by Syl Mortilla
Michael naturally took his awareness of the presence of the divine during moments of creativity into the recording studio with him. During the recording process, Co-Executive Producer Quincy Jones held dear the philosophy, “always leave some space to let God walk through the room.” (Incidentally, some suggest that Michael’s early solo success was purely down to the input of Quincy. However, Quincy had been reluctant to include ‘Smooth Criminal’ on the Bad album - a track that would become one of the most iconic of Michael’s career.)
There is an audio clip in existence that was recorded during the genesis of ‘Give in to Me’, in which Michael is heard suggesting that the session guitarist should just jam, as that’s where ideas come from,
“It would be neat for you sometime to just hook up your electric guitar… and just start playing, and get me a mic’ and… out of the moment… a lot of magic is created out of the moment like that… it really is.”
The musician Prince is renowned for his jam sessions and for his belief in their capacity to create - something that burdened Michael with a sincere concern. Michael worried that, if he fell asleep, the genie would bypass him. As he divulged in conversation with longterm artistic collaborator Kenny Ortega, “You don’t understand – if I’m not there to receive these ideas, God might give them to Prince.”
On the face of it, this seems an almost comical and stereotypically ‘Michael-esque’ concern to possess. Yet, he is by no means the sole artist to have been discomfited by such worries. The American poet Ruth Stone regaled a story of how - when growing up and working in the fields of rural Virginia - she would often sense a poem suddenly approaching her from the horizon, whereupon she would have to physically race the poem back to the house before it could hit her without her having the means to write it down. Sometimes she would lose the contest - at which point, the poem would continue on its enigmatic voyage through the ether, and she would have to reluctantly concede that the work was meant “for another poet”.
Of course, the success to which any artist interprets their perceived divinations from the celestial is entirely subjective. But it’s interesting to ponder what Michael would have done with Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’; or, indeed - what Prince would have done with ‘Earth Song’. Prince has had many attempts at world-redemption songs, though these have always been expressed through the thinly veiled guise of the Jehovah’s Witness solution. Michael also – unsurprisingly - utilised the Jehovah’s Witness approach (especially as a member of The Jacksons), but seemed more capable of employing Biblical passages without sounding like he had just knocked on your door with a copy of The Watchtower in hand.
The origin of the expression “with great power comes great responsibility” is unknown, though both prime candidates of Stan Lee and Franklin D. Roosevelt were heroes of Michael’s. Its essence is synonymous with Christ’s words, “To whom much has been given, much will be expected”, which again, is something Michael would have been very familiar with due to his upbringing. And what did Michael choose to use his great power for? To spread an ethos of love.
Michael had far greater commercial success with his ‘redeemer records’ than Prince did, and perhaps there exists some correlation between these relative successes and the respective echelons of fame achieved by the two artists. Michael shall forevermore inhabit a more prestigious plane of fame than Prince does (the litmus test for this being the showing of a photograph of someone famous to the inhabitants of a remote African village, then seeing if they are familiar with the person in said picture. Not only is Michael recognised where Prince is not, but Michael was actually crowned King of the Sanwi in the west African village of Krinjabo – whose people observed two days of mourning upon receiving the news of his death).
Further examples of Michael’s level of fame are evidenced in such accolades as the Thriller album being chosen as the only music video preserved in the United States Library of Congress; that he featured in Smithsonian magazine’s list of the ‘100 Most Significant Americans of All Time’; and that the British Council regarded ‘The influence of the life and music of the American singer Michael Jackson, 1958-2009’ as one of the 80 most significant cultural events in the history of the world.
At school, we used to play a game in which the question posed was whether one would rather be rich or famous. I can’t remember which way I swayed, but I’d say it’s a good bet Michael would have chosen fame, whereas Prince would have chosen wealth. This is not to infer that either of these options were the artists’ primary motivation for success - for both of them, the freedom of artistic expression was paramount, as evidenced by the pair protesting about their treatment at the hands of their respective record companies. Regardless, all great art – which the two men indubitably created - comes first and foremost from a house of honesty.
