion’s early incarnation, the peacock was utilised as a totem for immortality. This was due to the fact that after a peacock died, its feathers remained fresh and vibrant, in spite of the decaying flesh they covered.
One of the jackets that Michael wore to perform ‘Jam’ on the Dangerous tour (the artwork on the associated album also incorporating an image of a peacock) - a song in which Michael took to the stage to strut and state - is reminiscent of the shimmer and sheen of the peacock’s feather. At first glance, both the jacket and the feather are made up of what are ostensibly solid colours; but with closer inspection, it is revealed that they are actually comprised of myriad, minutely varied colourations that integrate to appear as one. A comparable analogy can be used for the many layers that combine to create a song – such as the way the bassline from ‘I Want You Back’ emphasises the harmonies whilst complimenting the melody.
As such, the peacock feather provides us with a perfect metaphor for the political and philosophical leanings of Michael. It is one that suggests that the growing individualistic nature of the people of the world - Michael himself taking individualism to its ultimate conclusion - in which the shackles of patriarchy are being dismantled, need not necessarily be an ominous thing. So long as the onus is on using one’s gifts and talents for the potentiation of the happiness of others.
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Michael had mastered the soulful evocation of romantic love by the time he was a teenager. It’s no wonder he evolved to write love letters to planet Earth. Saying that, people often misconstrue that Michael’s mission to heal the world was a latter-day attitude that he adopted – a moral obligation he undertook as a result of the fame he achieved due to Thriller – but the truth is, that way back in the Jackson 5, Michael was already singing such lyrics as “We can stand, despite all of the dark lies / And we can build a world that is right / We can be the children of the light”.
Then, in the seventies, as soon as Michael was granted the opportunity to record his self-penned music, he wrote lyrics such as “All the children of the world should be / Loving each other wholeheartedly.” The idea of the use of childhood innocence to redeem humanity had been entwined in his soul at an early age.
There is an absurd conspiracy theory promulgated by some that denies Michael the talent of songwriting. He remarked on this odd perspective,
“People used to underestimate my ability as a songwriter. They didn’t think of me as a songwriter, so when I started coming up with songs, they’d look at me like: “Who really wrote that?” I don’t know what they must have thought - that I had someone back in the garage who was writing them for me? But time cleared up those misconceptions. You always have to prove yourself to people and so many of them don’t want to believe.”
Michael was a man who had grown up in recording studios; recording studios in which he was the protégé of the genius songwriter Stevie Wonder. Why wouldn’t he be able to write songs? Indeed, perhaps his most prolific songwriting phase was during the period he duetted with Stevie Wonder, on the tracks ‘Get It’ and ‘Just Good Friends’ – though it is somewhat ironic that ‘Just Good Friends’ was one of only two tracks on the Bad album that Michael didn’t write. Michael’s creative fertility at this stage was further demonstrated on the Bad 25 bonus disc, which featured a collection of Bad era demos evidencing nothing short of an embarrassment of unreleased riches. (Though most eventually did see the authorised light of day as finished tracks in one way or another – ‘Free’ becoming ‘Elizabeth I Love You’, ‘Al Capone’ evolving into ‘Smooth Criminal’ and ‘Price Of Fame’ reminiscent of ‘Who Is It’. The chord sequence in ‘Abortion Papers’ ultimately evolved into ‘Jam’. Now there’s a sentence.)
Michael’s songwriting process is sometimes dismissed as being vague, what with his perpetual referral to the music ‘coming from God’ or the ‘Giving Tree’ – and in his insistence that he was naught but a vessel. However, in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the contemporaneous accepted belief system was that creativity is the effects of celestial spirits expressing an awareness of their existence through human acts of artistry: that a genius was a divine entity abiding in the walls of an artisan’s house, invisibly assisting the corporeal creator. In Plato’s Realm of the Forms, the philosopher muses that the ideal form of everything already exists, with everything on Earth being only an inferior copy. For example, there does exist a perfect circle in the world of the forms, but there can never be one on Earth. Plato dismissed art as unnecessarily distracting from the forms – that art is an imitation of a copy, and that any good art would have to come from knowledge of the forms; whereupon - such as in the case of Michael - it could manifest through a terrestrial recipient as an uninterrupted divine stream. The earthbound creator merely being - to borrow Jermaine Jackson’s take on Conrad Murray’s responsibility for the death of Michael – “the finger to a bigger hand.”
The childlike quality of Michael’s artistry is precisely what makes it so estimable; the capacity to successfully express emotion and ideas so succinctly is the exclusive domain of the artistic greats. Paul McCartney mentioned to Michael that he should modify the lyrics to ‘The Girl Is Mine’, as he thought they were too naïve. Michael responded that he was more concerned with “the feel” of the piece. Michael’s utilisation of childlike qualities in his music is exemplified in such songs as ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ and ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ – the choruses of both being reminiscent of playground chants. The “feel” Michael referred to in conversation with McCartney is very evident in these tracks, though neither the theme nor the lyrics to these examples could ever be construed as “naïve.”
When Michael spoke of his work being inspired by children, it was perhaps in a more direct way than people interpreted.
Michael’s refusal to take credit for the rhythms and melodies that inspired and entertained a planet – consistently attributing the results to a force beyond himself - is a beautiful depiction of Michael’s level of humility.<
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There is a demo version of ‘Beat It’ that simultaneously showcases Michael’s creative process and inherently modest nature. The track begins with a mumbled introduction, in which Michael stumbles over his words with a humble hesitance. He then proceeds to immaculately vocalise every instrument and sonic nuance that he wants the musicians to reproduce in the studio with their instruments. It is mind-blowing.
There is a further example that demonstrates how Michael managed to retain this admirable trait of humility even after a life lauded with plaudits and insidious sycophancy. It is exhibited in the ‘Billie Jean’ rehearsal featured in This Is It. As Michael performs, his molten dance moves etch expressions of pure astonishment onto the faces of the small crowd watching him. At the conclusion to the spectacle, Michael shyly bats off the resultant standing ovation with the embarrassed words, “Ah… at least we get a feel for it.”