The boy in the bubble, the man in the mirror

To the vast majority of the bazillion or so people who bought Thriller or danced to ‘Billie Jean’, Michael Jackson wasn’t quite real. He was more a combination of sine waves, a hologram, an avatar, and in his later days, an object of ridicule and a caution. For those of us too long in the tooth and with better things to do than affect residual or abstract grief for a distant star, it was tempting to react to reports of the 50-year-old’s death from a heart attack last Thursday – on the eve of a mammoth sell-out comeback tour – with the detachment of the professional obit writer whose first response is to calculate word count and column inches. We’re affected sure, but through a gauze, like witnessing the tragic end of the flawed hero in a film. We might shake our heads or tut-tut or even shed a tear, but we get to walk away pretty much unscathed.

So if MJ was to us Joe Soaps some sort of shared hallucination, an Afro-American idoru, we have to ask ourselves why his passing has made so many of us feel sad and... strange. Maybe because the way Jackson’s yarn played out is not just the oldest one in the book: your off-the-rack Icarus myth, a yawnsome but still cautionary tale about the fraudulent illusion of fame or celebrity or whatever you want to call it – it’s also the latest manifestation of the Tantalus-and-Narcissus complex that leads pop aspirants down a primrose path and ends up in a slurry pit. A recurring cultural sickness that begins with I wanna be somebody and ends with I vant to be alone.
“Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true/ Or is it something worse?” sang that other ‘80s MTV and stadium icon Bruce Springsteen. But what if a dream is both a lie and something worse even if it does come true? Consider Jackson’s case history, the damaged child become spoiled adult, the boy in the bubble (or the boy and the Bubbles) who grew up (or didn’t grow up) to become a man-child afflicted with an even worse scourge than an unhappy childhood: fame.
That MJ’s story played out every cornball MGM biopic trope doesn’t make it any more palatable. Few of us could refuse the kind of silly money and sillier privilege Michael Jackson enjoyed his entire life, but it don’t come for free. Celebrity is an enabler in any dysfunctional relationship. It allows messed-up folk to put off confronting nasty stuff the rest of us are forced to sort out at some stage in our adult lives if we want to go on functioning as employees, parents, spouses, siblings, sons and daughters. Put bluntly, them chickens will always come back to shit upon you from a great height.
But would even the most grounded of us have possessed the steel to withstand the daily mindfuck that was the unbearable lightness of being Michael? Like that other gifted basket case Brian Wilson, Jackson claimed to have been brutalised by a controlling father since he was a pup, and for a support system had lesser talented siblings who depended on him to bail them out of obscurity every few years with reunion tours. His best friends were movie stars, monkeys and children.
And although he eventually married and produced issue – via sperm donation and artificial insemination – it was hard to buy the idea of Jackson as paterfamilias (let’s face it, the last thing you want in an old man is one who thinks he’s Peter Pan), especially when he was filmed dangling one off his toddlers off a Berlin balcony, an image that still loosens the bowels. If anything, MJ’s story is a savage Saki or Wilde parable about what happens when the little prince is unable to grow up, and his arrested development is prolonged and deepened by the empire he’s created.
Yet, it’s still somewhat of a heartbreaker when the brain hits its inner clicker and calls up the image of that afro’d little tyke bursting open with exuberance, effortlessly letting rip the killer vocal on ‘ABC’, or the handsome young blade on the talcum powdered dancefloor whooping his way into the intro of ‘Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough’ with the panache of Astaire sliding down a bannister, or the composed and confident superstar-incumbent lighting up those pavement steps in the ‘Billie Jean’ video. It’s likely Prince wouldn’t have made the same impact with Purple Rain in ‘84 had Michael not breached the MTV colour cordon a year before. Of course it was easier for the hipsters to love Prince because Prince took more risks, fusing Hendrix and Duke Ellington and Otis Redding and Rick James and Parliament-Funkadelic and electro-pop and Joni and five-a-dime psychedelia with the help of a two tone unisex band in kinky get-up, but kudos was due nonetheless: Michael put Eddie Van Halen hammer-ons in a dance track and had the whole world singing along to a tune about being accused of siring an illegitimate child. He seemed to have an unshakeable sense of himself back then, tempered with a gentle humour and irony (“I’m not like other guys.”). Who couldn’t respect his perfect pop art?
“The thing about Michael Jackson was there was a complete fusion between form and content,” says Republic of Loose’s Mick Pyro, one of the few Irish musicians who can cite MJ as an influence, and one of the fewer still who can verbalise with authority on the later work. “The calibre of his artistry I don’t think will be recognised for hundreds of years, even though he was perceived as being great in his time: the levels of his achievement in terms of what he did with his dancing, his singing – in my belief he’s the best singer who ever sang on record – but also as a songwriter and musician and producer. You hear the demos for his original stuff: all the ideas are his.
“I think there’s a tendency, especially in rock culture over here, just the way things are written, to overplay the role of the paternalistic figurehead, the overseer of unschooled genius. I think Quincy Jones got onto a good thing in a lot of ways. He was able to harness the energy in a perfect way, but he was dealing with one of the greatest talents the world has ever known. I mean, I’ve huge respect for Quincy Jones obviously, because he’s another one of the great geniuses of the century, but I do think Michael Jackson’s part was underplayed because it fits into a cosy narrative.
“Everything in modern western rock culture has to fit into this narrative, which is the rise and then the decline, ‘cos that’s the way people like to tell stories, the narrative of failure. In terms of artistry that’s kind of misleading because the Dangerous album in particular is equal to anything he ever did, in fact superior in a lot of ways, because he just went deeper into James Brown territory, more into the funk. It was less melodic and didn’t appeal to our European sensibilities as much ‘cos it’s not that Abba or Beatles-esque singalong stuff which he was able to do before, but I think it was more compelling. I think the work he did with Terry Riley is the equal of the stuff he did with Quincy Jones.
“The Invincible record, around half of it... some of the treacle-y ballads are obviously made by a very ill person, you can tell that, but I think some of the funk stuff, if you see it as an evolution of his James Brown thing, musically it’s phenomenal, and the singing is the best he ever did. But the lyrics are terrible, obviously written by a very angry eight-year-old child. I would have loved to have heard him working with Timbaland or someone of that calibre. That’s the real tragedy for me, I would have just loved to have heard him make an album with more intelligent, cutting-edge producers, ‘cos the only people you could compare him to in the 20th century were people like Louis Armstrong, James Brown, Miles Davis. He was far beyond Elvis.”
A few years ago I interviewed Walter Yetnikoff, who, as Jackson’s boss at Columbia and mentor from the Jackson 5 days through the Off the Wall breakthrough and right up to the late ‘80s, knew him better than most people (MJ went so far as to call him his ‘Good Daddy’).
“It was the visual element and the choreography,” Yetnikoff said when asked why he thought Thriller became the biggest selling album of all time. “Michael always said that pop music brings an element of dance with it, and no one had really combined the two. Thriller was pop, and the dance was brilliantly choreographed – not by him, I think it was Paula Abdul who did the choreography – but he was the performer. He brought the two together. It surprised everybody.”
But according to Yetnikoff, the problems started when the follow-up album Bad was released in 1987 (selling 30 million copies), and MJ wanted nothing less than world domination.
“He always had to be number one. He’d drive me crazy, he’d call me two or three times a day. ‘Michael, be calm, stop already!’ When people have to be number one, it’s because they don’t feel that way. I stopped with HIStory, when he had his picture placed with Christ at the last supper. We all have some ego, but this was crazy.”
There’s the rub. Michael Jackson ceased to be the King of Pop around about the time he started calling himself bullshit names like the King of Pop.

