From the ArcaMax Publishing, Clarence Page Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/clarencepage/s-571952-205051
Which was your favorite Michael Jackson? Not your favorite Michael
Jackson song, but your favorite Michael? There were so many of him.
News that the "King of Pop" had died at age 50 might well have felt
more shocking had he not shocked us so often in the past.
He shocked the world in a good way back when he was a kid. Fronting
for his older brothers in the Jackson Five, he thrilled a lot of us
when we were kids -- decades before we would find ourselves trying to
explain him to our own kids.
Even at age 11, when the group scored their first number-one hit,
Michael's own versions of Jackie Wilson's and James Brown's stagecraft
lifted the J-5's bubblegum soul from Gary, Indiana, novelty act to
international stardom.
In the late 1970s, he shocked us again, this time with how much he had
grown as an all-around music and dance artist. He teamed up with
producer Quincy Jones to enrich the last days of disco with "Off the
Wall," which many critics call Jackson's best album. I'm partial to
"Thriller," the biggest selling record of all time and one of the most
influential.
Jackson's 13-minute "Thriller" video became a classic and encouraged
the young and timid MTV to air more black musicians. It also led to
Michael's next shock. He began turning white.
Questions began to grow around Jackson. Was he getting plastic
surgery? (Gee, do ya think?) Skin peels? What else was he changing?
Why didn't he have any girlfriends?
Even in the music world, where gossip is at least the second favorite
leisure activity, questions about Jackson took center stage. It was a
tribute to his prodigious talent that we even cared.
Jackson seemed to relish feeding our speculation. His friends ranged
from Elizabeth Taylor to Bubbles the chimp. Or was he just being
weird?
He built a new estate in Central California, complete with amusement
park rides, and called it Neverland Ranch, after the place where Peter
Pan, the boy who never grew up, lived with Tinkerbell and the Lost
Boys. Hey, it was his money, right?
But it also revealed a sad, lonely and confused side to the gifted
star, a side that seemed to be confirmed by our next shock. In a 1993
sit-down with Oprah Winfrey, Jackson claimed to have vitiligo, a skin
disorder that can leave its victims without skin color.
He revealed heartrending accounts of crying from loneliness as a
child. He said he was abused so badly by his father that he sometimes
would get sick and start to vomit when he saw the elder Jackson's
face.
After his death, those stories give new meaning to his songs about the
"Man in the Mirror" and how "it don't matter if you're black or
white." Was he trying to convince us or himself?
As the man that the aging Michael saw in the mirror increasingly
resembled his father, according to Jackson biographer J. Randy
Taraborrelli, he seemed increasingly determined to change his face.
Sad.
Yet the same troubled-childhood stories that elicited so much public
sympathy were turned against him when he was charged with pedophilia.
He was never found guilty in court, but questions remain, fed by his
many eccentricities, that both stain his legacy and enrich his
mystique.
After all, Jackson was a victim but also a showman. Michael Levine, a
publicist who represented Jackson in the early 1990s, called him a
"disciple of P.T. Barnum," according to AP, who was "much more cunning
and shrewd about the industry than anyone knew."
"There's a sucker born every minute," said the circus master Barnum,
and "Every crowd has a silver lining." He promoted newsmaking hoaxes
from time to time. Even when the hoax was exposed, Barnum reasoned,
any publicity was good publicity. Stoking the gossip helped Jackson's
ticket and music sales, too. But controversy ceased to be much fun
when his fame morphed into infamy and threatened his freedom.
I don't know whether Jackson was guilty as charged. I don't know what
it is like to be surrounded by people who are telling you how
wonderful you are, after a childhood of being told that you're not.
But it is not hard to understand how, after living so long with his
fantasies, he might have lost sight of what's acceptable behavior in
the real world.
Mourning his death pulls us back through a kaleidoscopic montage of
the many
========
E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com, or write to him c/o
Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, NY
14207.