In contrast to Michael’s back catalogue being instantly available to access and enjoy on YouTube (bar any uploaded voice comparison tests of the Cascio tracks, incidentally – they’re taken down in minutes), Prince is notoriously precious over copyright infringement, employing an army of legal staff to trawl the Internet and wave cease-and-desist demands at anyone construed to be crossing the copyright line.
In Michael’s song, ‘Price of Fame’, he lets us know that his father made him fully aware of the dangers correlative to the altitude of fame that Michael was shooting for. The risks were nonetheless confronted by Michael. As he sang in ‘Dirty Diana’,
“I'll be the freak you can taunt /And I don't care what you say / I want to go too far / I'll be your everything / If you make me a star”.
These risks ultimately becoming manifest through the infamy that arrived with the molestation allegations. With the tragic irony being Michael’s pursuit of fame being driven by a desire to spread his message of love as a healing force for the disadvantaged children of the world; whilst the architects of his fall from grace were motivated by money. The consequence of this tragedy was that the vacuum created by the potency of Michael’s drug of fame became inversely correlated with his self-defeating reliance on analgesics.
Of course, Michael’s penchant for a Salvation Army bargain and his lyrical complaints in songs such as ‘Leave Me Alone’, in which he sings, “Time after time I gave you all of my money” contradict the idea of his being apathetic towards financial success - although the bone of contention that inspired the ‘Leave Me Alone’ lyric appears to be borne more of a sense of being wrongly done by, rather than a reluctance to help. In the Glenda Jackson tapes - in which Michael is recorded without his knowledge - Michael bemoans the regular requests for money asked of him by his father. In this particular instance, half a billion dollars.
Yet, Michael’s willingness to stump up the surplus cash required to finance his short films - the most expensive of all time - provide a more concrete idea of Michael’s frame of mind in the quandary between money and fame. Too, was his complete lack of hesitation in profligacy when it came to hiring recording studios (though the sumptuousness of the sonics contained in the music produced - compared to that of Prince’s - speaks for itself). And let’s not forget Michael’s fondness for booking out multiple floors of hotel rooms whilst on tour (though the opportunity of having all that space in which to ride around in golf carts might account for this particular fiscal idiosyncrasy).
Michael’s relationship with money was certainly a complex one. In his song ‘Money’ he condemns greed with all the venom of - to quote Prince - “snakes of every colour, nationality and size”. And the parlance with which he rattles off the list of money moguls, “Vanderbilt, Morgan, Trump, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Getty... Getty… Getty, Getty, Getty, Getty” is nothing short of sinister. There is even a version of the song ‘Money’ in which Michael calls out press emperor Rupert Murdoch: a man often with the balance of power in swaying the opinion of the populous of entire countries - be that who should win X-Factor, who should rule a country, or whether or not a country should engage in war.
Michael was not a man to s
hy away from controversial socio-political matters. On the contrary, he considered it his duty, what with his being the most famous man in the world. As he stated at the Bollywood Awards in 2000,
“I’ve always believed that the real measure of celebrity success was not just how famous he becomes, but what he does with that fame and fortune”.
In an interview with UK television immediately prior to the first 1988 Wembley Bad concert, Michael’s then-manager Frank Dileo revealed that Michael said whatever he needed to say on the stage. Similarly, when his mother implored him to respond to tabloid criticism and conjecture, Michael simply responded that he communicated through his music – an ethos that would eventually bear the strange fruit that is the HIStory album.
Michael was lambasted for the repetitiveness of his themes (in itself supportive of the idea that Michael did indeed write his own songs). But - just as any other artist - he was simply inspired by what he knew, and what he was going through.
