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Pulitzer Prize winner Clarence Page began his career in journalism as editor for the Middletown Journal and Cincinnati Inquirer, and received his ...
Read more about By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services.
Pulitzer Prize winner Clarence Page began his career in journalism as editor for the Middletown Journal and Cincinnati Inquirer, and received his ...
Read more about By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services.
Michael Jackson's Creative Self-Destruction
By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services
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
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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.
(c) 2008 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
This news arrived on: 06/28/2009
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Posted Comments:
07-05-2009 18:24
JCE wrote:
I wish people would just accept the truth about him. He died a has been, and a drug addict. I hope that the doctors and pharmacists and others who illegally helped him be a drug addict, and live out of control, and contributed to his being able to be above the law, and hurt children, get prosecuted to the full extent of the law. So he might have made a comeback. His fans worshiped him like he was a god. But it would have taken illegal drugs for him to do it. What has this country come to? Worshiping a drug addict pedophile just cause he had a musical talent that was mostly wasted? Sick tabloid mentality. Please bury the sick soul and let him rest in peace.
07-05-2009 09:15
owm wrote:
Young boys can sleep safer now. He should hsve died in jail but money talks.
07-01-2009 01:27
JCE wrote:
DJP What with daddy Jackson capitalizing on Michaels death to publicize his new record company, and with a greedy bunch to argue over who gets the kids, that being worth some money in itself, the fight will be horrible, and I feel so sorry for the kids. They don't stand a chance at a normal childhood, and if they have any musical talent, daddy Jackson will be all over them. And I will still be surprised if all his creditors get what he owed them. It will be a huge mess, and a lot of greed at the feeding frenzy.
06-29-2009 17:23
DJP wrote:
JCE
I don't think you have to worry about creditors getting what is owed to them, or his children being taken care of. He may have been $400MM in debt, but his music library is worth an estimated $500MM. Couple that with the recent spike in Jackson album sales, he is worth more dead than he was alive. Similar to Elvis.
06-28-2009 23:03
PER wrote:
Mr. Page,
A great article. What a wasted life! (Note I didn't say career.) It made my skin crawl when he defended the "pure beauty" of being in bed with a young boy. If there was a 45-year-old scroungy parkbench dweller wanting to go to bed with your young son, would you say "Sure, spend the day, and have a lot of fun!" MJ was the most dangerous kind of predator (if he REALLY WAS,,nod, nod wink, wink..): a famous, seemingly gentle soul who only wanted to share a teeder-todder and swing with a special friend who was FORTY years younger than him! Give a hand, too, to the parents who want to bask in the glory of stardom of this guy:
"Please, Michael, can we have little Joey come over to play?" All of the secrets of his demented mind will, perhaps never be discovered, either by his family or his high-priced lawyers, but perhaps scores of little boys will have the chance to have guilt-free productive lives in the future.
A great article. What a wasted life! (Note I didn't say career.) It made my skin crawl when he defended the "pure beauty" of being in bed with a young boy. If there was a 45-year-old scroungy parkbench dweller wanting to go to bed with your young son, would you say "Sure, spend the day, and have a lot of fun!" MJ was the most dangerous kind of predator (if he REALLY WAS,,nod, nod wink, wink..): a famous, seemingly gentle soul who only wanted to share a teeder-todder and swing with a special friend who was FORTY years younger than him! Give a hand, too, to the parents who want to bask in the glory of stardom of this guy:
"Please, Michael, can we have little Joey come over to play?" All of the secrets of his demented mind will, perhaps never be discovered, either by his family or his high-priced lawyers, but perhaps scores of little boys will have the chance to have guilt-free productive lives in the future.
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