This is a piece written 24 hours after Michael Jackson's death, and commissioned by my old newspaper, The Sunday Herald in Scotland.
MICHAEL JACKSON: THE MAN IN OUR MIRROR
By Pat Kane
Sunday Herald, 28 June 2009
THE misty black-and-white clip has been opening most of the televisual retrospectives for the last few nights, and to me it's the alpha and omega of Micheal Jackson. We're somewhere in the mid-sixties, and someone's on their knees with a camera in a murky Motown audition room. The band's cropped off at the chest, and all the universe is looking at this motion-blur of a boy.
He's a compressed James Brown, in almost every way: the box-shaped 'fro, the tight tailoring, the carnal mathematics of the dancing (part robot, part boxer, part libertine). And that voice – impossibly percussive, a rythym section unto itself, wringing melody out of the tightest of corners.
But in any of his early performances, you have to look closely at young Micheal's eyes. They are large brown pools of stillness, uncreased by any of the tell-tale signs of excess passion or abandonment, even as he throws out those startling extemporisations of larynx and limb that rightly took him to global fame.
Look at this most naked of talent-in-the-meat-factory moments - with his ruthless father-exploiter Joe Jackson behind him, and the relentlessly aspirational regime of Berry Gordy's Motown ahead of him. Look at Michael. Right at the heart of this briar patch of virtuosity, ambition, brute commerce, punishing self-discipline - you're wondering who's looking out of those eyes. Is he utterly calm and self-possessed? Or is he utterly null, his soul the property of others?
Cut to his last ever recorded interview, with an ABC news reporter only a few days ago, on the planned O2 concerts in London. "To do this you have to sacrifice your life, your childhood", he enunciates clearly, the timbred voice of a fifty year old evident through the crackle. "It's giving up your life for the medium".
As the narrative begins to coalesce around Micheal Jackson's death – that of a weary, chronically unwell, stressed-beyond-imagining mature man, whose body finally rebelled against the regimens of performance and enhancement it had been subjected to for far too long – we need to keep in mind that lithe, strange little android, shimmying across the rehearsal tape.
What was it like to be Micheal Jackson, from the beginning to the end? To "give up your life" – from that very tenderest of moments where his self was beginning to form, till the end of his complex, wracked adulthood – "for the medium"?
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Increasingly these days, we might well ask that question of ourselves. Of course, we can place Micheal Jackson in any list of epochal superlatives – as one part of the holy trinity of the great, transformative post-war performers of the 20th century, along with Sinatra and Elvis; or as the all-time zenith of the music industry, both commercially and culturally; or as one of the keystones in the bridge that bent its arc across history to enable a black American president; and on and on.
But Micheal Jackson is also deeper, more integral to the way we live, than any of these headline indicators. Or perhaps we should say his life, times and art has pushed certain core tendencies of modern life to their extremes.
Once we grant the power of his music, we can look at the spectacle of Jackson, and indulge quietly in that familiar, hubristic pleasure at his massive fall - from overpowering celebrity, to sexual pariah, to spindly, sheet-covered corpse. We think we can box him away in our lifestyles as another showbiz calendar date – "where were you when", etc, etc. But he's closer to us than that: indeed, much too close for comfort.
Let's begin with how Micheal Jackson died – a cardiac arrest in the midst of a punishing project-schedule, driven by massive debt and the need to restore public reputation and status. Sound familiar to anyone out there, destressing slowly on their precious Sunday?
It's a little known fact that The Jackson Five weren't actually discovered by Motown, but by a local label in Gary, Indiana called…Steeltown. You may be able to take the Jacksons out of an industrial town – but you can't take the industrial town out of Micheal Jackson.
There is a respectable angle on 20th century popular culture that views our playtime as, more often than not, just a slightly blurred version of our worktime: our "leisure" suffused with just as much routine, duty, self-monitoring and mechanism as our compelled days in the office or factory. On YouTube you can easily find that infamous Martha and the Vandellas clip, swishing their swing dresses around the Ford Mustang production line in Detroit (Gordy was nothing if not a literalist). The song, appropriately enough, was 'Nowhere To Run'.
Look back on the signs and symbols of Micheal Jackson, and you see a man that that had Motown – indeed, the motoricity of industrial culture – in his very sinews. Of course, the King of Pop achieved his absolute-monarch status by applying total effort to supreme talent.
But that android boy won't go away. The Motown 25 television special in 1983 was the first time Jackson debuted his 'moonwalk' – startling because it seemed (and seems) like a human turned into a machine, the natural body forced into extreme artificiality. Show-business has always had this mechanistic iron in its soul, from vaudeville to Pixar (both extremes of which Jackson willingly emcompassed). Think of that tiny boy crouching backstage at the Apollo in Harlem, watching Mr. Brown perform his moves, his fake collapse and fake revivals, in show after show.
And let's remember the political moment too. Thriller's extraordinary success came in 1983, at the very cultural peak of Reagan's America: a world in which, as Donna Summer sang to a nation of sweat-band wearing treadmill pumpers, they worked hard for the money. One could always have read Jackson's sustained fondness for military or regimental symbolism – the epaulettes, the armbands, the bullet-studded belts, the massed ranks of precision dancers – as a case of a gentle man protesting-too-much.
