Music Blogs

Now that the tabloid hysteria--the wailing and the gnashing of teeth--has died down, isn't it time to recall Michael Jackson in the sober light of dawn? I, for one, want to remember what was truly great about the man--which is essentially everything before the not-very-good Bad.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

In September 1979, my friend Davitt Sigerson--then a very good white writer on black music; later the chairman of Island Records in America; still later the author of the fine novel Faithful--handed me an advance copy of Off The Wall and said it was going to make Michael Jackson a superstar.

The cover didn't promise much: In his tux and Afro, the winsome kid who'd fronted the Jackson 5 looked about as off-the-wall as a student en route to his high school prom. What difference could this album, recorded after several undistinguished years in the post-J5 Jacksons, make to a career that seemed certain to peter out into the semi-anonymity suffered by so many '70s soul performers?

One listen to "Don't Stop 'Til You Got Enough," the album's electrifyingly funky first track, was more than enough to suggest Sigerson was right. An intoxicating mix of stabbing horns, ultra-syncopated Latin percussion, and Jackson's own feverish falsetto yelps, "Don't Stop" propelled '70s black dance music into a new dimension at warp speed. The whole ultra-choreographed X-Factor world we now live in--from Prince and Madonna to Britney and Beyoncé--surely starts here.

Michael had always been the star in the Jackson 5: cute as a button, coyly knowing beyond his years, in total command of the stage. Who at the time knew the abusive regimen that lay behind such expert synchronisation and effortless grace? The brothers looked so darned happy. Even when Michael entered puberty and adolescence, his pint-sized frame stretching out into long gangly limbs, he was magnetic.

Jackson was not an innovator. He did not shape the course of African-American pop music in the way James Brown or Stevie Wonder or Sly Stone or Jimi Hendrix or Prince shaped it. What he possessed was a vision of what an African-American entertainer could be, taking Berry Gordy's original conceit of crafting black pop for white teenagers and making it global: a shining crossover star who would dwarf even Elvis Presley.

Teaming up with producer Quincy Jones was the catalytic event Michael required to leave his brothers behind--to pull the various strands of black pop together into one irresistible signature, using the absolute cream of LA studio musicians and technicians to achieve it. Blending the vocal and melodic influences of Motown icons Stevie and Marvin (and of course Diana Ross and Smokey Robinson) with the smooth late-'70s pop-soul sensibility of Heatwave and the Brothers Johnson, Jackson and Jones co-piloted an album that offered something for everyone: the ecstatic propulsion of "Don't Stop," the creamy groove of "Rock With You," the tearful abjection of "She's Out of My Life." At the tail end of the '70s disco era, Off The Wall set a benchmark for the 1980s.

After the Matterhorn, Everest: Michael had had a taste of superstardom and was compelled to better it. Thriller took the template of its predecessor and covered yet more bases. Hiring guitarist Eddie Van Halen to blare all over "Beat It" felt as premeditatedly workshopped as enlisting Paul McCartney to simper alongside Jackson on "The Girl Is Mine." But the dizzying energy of "Don't Stop" was picked up by the manic "Wanna Be Startin' Something," and the whole of Off The Wall was surely trumped by the extraordinary "Billie Jean," the sinuously funky account of facing a paternity suit by a deranged groupie. The morning after Michael performed the song at Motown's 25th anniversary show in March 1983, dancing for 47 million people with supernatural self-assurance, he was unarguably the biggest star on the planet. The video for the album's title track made him the new icon of MTV.

Then it all started to unravel. For an essentially shy, frightened, immature and (as we later discovered) badly abused 24-year-old to find suddenly that he was the most famous person on earth was bound to do strange things to his fragile mind. Having never known much normality, his pathology began to follow the usual dysfunction of the child star: a gradual retreat from reality, compounded by delusions about his identity. 1987's Bad wasn't just bad, it was wholly untrue to his real musical impulses, as fake as his increasingly weird physical appearance and his daft Ruritanian outfits. At a time when Jackson's closest black rival Prince was dazzling us with Parade and Sign O the Times--and when Public Enemy and NWA were turning hip hop into the real cutting edge of black street culture--Michael was...well, a bit naff.

Actually, Michael had always been naff but it didn't matter when he was making music as radical as "Billie Jean". With Bad and its equally awful successors Dangerous (1991), HIStory (1995) and Invincible (2001), he seemed to be second-guessing what the public wanted instead of listening to his own instincts. More to the point, he'd lost touch with everything that was organically great about Michael Jackson. When Jarvis Cocker jumped onstage during Jackson's performance of the hideously messianic "Earth Song" at the 1996 Brit Awards, miming the wafting of a fart in the audience's direction, he was puncturing the balloon of a megalomania that made all but the most myopic fans cringe.

Any credibility Michael still had at that point was now gone, and the desperate auto-coronation of "the King of Pop"--a specious term courtesy of that other chronically damaged child star, Elizabeth Taylor--only made matters worse. The pubescent sleepovers at Neverland came as no great surprise: tell us something we hadn't guessed long ago.

Ultimately Jackson's tragedy isn't so extraordinary; it was merely played out on a media scale that would have shocked Elvis. No amount of fame and money was going to heal the psychic wounds of the little boy beaten by his ogre of a father. Classic addiction patterns were evident from the moment the surgeons started chiseling away at Michael's face. Anyone who watched those ghastly Martin Bashir interviews will recall the grotesque scene in which the shopaholic Jackson casually dropped $3.6m on some garish Empire vases. And then, finally, came the miserable predictability of Jackson's addiction to prescription drugs. Well, at least he didn't die on a toilet seat.

Michael Jackson wasn't the first entertainer to be driven insane by fame and he won't be the last: look at the recent experiences of Britney Spears, Amy Winehouse and Eminem. But if there are no lessons learned from the pitiful last years of "the King of Pop"'s life, then surely we are all culpable.

Read dozens more Michael Jackson interviews and reviews at www.rocksbackpages.com. Over 14,000 articles by the greatest writers from the finest rock publications of the last 40 years.