Michael said, "Music is the soundtrack to life. It plays the melody of our being." Therefore, hand-in-hand with the change in tune that was his treatment by the press, so did his muses mutate: from artistry inspired by the sweet naivety of nature, to craft generated by the infernal rage of injustice. As Michael explained,
"The more you hit something hard, the more hardened it becomes - the stronger it becomes. And that’s what’s happened."
This metamorphosis is illustrated rather poignantly by contrasting the carefree lyrics from the Temperton-penned ‘Off The Wall’ title-track, in which Michael joyously croons, “Gotta leave that nine-to-five upon the shelf / And just enjoy yourself” with the comparable lyrics from Invincible outtake, ‘Shout’ - in which he sings, “Eating each other alive just to survive the nine-to-five / Every single day is trouble while we struggle and strive”.
(Incidentally, the caustic, industrial-funk, political-polemic track ‘Shout’ was only cut from Invincible at the eleventh hour, in order to make room for the heartfelt ballad, ‘You Are My Life’. Only Michael could make two such polar-opposite tunes interchangeable on an album.)
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After the unprecedented successes of Thriller and Bad, Michael understood absolutely that his follow-up would be a globally significant record. But he took the risk of changing direction and parting ways with Quincy Jones, becoming Executive Producer himself, and creating an experimental masterpiece that demonstrated his omnipotence over several different musical genres.
The relative subtlety involved in the rock-funk fusion that was ‘Beat It’ was flagrantly discarded: the Dangerous album campaign kicked off with the explicit genre-amalgam hit, ‘Black or White’ - a shameless attempt at unifying different cultures through song, using a mash-up of musical styles. You can call it a cynical ploy to appeal to a wider range of buyers, or you can call it a man using his leverage to bring about something positive, but I would say one need look no further than ‘Heal The World’ for the truth.
Michael produced the entirety of ‘Heal The World’ with the sole purpose of doing what he could to make the world a better place. The track is an incongruous curiosity on the Dangerous album - a jarring shift that marks the transition from the New Jack Swing first half of the record, to the ‘pot pourri’ (to borrow Michael’s expression) of genres that make up the second. It certainly wasn’t a song included to appease the critics. Its incorporation left him wide-open to ridicule. Ergo, it seems intellectually disingenuous to then claim it as part of a cynical ploy for sales. ‘Heal The World’ is a pacifier for the planet, sneaked past the Sony suits onto what was primarily - at the time - a trendy New Jack Swing record. ’Heal The World’ is placed precisely where it is in order to be noticed. To make a point. Which other artist would, or could, do that?
In a similar vein, there’s also a further reason why ‘Come Together’ was oddly included on the HIStory album – situated directly after the song, ‘Money’. The Beatles track symbolised his acquisition of the band’s music catalogue. The quality and magnitude of Michael’s art has ensured it an infinite longevity, but the ingenious subtleties of it are often overlooked.
On the Dangerous track, ‘Why You Wanna Trip On Me’ - although not written by him - Michael waxes lyrical on the state of the world and the relative insignificance of his personal life, even inferring at one stage that AIDS is a man-made virus (although the way he expresses the interjection “ha” after singing about “strange diseases” begs the question as whether this is also a dual reference to Michael’s, at-the-time-unannounced, vitiligo).
The term ‘Punk’ is perhaps not the first adjective that springs to mind when it comes to describing Michael (‘Goth’ maybe – considering his predilection for the macabre). Yet, if we apply the prerequisites used to identify punk behaviour, in the true spirit of the term - a stubborn refusal to bow down to orthodoxy and authority - it could be argued that Michael suddenly becomes punk’s paragon.
The propensity for analysis in Michael’s songwriting is indefatigable. And Michael’s songwriting genius wasn’t limited to any particular heyday, either: the latterday track ‘We’ve Had Enough’, for example, containing the lyric, “What did these soldiers come here for? / If they’re for peace - why is there war?”
