Michael Jackson: The Man, the Music and His Legacy

What has always moved me the most about Michael Jackson -- what I always found most compelling about him as both an artist and a person -- is his incredibly ambivalent position as a cultural icon. Here is an artist who is at once one of the most universally beloved icons in all of popular music history and one of the strangest and least "normal" public figures ever to capture the world's interest. He managed to move beyond child stardom (a feat in and of itself) to a solo career that began by breaking MTV's color barrier and translating niche genres like disco and funk into something a broad, mainstream audience could get behind and get down to, but he could never seem to find a way to feel comfortable in his own skin -- literally and figuratively. In large part, his ability to remain beloved, despite his quirks and idiosyncrasies and even potential criminality, has everything to do with his incredible, undeniable talent. But I also think that something about his apparent alien-ness, his simultaneous ability to appeal to the whole world and inability to relate to it in a conventional way, made him more human to us. Maybe it's overstating it, but it's like he somehow embodied both everything we thought American popular culture should look like -- and all the weird parts of ourselves we cast away or hide to create that image. That's a lot of pressure to put on one person, and the stress was legible on his strange, ever-mutating body. -- Rachel Devitt
 

The Music
I always remember the Jackson 5’s fantastic single “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)” as being on Off the Wall, which not only remains his finest album but actually proved that disco wasn’t dead. The songs on that album thrived throughout the '80s and sound even better today (thank you, Quincy Jones). Michael’s voice was different -- he now sang really HIGH (when the wretched Wiz movie came out, the once fun-loving Michael Jackson seemed completely devoid of all charisma).


With Off The Wall, Jackson wanted to make a great record; with Thriller, he wanted to rule the pop world. Nothing on the record topped “Billie Jean,” which may just be the defining single of the 1980s. The Thriller album has a little of everything except New Wave -- R&B rock, ballads, rap (Vincent Price, we miss you, too), even world music. It also had plenty of old-world showbiz hokum, which rock people slammed him for at the time. But it was exactly this classic Hollywood-style razzle-dazzle that was sorely missing from his post-Thriller work. He was still a vital performer, but a different one; as a kid, the joy on his face as he performed was his meal ticket. During the Thriller era, his amazing dance moves became his hallmark -- he was sometimes lit so you couldn’t really see his face. His body replaced his rapidly morphing face.

The amount of hidden, backstage work he put into being a star must have been extraordinary. I can’t think of another rock-era performer who pulled off those choreographed dance moves -- they were closer to Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire or (one more time) Sammy Davis, Jr. But Sammy loved an audience and kept performing even when he was clearly not making too much money from it -- he had to do it. Maybe Jackson got so big he couldn’t perform. Maybe as he aged he couldn’t keep up anymore. Maybe he was so rich and so famous he lost sight of the need to have a career. His sister Janet successfully used his playbook in the 1990s, but she added sensuality and the (broken?) promise that she wasn’t anywhere near as weird as Michael was.

After he got to the top, all the joy went out of his work -- even if it was manufactured showbiz joy. Bad has some good songs on it, but if you are old enough to remember it coming out, you probably remember being hugely disappointed by it. Jackson was already tabloid fodder by this time, but it quickly came to define all that he was. What did Michael Jackson think, feel, like? Who knows, but I miss the time when his life was defined by making other people happy. “Billie Jean,” a heap of Jackson 5 songs (like "Never Can Say Goodbye") and the Off the Wall album still make me happy. I’d prefer not to think about the rest. -- Nick Dedina

His Legacy
In 1996, while I was traveling by bus through Chile and Peru, I spent four or five days in the Chilean border city of Arica, a strange, hazy place tucked on a desert plateau between the ocean and the Andes. There on a central shopping plaza, a man (or boy?) would turn up in the afternoons: slim, clad in skinny black pants, loafers and a zippered leather jacket, with long curly hair snaking out beneath his black fedora. He seemed to materialize out of nowhere; I don't recall ever seeing him arrive. He'd hit play on a boombox, and heads would turn to see this figure morph into an almost uncanny embodiment of the American pop singer. He had all the movements down pat -- moonwalking, dancing on tiptoe, twirling, pirouetting. He had the Jheri-curled ringlets just right, and given his Mestizo coloring, when he cocked his hat at a certain angle and skulked just so, it was possible to imagine, at least for an instant, that this was the real thing. He must have done well for himself, because he came every single day. I wouldn't be surprised if he's still working the same beat today, 13 years later -- assuming his knees haven't given out.

I've since seen other Michael Jackson impersonators in other cities in the world, though I can't recall where -- Greece? Turkey? (Oddly, in my three years in Barcelona, I never saw a Michael Jackson amidst the characters and "human statues" of the Ramblas, but I'm sure there will be one there soon.) If the busker singing Bob Marley songs is a staple of city plazas around the world, I suspect that the Michael Jackson impersonator is as well.

