Originally published in Hot Press Volume 8, Issue 4, 1984
Michael Jackson’s theme song is not amongst his own work. Chic wrote and Sister Sledge sang it: Michael Jackson is “The Greatest Dancer”.
He is also the seminarian of soul. Hardly ten, Michael went to Motown; showbiz was almost inculcated as his religion. Any Catholic who ever went to boarding school should understand how Michael Jackson was trained for the priesthood and then the hierarchy of stardom.
He learnt his devotions early. It is possible that Michael Jackson was practising back-spins before he knew how to toddle. It is certain that before he was six, Michael Jackson sat back-stage watching James Brown in his prime. If Michael Jackson hadn’t existed, he would have been invented… and perhaps he was!
As yet, this monk hasn’t married but Olga Korbut would have been his ideal bride. Between Jackson’s career and those of teen athletes, the parallels are numerous. As with swimmers, gymnasts and toy tennis players like Tracy Austin, he has been trained from his earliest days to the exclusion of other interests, defined totally by his skills. Again like many adolescent athletes, he’s been part motivated and guided by an ambitious parent, his father Joe who still co-manages Michael and his brothers Jackson.
Athleticism marks him like no other music star. His arrival has coincided with the fitness cult and its insistence on dance as exercise, healthful, virtuous and only incidentally sexual. Michael Jackson works rather than makes out.
In sixties soul, sweat has always adjacent to sock-it-to-me sex. Michael Jackson strives to transcend those connotations and subsume sixties relationships between body, dance and sex. He gets physical, then glides off on his wings of romance. What a MALE flirt! What a MALE tease!
So it goes. He’s still Superboy and if Sister Sledge sang his theme, another girl group filed through the Motown archives for his flip side. Michael Jackson is also Bananarama’s quintessential “Shy Boy” .. a MALE sex object…and…a Jehovah’s Witness!
It is impossible to decide how much his increasingly odd-ball image is a mismatch between publicists’ manipulation and media speculation. The least reverent accounts play up his reputation as an eccentric hermit with a crush on llamas who holds deep and meaningful conversations with his specially-built gallery of electronically-animated Disney cartoon mannequins.
Yet this self-proclaimed Peter Pan always knows where the pulleys are. A daft and daffy Jackson could not have gained the respect of the redoubtable Katherine Hepburn. Or of Steven Spielberg.
He may have made the most pertinent comments on a Rolling Stone feature, arguing that “he’s in full control. Sometimes he appears to other people to be sort of wavering on the fringes of twilight but there is great conscious forethought behind everything he does. He’s very smart about his career and the choices he makes. I think he definitely is a man of two personalities.”
And a second personality that allows him steal away. There can be no doubt that some of Jackson’s most pertinent traits are defence mechanisms. But while the media consensus contends these habits are unpremeditated, I’m not convinced of Jackson’s complete guilelessness. His gentle eccentricity gives him extra space for social manoeuvre.
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Bill Graham 