Michael was a martyr for innocence. He died engulfed by an inherent sadness that he could not realise his idealistic perception of the world; a romantic perception borne of a lifetime of being a sounding board for love. And, as the human being who’d experienced being loved more than anyone else in existence, who was better qualified to state that love is the answer? The song ‘Heal the World’ has its detractors, but who can deny the sincerity with which it is sung? That song is all the proof required to know who Michael was. Michael felt the pain of people’s suffering. We saw Michael as myriad characters, but they were always beneath the umbrella of him as humanitarian; a record-breaking philanthropist. He conveyed his beautiful ideal to anyone that would listen: that the innocence of childhood has an untouchable preciousness, and should be universally treated with unimpeachable honour. This is what Michael represents.
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Michael described being on stage thusly,
“You are connected to a higher source… you just go with the moment and you become one with the spirit, and not to sound religious… but it is very spiritual, very much like religion… it’s a God-given gift… I’m honoured to have been given it… it’s fun to become one with the audience, it’s a oneness.”
It’s this repeated experience of “oneness” with so many people – a recurrent experience Michael had to a unique degree - that I believe drove Michael’s political leanings.
In the crowd-immersing short film that cranks up the anticipation prior to Michael’s explosive entrance onto the HIStory tour stage, the audience is taken on a ride through historic global events. Michael’s music and iconography is interspersed with video of the moon landings; images of Mother Teresa; and speeches from Martin Luther King Junior: events and people appropriate to the majesty of Michael and his achievements. The rollercoaster then takes us into the Sistine Chapel, which we float through in seraphim silence, taking time to admire the exquisite pulchritude of the surrounding art – before being plunged into a dark-but-fiery nightmare, a depiction of bleak emptiness inspired by God-knows-what. Then, before gracing and scintillating a stadium for the umpteenth time – to entertain yet another hundred-thousand people piqued to see him – Michael makes a quick detour to go and sort out that minor irritation: war.
The HIStory tour is much-maligned. The audacity with which Michael utilised lip-syncing was lambasted by many critics at the time. Lung damage was described in his autopsy. It had been a longstanding issue – likely a symptom of his being a victim of lupus. Michael, being a very private man, tried to keep his medical problems a secret (sometimes to the detriment of his public relations – Michael had been becoming noticeably paler for years before he revealed his vitiligo), but the breathing problems became evermore evidenced by the fact that his
reliance on playback increased with subsequent tours. With hindsight, it stands to reason that this was due to his lung damage being a degenerative condition exacerbated by being a professional singer.
It is unfortunate that the HIStory tour ushered in an age of pop star lip-syncing (after all, if the King of Pop can do it, surely anyone can? But then – Michael was forever the trendsetter), as there now exists a frightening ubiquity of post-Disney puppets that flagrantly employ auto-tune and playback with the cynical sole intent of selling capitalist standards of sexual imagery to children. At least when Michael’s illness forced him to lip-sync, he was selling a message of peace and goodwill. (And dancing a fair bit, too - a very special spectacle, itself worth the entrance fee). All of this being done whilst suffering with various extreme physical pains, acquired as a result of dedicating his life to entertaining and educating us through song and dance.
The fact that Michael toured at all is testament to his work ethic and dedication to his message. The reason Michael grew tired of touring was because of the Sword of Damocles that was the inevitable drug dependency that would resume in order to get through a gruelling two-year global schedule. With regards the intermittent screaming he began to utilise – it may well have been the subconscious, spontaneous vocal expression of a frustrated human being, universally renowned for his unique voice, having to contend with age-and-illness-related vocal deterioration. Let’s not forget that Michael had been touring the world and singing professionally for thirty years by this point. Or perhaps the reason for the screaming has a simpler solution. After all - why do people scream? To draw attention to their plight. The HIStory tour was the twilight of Michael’s career. And ultimately, attempting to live up to the unrealistic and selfish demands of an ungrateful public, This Is It - becoming the midnight of his career – concluded with his death.