Most megastars have a touch of the unreal about them. The more they're filmed and photographed, and the more their private lives are turned inside out for our consumption, the more they seem to be figments of our own imagination. (Just think of The Truman Show or, more disturbingly, South Park's Britney Spears episode.) With Michael Jackson, that sense of unreality was exponential, and not just for his fans. Jackson's surgeries, his eccentricities, his scandals and his retreat into Neverland suggested that even he didn't believe he was real any more. He died before he was forced to prove just that with a grueling, almost unthinkable 50-show run in London, which was to begin this summer. (I can't imagine how, in the end, that episode would not have somehow, irreparably, diminished him.) No matter. Legions of Michael Jackson impersonators around the world are stepping up from the understudy's role. His transformation is complete. Finally more than real, he's become universal, ashes to ashes and dust to a dust of pollen: long live the King of Pop. -- Philip Sherburne


There was always something about Michael Jackson that reminded me of the General of the Universe, the central character from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s hallucinatory, stream-of-consciousness epic, Autumn of the Patriarch. The general is the dictator of an unnamed Caribbean country who was born to a bird woman and with a grossly enlarged testicle that hums songs. He lives to be between 107 and 232 years old, sires 5,000 children, orders time altered (after all, aside from the General of the Universe, he is also the undoer of dawn, the commander of time and repository of light), and sells off the Caribbean Sea to the United States (which then transplants the sea, along with “the reflection of our cities, our timid drowned people, our demented dragons," to barren Arizona).

Toward the end of his life, he becomes overtaken by illusions, unable to distinguish reality from fiction. He becomes unduly paranoid and never appears in public anymore, preferring instead to deploy an army of body doubles. When one of the body doubles is killed, the General doesn’t clarify, and instead orchestrates his public resurrection three days later. When his own death finally comes, the countrymen find him in a dilapidated mansion, a "rotting grandeur" of corpses. No one can process that the dead man lying before them, infected with parasites from the deepest depths of the sea, is the General of the Universe.

Of course, M.J. never killed 2,000 children and dumped them in the sea, as the General does, but he seemed touched by a similar sort of madness and magic. He built his own private Disneyland. He defied physics with the moonwalk. He married Elvis' daughter. He bought the Beatles. He planned to live to be 150. He cavorted with Ronald Reagan. When he visited Africa, he was greeted by 100,000 people. He performed for over a half million people in just seven nights in London. He sold 100 million copies of Thriller. He erected a giant statue of himself that floated down the river Thames. For years, he dressed like a cross between Liberace, a Martian general and an Egyptian pharaoh. He made a complete mesh of race, gender and sexuality. He befriended a pet chimpanzee called Bubbles, who shared his toilet and cleaned his bathroom. And these are just the confirmed facts -- never mind the rumors and accusations.

All of which made it difficult for me to truly believe that he was dead. I spent Sunday halfway expecting that he would pop up on CNN, with a twisted angelic smile, and in a fey voice announce that he had conquered death. But it’s Monday. He’s still gone and the reality of his death is beginning to set in. -- Sam Chennault
 

The Memories
I was working nights on the radio in Washington, D.C., campaigning for the hearts and minds of teenagers, seducing them with the hottest hits between 6 and 10 P.M.

“The Real Doctor McCoy operating on you tonight!”

It was 1982, the year of Michael’s Thriller album, and needless to say I was playing at least one cut from his pop masterpiece every hour. The station request lines blinked all night long, and whenever you pushed a button there was another teenybopper requesting “Billie Jean” or “Thriller.”

Like every DJ in America, I had my usual suspects who called me religiously -- teenagers who would pour their problems into my ear. I was their surrogate older brother or missing father, the cool guy on the radio who had all the answers.

There was this kid named Michael who was a regular caller that I took a liking to. I looked forward to his calls because he was smart and had his finger on the pulse of the musical trends swirling around his suburban high school. He was my own personal focus group, but better.

Michael called one night very depressed. He’d been taking a lot of heat from his friends at school for his outward devotion to Michael Jackson and his music. He was confused and a bit scared. It was his first time experiencing, or being the brunt of, the fevered anger and putrid smell of racism. His classmates were calling him a “nigger lover.” The peer pressure was intense. He was a white kid in an all-white private high school, and if you weren’t into rock you weren’t in. What is a white kid with rhythm to do?

I suggested he go underground. Keep his Michael appreciation under wraps (“down low” wasn’t in the vernacular yet). No more wearing white gloves and socks to school, and definitely cease and desist the moonwalking. Michael agreed to become a Rolling Stones and Aerosmith fan because we both felt they had more rhythm in their rock 'n' roll.

