8st 1oz, no food just pills in his stomach, bald, bruised, his ribs broken by CPR, 4 needle wounds near his heart...It was a story of a prolonged and ugly fall from grace told in whispers and innuendo, but all too rarely (sadly) in song. It was eight years since he made a record, and probably twenty since he made a good one.
Jackson rose like a showbusiness meteorite from much loved child star to the greatest pop icon of his time, but once installed on the throne he craved, he seemed to unravel before our very eyes. He mutilated his appearance in a vain attempt to turn himself into his childhood fantasy hero, Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up. He installed himself in a playground that he called Neverland, with monkeys and other animals for company. He entangled himself in inappropriate relationships with young boys.
He married and divorced Elvis Presley’s daughter. He acquired children through some surrogate shenanigans with his nurse. His nose apparently fell off. He blew an astonishing amount of money and wound up an itinerant superstar, pursued through the courts by creditors and sheiks baying that he owed them millions of dollars.
Neverland closed its gates. His belongings were exhibited for auction, including such prize items as an actual throne and an oil portrait of Jackson as a fairy tale ruler. He grew skinnier and paler (quite something for a black man) and apparently explored every possible avenue to return to the limelight without actually having to perform live. And then he surrendered to the inevitable and announced his return to the stage. Only even then, he seemed to be simultaneously announcing his retirement, telling us it would be the last time we would ever see him, in London at least. Or the last 50 times. “This,” he kept repeating like a mantra he didn’t even believe himself, “is it.”
The death of someone so famous shakes us to the core, because it is like a death in the family. Love him or loathe him, Michael Jackson was part of the fabric of all our lives. Or maybe worse, it is like the death of a God, a sudden unexplainable absence in the mythos of the times. President Kennedy, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Lady Diana: these are the kind of deaths that confront us with our own mortality, the realisation that the end is unavoidable, death stalks us all, no matter how anointed by the fates. Such a death is usually greeted with a kind of incredulity. But this is it. This is really it.
And as the dust settles, what are we to make of Michael Jackson, who had denied us, and himself, the ultimate showbiz redemption? Do we remember him as the extraordinary musical talent that he undoubtedly was? With one of the most distinctive and gorgeous voices known to pop, an incredible gift for rhythm and melody, and for combining different musical elements into a seamless pop whole and wrapping it all up in image and movement? The Jackson 5 sprinkled the airwaves with pure joy. His funky string and disco classic ‘Off The Wall’ remains one of the most sinuously addictive dance albums ever made. ‘Thriller’ is an extravagent plastic pop masterpiece to rival ‘Sergeant Pepper’. Even ‘Bad’ is, well, not bad, although the mania for physical transformation and the almost messianic self aggrandisement had started to cast a shadow over the music he was making.
We in The Kingdom remember looking at Jackson in the mid-nineties, a white, cleft-chinned, thin-nosed, stick figure miming onstage during his egomaniacal yet somehow shabby HisStory tour while footage was projected of his younger, smiling, black, handsomely boyish self, and thinking did some alien kidnap our sweetest star and replace him with a monster? Whatever really happened to Michael Jackson?
But then his entourage showed up. Then news leaked of his presence and the tabloids and fans turned up, bombarding the studio to such an extent that Jackson had to be carried from his limo on the shoulders of a security guard. And his focus seemed to be lost. The recording sessions ground to a halt. The record never came out. But when he was in the studio, when he was working on the music itself, the engineer said Jackson was totally present, totally alive, comporting himself not as a star but as a true musician. Whatever became of that talent, whatever damage fame wreaked on his psyche and his life, my own guess is that the records are where we can continue to hear the real Jackson, the lost boy inside, singing and dancing to his own private beat. This really is it.
