All about Michael Jackson

It is a curious and, in the light of his death, poignantly revealing
collection of writings on the subjects that were apparently close to his
heart – music, dancing, God, his mother, the plight of the dolphin and
children.

It is the nearest that Michael
Jackson – a man who had long since transcended the need or
desire for public confession and disclosure, and indeed, did everything
within his power to avoid – ever came to autobiography.

“We have to heal our wounded world,” Jackson wrote in Children of
the World. “The chaos, despair, and senseless destruction we see
today are a result of the alienation that people feel from each other and
their environment. Often this alienation has it roots in an emotionally
deprived childhood. Children have had their childhood stolen from them.”

Beneath the sweeping generalisation – all children? – lay a
painful personal truth.

There are three figures who will stand as defining icons of popular music in
the second half of the 20th century: Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Jackson.
And just like the deaths of Elvis and Lennon, so Jackson’s passing can be
seen as a consequence of the extraordinary demands and vicissitudes of fame,
particularly the extraordinary fame that Jackson came to — can we really use
the word? — enjoy throughout his life.

If Elvis’s death can be seen as the most extreme consequence of excess, and
Lennon’s as the most horrific outcome of the malevolent attention of
strangers, Jackson’s can surely be attributed to the imperative that was
driven into him from childhood — to perform, to dazzle and to pay the bills.

It was in order to pay off debts estimated at £200 million, as well as to
rebuild his tarnished career, that Jackson was persuaded to return to the
stage and undertake the residency at the 02 that was due to commence in two
weeks.

While it is still unclear exactly what caused Jackson’s heart attack, he was
not a well man. The cancellation of the first four shows due to “technical
issues”, the rumours of his absence from rehearsals and the strenuous
insistence by the show’s promoters that he was a picture of health and
unbridled energy all suggested that he was under enormous pressure.

Blame is being laid on the pharmacopia of painkilling and anxiety-abating
drugs that Jackson was allegedly being fed by “enablers” in his entourage.
The coroner’s report might just as well read “Death by showbusiness”.

There is a theory that applies to any child star, that the age at which you
become famous is the age at which some part of you becomes forever, and
irreparably, arrested.

Jackson was just 11 years old when he first topped the American charts with
the Jackson 5 single I Want You Back. By then he was already a showbusiness
veteran. The seventh of nine children, his father Joe was a journeyman
musician who projected his own, failed ambition on to his children.

By the age of seven Michael was coming home from school at three in the
afternoon to rehearsals that would often last until 10 at night. In later
years Jackson would speak of the violence and abuse that he suffered at the
hands of the man he was instructed to call “Joseph” — never “Dad”.

In 1993 he told Oprah Winfrey how Joe would beat him before sending him on
stage. “He was very strict, very hard and stern. Just a look would terrify
me… There were times when he would come to see me and I would feel sick. And
I would say, ‘Please don’t get mad, Joseph. I am sorry, Joseph.’ ”

Joseph apparently took the phlegmatic view. “When you chastised a youngster
back in the early days we called it a whippin’,” he once explained. “Now
they call it child abuse.”

Signed to Motown, it quickly became apparent that Michael was the star turn.

He made his first solo albums while still part of the group but it was when he
broke from them altogether and released Off The Wall in 1979 that his solo
career truly began to blossom.

Soul music — the well from which Jackson’s talent and style sprang — is first
and foremost a music of raw emotion and authenticity; yet, paradoxically,
Jackson’s greatest skill was to conceal himself beneath layers and layers of
artifice.

The expression of romantic feelings might have touched a universal chord in
his audience, yet seemed to have nothing to do with his own life; the
expressions of sexuality, paranoia and fear seemed to have been learned from
films and comic books rather than felt. Slick and sublime, his music was the
ultimate construct, which is what Jackson strived to be.

What is clear is that his rapid acceleration from childhood to the hothouse of
fame was to have a crippling effect on his development as a rounded human
being. His friendships were made exclusively within the hermetically-sealed
world of the famous, the odd and the similarly damaged — Elizabeth Taylor,
Diana Ross, Uri Geller, at whose wedding Jackson was improbably best man,
and Liza Minelli.

From an early age, touring with the Jackson 5, Michael had been the prime
target of the libidinous attentions of teenage girls; yet accounts from that
period suggest that he was too shy, or too moral, to exploit his position.
The relationships that later surfaced into public view seemed to be more the
stuff of the public relations department than the heart – such as dating
Tatum O’Neil and his brief marriage to Lisa-Marie Presley.

A second marriage — to his dermatologist’s assistant, Debbie Rowe — was even
more unlikely. It produced two children, allegedly by artificial
insemination, and lasted barely two years. It would be reasonable to ask
whether Jackson had ever enjoyed sexual relations with …

Read the original article at Telegraph

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