He would only talk about Michael Jackson to me.

A month later, the King of Pop was coming to D.C. to perform. My Michael confessed nightly how desperately he wanted to go, but he was being questioned about it at school, spied upon. They were watching to see if he would fall off the rock wagon and go worship Michael Jackson in concert. Well, the tickets sold out in hours, and so his decision was made for him.

My station was giving away tickets to the show. I literally had the last pair of tickets in town. I asked for the 96th caller (we were 96.3 on the dial). Long story short, I cheated and said some fake name on the air, but I wrote down Michael as the winner. When he called that night he lost his mind! He got his dad to bring him down to the station to pick up the tickets.

You must remember that back in the day (before Google or Facebook), radio listeners rarely knew the true identities of radio personalities. So when I walked into the lobby to hand the tickets over to Michael and introduced myself, he saw that I was African American (that phrase had just become popular). He was surprised, shocked really … then delighted, as he started to laugh. We both laughed loudly, and his dad just stood there, clueless about our private joke.

Michael told me later it was a performance he would never forget. I wonder, and I hope he’s told this story many times and that it was a small fulfillment of Michael Jackson’s quest for unity. -- Quincy McCoy


My favorite M.J. memory is of my sister, who'd been learning the "Thriller" dance in her spare time (she envisioned all of her siblings learning it and taking over a dancefloor one day, but the rest of us were lazy), performing what she knew of it for my 87-year-old grandmother -- who requested it and grinned the whole time. -- Rachel Devitt


Every Friday, my second-grade teacher would bring in her record player, as well as her Prince and Michael Jackson albums, and, for an hour at the end of the day, we'd listen to music and dance. Thriller was the first album I remember owning, and it seemed that everything sprung from that. I grew up in a small town in Louisiana, but I'm sure that most people around my age have similar memories. -- Sam Chennault


I was obsessed with the werewolf transformation in the "Thriller" video myself, not to mention the whole storyline of the "Beat It " video. I was 12, and this skinny dude with the sleeves of his leather jacket rolled up scaring off knife-wielding hoods with his ability to dance-fight made him hands-down the coolest person ever to me, even before he turned into a werewolf a few months later when "Thriller" was first aired on MTV. That premiere itself was practically a holiday -- my father (who was a Teamster for crying out loud) even watched it -- and stands as one of the few times in my life an event actually lived up to its attendant hype. -- Mike McGuirk


After Thriller, I followed his triumph over pop culture with the singular devotion of an obsessed 8-year-old: in a jean jacket covered by buttons of his face, a hawkish eye on the tabloids and a dog-eared copy of Thriller that I played again, and again. (To really dig the grip that Jackson held on my household, it's important to note that mine was one of THREE Thriller LPs in our house; the other two belonged to my older sister and my brother.) When my great-grandmother's black-and-white television showed his hair on fire during a Pepsi commercial, I cried. Today, looking at the pictures of Michael Jackson wallpapering CNN -- most of them showing cadaverous images of his decline -- I want to only remember the warmth of his greatness and the rapture that accompanied it. -- Nate Cavalieri


I grew up in the '80s and '90s in Southern California -- Disneyland country. So for me, my biggest, fondest, funniest, warmest etc. memory of M.J. was the 1986 premiere of Captain EO, for which I waited a good six hours in line on the weekend of its release. It's possible not all of you remember Captain EO -- it was pulled from the theme parks around the mid-'90s and there was no accompanying soundtrack (though its two original songs, "Another Part of Me" and "We Are Here to Change the World," found their way onto subsequent Jackson releases, Bad and The Ultimate Collection, respectively). Directed by Francis Ford Coppola and filmed in 3-D, the sub-30-minute flick starred Jackson as the titular space captain, on a mission to a rotted-out netherworld to deliver a package to the evil Supreme Leader, played by Anjelica Huston. Joined by a crew of alternately furry, frumpy and robotic misfits ("Hooter!"), EO touches down on the junkyard planet, finds his way to the queen's lair, and drops the bomb on her -- his song. Overcome by the goodness of his music, the queen is transformed from a cackling H.R. Giger-like witch into a beautiful empress as Captain EO and his cohorts rock out on instruments seemingly picked up at the Mos Eisley Guitar Center. The rest of the planet and its inhabitants follow suit, morphing from Stormtroopers into Care Bears, mechanized detritus into vibrant flowers, etc. The moral of the story is pretty straightforward: Michael Jackson's music can transform a planet made of crap into a magical wonderland of color and light. Now who could argue with that? -- Garrett Kamps