The Message: Michael Jackson 1958-2009

Michael Jackson, one of the greatest entertainers of the modern era, died last week of a heart attack in his rented home in Los Angeles, California. His personal doctor Conrad Murray was with him when the cardiac arrest occurred. A post-mortem is already underway, which will confirm what drugs were in his system at the time, and the extent to which these contributed either directly or indirectly to his death. It is better to say some things in the time-honoured language of the news story. It is better to remain calm and detached.

Until the results of the post mortem are revealed, there will, after all, be endless reams of fevered and ultimately useless speculation, fed by the apparently infinite capacity of the internet for low-grade rumour, idle gossip and downright mendaciousness and exploited by conventional media – for whom the reclusive superstar’s grim ending represents an opportunity to drive sales in a time of recession. Yes. Of course, not everything you read will be wrong. But it is best for now simply to stay quiet on the circumstances and let the forensic analysis take its proper course until reliable information is available. In time, we will know better precisely what killed him. And very probably we will know how it happened too.
No matter what the immediate cause – and it may simply be that his heart gave out after years of his body being abused in not one but a hundred different ways – it is a sad end to what was by any standards an extraordinary and record-breaking career. Sad in that Michael Jackson had been through the ringer in so many respects and never recovered. Sad in that his reputation had taken a hammering from which he had not yet found a way back. Sad in that his musical genius had been put on hold while other far tawdrier obsessions usurped his life. Sad in that the suggestion of a re-engagement was beginning to take place. Sad in that if he had been able to muster up enough strength to get to, and then to get through, the planned 50 dates at the O2 in London, he might just have gone on to achieve some kind of redemption. Now we know that isn’t going to happen.
There are those who luck into success, but as any follower of the fortunes of pop will know, it was no fluke that Michael Jackson was up there among the biggest-selling artists of all time. He arrived in a blaze of glory as the voice of The Jackson 5 with ‘I Want You Back’: their first single was a superlative, joyous explosion of a record in the patented Tamla Motown pop-soul tradition that stormed to No.1 in the US singles chart. He was just eight years of age at the time and he sounded marvellous, singing with an authority and confidence that was genuinely quite astonishing. Even now, and even knowing all the terrible events that shaped themselves in the meantime, to hear that track bursting from the radio is a wonderfully exhilarating and life-affirming experience.
Even as a kid he was a great singer – and from the start he was a wonderful dancer too, revealing the innate ability as an all-round entertainer that would deliver his finest moments as a solo artist. But even while he and his family band topped the charts, a worm had established itself in the apple. They were being managed – or rather driven – by a monstrously ambitious father, Joe Jackson, who was relentless in his demands. Michael Jackson was very badly abused by his father. So were other members of the Jackson family. It marked him, and may even have defined him; as is often the case, he never really escaped the legacy of what was a traumatic childhood. For a long time he seemed to go from strength to strength, but there were demons lurking within that would eventually snag him and lay him low.
Jackson’s golden era was announced with the release in 1979 of Off The Wall, his first Quincy Jones-produced album, an enormously funky disco record that brilliantly picked up on the dance grooves pioneered by Chic, and turned into a craze by The Bee Gees in Saturday Night Fever, and took them onto a different level. If you were comfortable on the dance floor at all, it was impossible to resist the wonderful rush of ‘Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough’ and the lush, insinuating, hummable chorus of ‘Off The Wall’.
And then came Thriller, an album that defined the 1980s, and which changed the course of pop music and particularly black pop music, by fusing elements of rock (including metal solos – though there were nods to the Isley Brothers in there too!) with funk, disco, and soul in a thrilling melange that had the Funkadelic objective of placing one nation under a groove as its core artistic objective. Thriller revolutionised the aesthetics of pop in other ways too. Michael Jackson hired a number of illustrious directors to make his videos and turned out some of the most powerfully executed pop promos ever, mini-epics with story lines that gelled brilliantly with the music’s essential genius.
Looking back now at the videos for ‘Beat It’ (directed by Bob Giraldi), with its West Side Story theme and extraordinary choreography; ‘Billie Jean’ (directed by Irishman Steve Barron) with its There But For Fortune motifs, homage to spats, virtuoso solo dancing and disappearing hero; and the titanic ‘Thriller’ (directed by Blues Brothers and An American Werewolf in London man John Landis), almost a full-blown horror movie in itself, is to become aware afresh of a singular moment when a great talent reached a kind of apotheosis. Thriller went on to sell upwards of 100 million copies, becoming the best selling original album of all time and contributing hugely to a career total estimated in the region of 750 million album sales. Minds boggled. Perhaps including Michael Jackon’s.
It would be wrong to suggest that it was all downhill from there. Elsewhere in this issue of Hot Press, Mick Pyro of Republic of Loose makes a convincing case for Michael Jackson’s later work, arguing that Bad and the Teddy Riley collaboration Dangerous were as artistically vibrant and successful as his earlier records, and they were certainly more representative of his songwriting talent. But the truth is that the stratospheric success of Thriller carried with it a higher price tag than anyone might have imagined. Michael Jackson saw the whole of the moon, and could never see the mortal world in quite the same way again. In the wake of Thriller’s success, he increasingly slipped into a fantasy playland and – as the years wore on – provided fodder for the more ghoulish aspects of the media, so that he became one of the most easily caricatured and constantly vilified characters in popular culture.
He had a series of medical conditions and at different times was addicted to prescription drugs, including valium, Xanax and Ativil and later Morphine and the morphine substitute Demerol. He lived in a rareified stratum, in which he could indulge his fantasies to an extent that was clearly singularly unhealthy. He was rumoured to have taken to sleeping in an oxygen tent in order to stay young. He also had a number of rhinoplasty operations to deal with problems in his nose – though people also suspected to change his appearance. He suffered from panic attacks and collapsed on a number of occasions. His eating was erratic and finicky to an extent that suggested a form of anorexia nervosa.
He suffered from an increasingly crippling neurosis about his health and his appearance – and what seemed like a deep-seated need to achieve some sort of personal transformation. There were rumours that he suffered from Viltigo, a condition which involves either in itself or in the treatment the loss of skin pigmentation – which is used as a way of explaining why he had become whiter. His appearance changed hugely with the passage of time – he looked like a walking condemnation of the effects of plastic surgery, a monument to low self-esteem. And then there were the child abuse accusations.
All of that has to be seen in one way as a product of the excesses of fame and the fact that he had access to apparently unlimited money and the time to indulge himself. But to a greater extent, I suspect it was a response to abuse and being raised by a brutal and authoritarian father in a dysfunctional family. In that sense, his life offers a very public paradigm of the kind of damage that can be inflicted on individuals as a result of abuse – something with which people in Ireland are only now properly coming to terms.
Which is why I always tended to err on the side of sympathy – to an extent because to be on the side of those throwing tomatoes is always thoroughly repugnant but also because, his extraordinary talent notwithstanding, Michael Jackson always seemed more victim than perpetrator to me.
Thus, when the heat of the current frenzy dies down, I think, will most people see him. He is out of harm’s way now, and so in a sense is his reputation. There may, as Louis Walsh suggests in his contribution to the Hot Press tribute, be more revelations on the way. But from now on, it really doesn’t matter. He has been and gone – but the legacy of his music and the magic that he created through his artistry will live on.
Michael Jackson was a brilliant singer, dancer, pop songwriter, record producer and all-round entertainer. He was capable of making bad records. But he made some of the most extraordinary ones of the past thirty-odd years too. No one can never take that away from him. And sure, why would they want to?