Yet as Fred Astaire told Jackson after he saw him doing his moonwalk on national television, "you're an angry dancer". And there's another truth which Jackson's contorted life pushes in our faces. If they've "got you working, working day and night", as that killer track from Off The Wall had it, then there will be psychological and physical results.
But I think it's more elemental than that. In one sense, Jackson in his heyday was the greatest American exemplar of the work ethic. The energy he brought to his neo-motown (think of the backing track of 'Bille Jean' itself: never did an industrial pounding sound so seductive, so compelling) mapped the very forcefulness of American power. Its total success marked our identification with that power, too. Another time - and maybe, hopefully, a different America.
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As Neal Lawson wrote last week, if we agree to live in a hyper-consumerised, hyper-advertised culture – one which depends on our subjective insecurity to keep us purchasing, a compensation which keeps the mills of production rolling – we must take the consequences. If we "give up our lives" to the media of money, stuff and image, there will be a dark side.
And who epitomises what lack, neediness and the corrosion of character does to the human spirit (and corpus) more than Micheal Jackson? It shouldn't be necessary to say that any disdain for his pharaoh-like profligacy reflects badly on us, the accusers: a consumtariat who eagerly used up every commercial offering of fictional credit presented to us over the last three decades.
But we should also admit that our gory fascination with the way that Jackson has played around with his frame and his face betrays something in us: that is, our own collective investment in the same desperate processes of rejuventation, self-perfection, endless enhancement.
We live in a media culture which seeks to prod, poke, stretch, cut, amend, dress up and dress down the average citizen; which presents invasive surgery as live entertainment; which makes an entertainment spectacle of family and interpersonal dysfunction… And we have the audacity (not of hope, but of self-loathing) to describe this man as 'Wacko Jacko'?
Psychologists have long been able to predict the latent madness of celebrity performers, in a exploded media age. Their careers are based on the construction of a public self, built from precious elements of their own traits and tendencies. So when that public self becomes general property, and then praised, attacked and dissected from all angles by the star-making machinery, the performer can feel as if they have birthed a host of dopplegangers – virtual versions of themselves that they struggle to relate to, once unleashed to the world. "He's a great bunch of people", as they say in Hollywood.
We know those great artists who can manage this multiphrenia of stardom to their advantage, if not entirely to their equilibrium: Madonna, Bowie, Prince. And we know that Micheal Jackson intrinsically understood fama, as the Romans meant it – meaning the public display of character – from his earliest, scuff-kneed moments.
And we cannot deny that we have enjoyed watching Jackson construct, deconstruct and then destroy himself. That flat-nosed munchkin with his helium-driven soulfulness, who became the super-human (or at least post-human) entertainment titan, who then decomposed into a hypochondriac, delusive, sexually misdirected collection of human fragments.
Yet we must be honest about our enjoyment. We're all, to some degree, as plastic, self-malleable, and threatened with fracture and dissolution as Micheal Jackson was. We let him be our proxy collapse: that's what celebrities are for. But we live in the same psychologically demanding capitalist society that he lived in, albeit for him at its infernal apex.
Let history record the news item right after the BBC's Six O'Clock News lead package on Jackson last Friday: yet another infant's death, at the hands of a dysfunctional teenager, amidst a family made vampiric by the drugs economy. Micheal Jackson – who was acquitted of his charges in a court of law - has no monopoly on the narrative of child abuse, in this hemisphere at least.
In short: we don't bury our own brokenness, the proliferating divisions in our own souls, along with Jackson in his grave.
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Are there more straightforward, less momentous things to mourn about the passing of Micheal Jackson? I'm a musician, so I'll take the chance to lament his supreme funkiness. The industrial machine is still at the heart of funk – but its operatives are either slipping sabots into the gears, or perhaps even thinking of taking command of the equipment themselves (see Parliament-Funkadelic for that particular utopia).
Behind his militant market-sensitivity, Jackson really knew the essence of funk – that is, how you can find moments of real freedom in the spaces between and behind the beats. With Quincy Jones's elegantly decorative bodywork on their thrumming engines, there are few musical experiences that can match a song like 'Don't Stop Tlll You Get Enough' or 'Wanna Be Starting Something'. It must also be noted that Micheal always, always had the church in his voice, giving grace and light to his grunts and syncopations.
And given that melodic connection with the emancipatory potential of the African-American gospel tradition, it might not be too uncool to commend Jackson for participating in some of the great humanitarian achievements of popular culture in the twentieth century. 'We Are The World' makes you cringe much less when you view it from the peak of Martin Luther King's inclusive mountaintop, rather than from behind the bad perms of sundry eighties moral freeloaders.
And there's a pain in me to think of Obama's first White House concert, rightly honouring the president's favourite artist Stevie Wonder, and then to imagine Jackson watching this redemptive pageant from the depths of his agony: two charismatic black men, commanding the heights of American power on public televison. And also, perhaps, one transformed, deracinated black man, near drawn-and-quartered by the forces of money, media and ambition that were drilled deep into him, before he even had a chance to become an autonomous self in the first place.
Rest in pieces is an old, bad, tasteless pun. But it would seem to be merely descriptive of the passing of Micheal Jackson. But when those pieces came together – well, what a sight, what a sound. Off the wall.
Pat Kane is author of The Play Ethic (www.theplayethic.com), and one half of Hue And Cry (www.hueandcry.co.uk).
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