The Man in the (Rear-View) Mirror

Writing about Michael Jackson was difficult in life, and it remains so in death, because over the years he became known more for his bizarre media presence than he was for his music. Despite being the most influential artist of his generation, a man I don’t hesitate to call a musical genius, he’s more likely to be spoken of in death by some as an alleged pervert than as someone who revolutionized pop culture in ways few others have. That disappoints me as a fan of meaningful music.

Born ten months before Jackson unleashed the wonder of Thriller upon us, I clearly remember when I received my first cassette player as a child and I went out and spent my birthday money on a copy of Thriller, which I played until it wore out. I followed his subsequent albums eagerly, and later discovered the precursors to Thriller found on Off The Wall, as well as in his magnificent Motown music with his brothers in the Jackson 5. Even to a kid who knew little about pop music, it was clear there was something incredible about this musician, something worth paying attention to.

As I grew older, however, it became uncool to follow the music of Michael Jackson, due to his presence in the media spotlight for his bizarre behavior. I won’t go into that here, there’s no need for it when a Google search will provide everything. But the ten years between Dangerous and  Jackson’s next and final album Invincible took their toll. Critics at the time were favorable toward the release, but time hasn’t been kind. I myself enjoyed the album for what it was, a solid effort by Jackson to reclaim what he once had, to remind the world what his music could be.

Oddly, however, his public problems had clouded how many of us heard his music in the most general sense. Rolling Stone wrote of Invincible: “ … every song is full of grandiose desperation. It’s an excruciatingly self-referential place, worsened further by its namesake’s unmatched controversies and weirdnesses.” But listening to Michael’s music chronologically, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the self-referential paranoia, the excruciatingly claustrophobic lyrics and his own personal idiosyncrasies have been with us from the start.

Most look at Michael Jackson’s music, his personality and his eventual public absurdities as separate considerations. Perhaps, however, it’s more fair to say that he had his personal demons and spent his career attempting to sort them out using his musical talents. Even as far back as Thriller, it’s possible to hear Jackson’s fear of public embarrassment and humiliation, along with his fear of being trapped by fame. On “Wanna Be Starting Something,” he sings:

You’re stuck in the middle
And the pain is thunder
You’re a vegetable and still they hate you
You’re just a buffet and they eat off you

The tone suggests that even as early as 1982 he was beginning to feel the intense paranoia that the world existed to feed off him, to destroy him. It becomes more clear on “Billie Jean,” among the album’s more iconic tracks:

People always told me “Be careful what you do,
and don’t go around breaking young girls hearts,”
Billie Jean is not my lover
She’s just a girl who thinks that I am the one
But the kid is not my son

The song became a hit because of the iconic dance moves featured in the video, which became ubiquitous with Jackson when it hit MTV in 1983. But the song’s as dark lyrically as anything Jackson had written previously, the idea that already he feared everyone eventually wanted nothing more than to take advantage of his fame.

He never did let go of the neurotic lyrical delusions. On Bad, “Smooth Criminal” was perhaps his most disturbing exhibition of his fear of outside intrusions into his world. Ostensibly the song was about an assault by a stranger upon a young woman, but the song’s addictive chorus featured a barrage of paparazzi questions and terse answers, as though the woman was being assaulted for a second time by the media.

By the time we got to Invincible, however, two albums and fourteen years later, Jackson seemed to give up on any subtleties in the lyrics.. He was most forward on “Privacy,” during which he asked the question outright:

Ain’t the pictures enough? Why do you go on so much
To get the story you need so you can bury me
You’ve got the people confused, you tell the stories you choose
You try to get me to lose the man I really am

I’ve grown up in an age where we think we have the right to know everything about everyone at the click of a mouse. It only takes an instant for something to go from rumor and innuendo to becoming common knowledge. In the case of Michael Jackson, the innuendo became what we knew of him. Once he chose to recede from the spotlight, putting more time between albums, instead of his music speaking for him, his actions in the media spotlight did so. And the world couldn’t get enough of the details. Even when acquitted of wrongdoing during a protracted trial, Jackson became more known for the thorough examination of his California home, during which every creepy aspect of his man-boy lifestyle became known to everyone with a broadband connection and a TV screen.

Which all gets to the point: who really was Michael Jackson? We really don’t know nearly as much about the man as we may think we do. What we do have is his music and his legacy as an artist, which show us that, though he may have been a troubled man, he also had an innate talent through which he gave us musical innovations from the time he was a young child until the years before his death. Now that he’s no longer among us, this critic hopes it will become possible to re-examine Jackson’s role as a pop innovator and give his music a new chance to speak for him, and for itself. I’m not encouraging us to become revisionists, but rather to agree that, whatever a man’s personal demons may be, we can at least acknowledge the role his music played and the role, perhaps, that his demons may have played in creating his music.

At the very least, one hopes in the process we can develop beyond the point where a man is defined by only the last years of his life rather than for the bulk of a long and respected career.

No related posts.

blog comments powered by Disqus