How do you write about Michael Jackson that doesn’t seem brutally reductive? Tom Moon, writer of 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die, addressed this question on his blog:
Normally I’m of the “trust the art, not the artist” mindset, but when my first draft had nothing about his foibles – those lapses in judgement, the physical transformations, the odd behavior – it seemed myopic, a willful whitewash that didn’t equip the uninitiated to understand Michael Jackson. As great as Thriller is, and it is as near-perfect a pop music experience as is available to us, what happened in its aftermath is a sordid, painful, arguably preventable tragedy, with a few brilliant tracks interspersed along the way.
I’ve always assumed that many of the songs that mean the most to me were made by people who’d be an asshole to me if I met them, so holding Jackson’s eccentricities and personal life against him seems a little unfair (as does excusing the molestation accusations as “personal prefs” on the other side). But I lost interest after Thriller because of the person – not who Jackson was, but the difficulty I had making the public persona and the music fit together. It was easy to imagine that when he sang Jackson 5 songs, the sentiments expressed were his or could be his. That was also the case with Off the Wall and for Thriller – for the most part – but by Bad, there was no getting around it. He didn’t seem bad to me. His cuddly, idiosyncratic glam of the Thriller era tested my disbelief where the image of him as a lover was presented, but I could get it, sort of. As gang leader, though – no. As a smooth criminal – no. As black and white – no; more like neither, and the more removed he seemed from normal appearances, the harder it was to believe there was any relationship between the words to the songs and him.
For me, the video revolution that he helped usher in ultimately hurt him because from the Bad era on, his videos lived in the long shadow of the Thriller videos, and it was hard to watch them without seeing the way their agendas compelled awkward and unconvincing artistic decisions. Big budgets, as if budgets were a de facto measure of quality. Special effects, as if filmic techniques made his videos on par with movies. Guest stars, as if celebrities are a form of validation. The results seemed desperate and antiseptic, as if every detail had been micromanaged to such a degree that the milieu created was utterly detached from a reality I recognize. In short, the persona he’d created through his videos made his music hard hear as credible.
When I hear post-Thriller Jackson – which isn’t that often – I’m occasionally struck by the songs-as-songs. The musical phrase, “Do you remember the time?” runs through my mind with surprising regularity considering I doubt I’ve heard the song in the last five years. But while people I respect are devastated by Jackson’s death, it’s been too long since he gave me a reason to care for me to join them.
Update: 11:45 a.m. – After writing this, I found Alex V. Cook had some similar thoughts, and since he linked to a track from John Oswald’s Plunderphonics album – a radical rearrangement/reconstruction of Jackson’s Bad and itself an evocative object in light of Jackson’s own plastic surgery – I’ve included this link.
