COMMENTARY
Jackson was a victim of his own genius
He was a performing genius. Clearly. And you’d be amazed at those who resist that judgment, still, about Michael Jackson. To them, throwing the “G-word” around indiscriminately is one of culture’s seven deadly sins. “Genius,” for them, is how you describe what people do when they’re sitting down—write like Goethe or Shakespeare, or think like Einstein and Isaac Newton. Maybe you can let in the painters and sculptors but only if they promise to be very quiet while they work on their feet.
And, if we must, they’ll let us usher in Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker and Jimi Hendrix too, even though they always stood up while their genius poured forth.
“Performing genius?” “Pop genius?” They’re contradictions in terms, aren’t they?
Not when you saw Michael Jackson perform, they weren’t.
Believe me, you didn’t have to catch him live—at that 1984 “Victory” tour concert in then-Rich Stadium, for instance— though it certainly helped. All you had to do was watch those videos all over TV last weekend. Or see him on that Motown 25th Anniversary Special.
Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly both lived long enough to know it and say so. But then Michael always returned the favor. He dedicated his “memoir,” “Moonwalk,” to Astaire. And those white socks he wore in all those videos (“Billie Jean,” for instance) were learned from Gene Kelly, who always said he wore them to attract the eye and make sure the audience saw what his feet were doing.
Sure Jackson took a lot from Jackie Wilson and James Brown. That’s so that Jackson could succeed in marrying R&B to classic American showbiz. Who else had ever been considered a peer by Diana Ross AND Liz Taylor? James Brown AND Fred Astaire?
And, for all that, I don’t think you can separate his genius from his pathology. One was the pearl, the other the irritant within. Or, as Edmund Wilson once put it, they’re the wound and the bow. Without the pathology of Michael Jackson — whose singular talent made his train wreck the worst in the history of American fame — you wouldn’t have had the genius, I think.
You have to remember that his latter-day, post-Jackson Five career sprang whole from the movies. It was Sidney Lumet’s version of “The Wiz” with Diana Ross that first put Michael Jackson into contact with Quincy Jones to begin the most successful producer/artist partnership in the history of American recording.
That’s where Quincy Jones has said he first really saw Michael Jackson, where he first had a full inkling of what he was capable of.
What came from that were those world-conquering three discs they did together—two of them recording classics by any conceivable definition, “Off the Wall” and “Thriller,” the biggest- selling record of all time. What also came from that was Michael Jackson combining old Hollywood and new technology on video to advance a new art form so far that he’d never really have to make another conventional Hollywood movie.
Why on earth would he, when he could get actor Wesley Snipes, writer Richard Price and director Martin Scorsese to make a video of “Bad” with him? Why on earth should he make a whole movie when John Landis — director of “Animal House” and “An American Werewolf In London” — could make the “Thriller” video?
And all of it, I think, is a direct sublimation of the deeply distressing pathology of this child/man whom Quincy Jones called his “little brother.” And, in what I found the most moving and disturbing statement in the wall-to-wall coverage of his death, Jones told Brian Williams that Jackson was a “victim.”
Of what? He elaborated by way of explanation — “all those surgeries” and the self-dissatisfaction they reveal. And when you walked into Michael’s house, Jones told us, you’d go upstairs and see “all those pictures of white kids.”
He didn’t really have to finish the thought. Clearly he didn’t want to.
The original Jackson Brother act grew out of the ghettos of Gary, Ind. The fantasy came out of Hollywood. In his head, I think, was an abused, overworked child star, a modern version of all those contract kids at MGM in the ’30s and ’40s: Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Peter Lawford, Tom Drake, Roddy McDowell.
Scour that list. You’ll find more than a little substance abuse on it. And sexual chaos. And early death. (McDowell, in fact, stands out on it as a paragon of circumspection, maturity and mental health.)
Michael Jackson, it seems almost certain, died of “Elvis disease” as he once seemed to predict he would to ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley (see her incredibly moving statement online after his death and check your skepticism and irony at the door). Just like Heath Ledger. “Polypharmacy” they sometimes call it.
But then before Elvis, there was Judy Garland, the star of the original “Wizard of Oz,” the woman who said she was put on a diet of uppers and downers to stay on the studio production schedule.
Victim of what, you ask?
Jackson himself told Oprah Winfrey that his father abused him. His brother Marlon once described their father, an ex-boxer, hanging Michael upside down by one leg and walloping him repeatedly on the back and the backside.
That’s Joe Jackson, paterfamilias and creator of the Jackson Five. Whatever he was or wasn’t guilty of as a father, one thing is certain. Few, if any of us, would have wanted him for ours.
What few even now want to know or think about is the commonplace squalor of show business. It can be rough and lonely and profoundly sordid — especially on the road where so much of Michael Jackson’s childhood was lived. And when defending his sleeping in the same bed as young children, he’d describe the warmth of sleeping as a child in the same bed as his brothers.
And what if that was the only warmth, in childhood, that he ever really knew, while the entire time he was the family’s meal ticket and knew it?
A victim? God yes. Of his own brain and his own genius, as well as his own childhood.
I never believed in the comeback tour. When reviewing “the Ultimate Michael Jackson” four-disc set in 2004, I wrote “even if his last decade hadn’t been overshadowed by freak show and public suspicion, his is not an act that time would welcome . . . Jackson has mercilessly outlived his pop possibilities, though tragically not his talent.”
Or his worldwide audience’s love, either.
A couple years later, in her slim book about him, Margo Jefferson asked “who wants to watch mental illness in panoramic close-up?”
We don’t have to anymore.
We can all follow the story’s residue now avidly — the toxicology report, who raises the kids, the tributes, etc., etc., etc.
And do what was probably wisest all along: remember the most astonishing pop culture figure of his time.
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