“There are no second acts in American lives.” – F Scott Fitzgerald
“Life is a fairly well-written play except for the third act.” – Tennessee Williams

We can’t help but look at the last 15 years of MJ’s life as some po-mo Poe horror show and lament a beautiful young boy who gazed in a funhouse mirror and saw an image so distorted that, like some reverse Dorian Gray act, he sought to disfigure his real face. We’ve all heard the Native American chestnut about how every time you have your photograph taken you lose a bit of your soul. Multiply that exponentially through pop videos and billboards and movies and papparazzi-shots and add the caveat that it’s not just the taking of the picture that does the damage, but looking at the end result, and your next logical thought might be Updike’s quote: “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
Yetnikoff: “When he started to do the surgery stuff I got angry at him: ‘What are you doing? You’re not even black, I don’t know what you are, you’re non-colour, you’re non-racial.’ I tried to say to him, ‘Michael, you’re fine, what are you doing?’ and he told me, ‘I don’t like myself.’
And he started to tell me, ‘Look, I didn’t grow up like you. I was a star at six.’ His world shifted at that point and he remained at, not six, but he was a child in a lot of ways. One of his wives said that when he was with her he spoke in a different voice. I never heard that voice. I always heard the little boy voice. I never heard a grown up speaking, in terms of the sound. He once called my house, my son was 14 and he answered the phone and came in and said, ‘Hey dad, Michael Jackson’s secretary is on the phone.’ I was with him once at a formal kind of thing, presenting an award to him at a party at the Smithsonian, and he turned to me and he says, ‘Walter, I have to tinkle.’ Gaaawd.”
By the mid-‘90s, already chapter and versed in OJ, we sat Pavlovian in the in-camera jury box and considered the child abuse allegations leveled at Jackson (dropped due to lack of evidence) and wondered could he really be some sinister child-catcher using fame and money to exploit the at-best naive gullibility/at-worst cravenness of star-struck parents in order to indulge his creepy proclivities? Or was he an asexual being with no grasp on reality, who just wanted playmates to watch Disney movies in bed with in Neverland and had borderline village idiot comprehension of the perils and consequences, like Josie in Garage or Carl in Slingblade, while the culture processed and disseminated its extrapolations – as it always does – through black market humour and behind-the-hand wisecracks like, ‘What time is bedtime in MJ’s house?/When the big hand is on the little hand.’ etc etc.
For his part, Yetnikoff professed no opinion on the child abuse allegations. “I really don’t know,” he shrugged, “I can talk myself into either side: ‘Clearly there’s something there ’cos where there’s smoke there’s fire,’ or, ‘Hey, he just likes to hang out with young kids.’ Always did. I have pictures of him with that black television actor whose name escapes me at the moment. And the monkey! He would leave parties or wouldn’t show up, he might have been up in his room watching cartoons more than likely. So maybe he liked the company of kids ’cos he felt more comfortable. Could be he was set up too, that’s another possibility. If you think that Michael Jackson is a paedophile – and I don’t have an opinion on that – why would you have your kid hang out with him?”
Impossible to ruminate on such matters and not recall suggestions that Johnny Depp’s turn as Willy Wonka was modeled on Michael. And maybe that’s the real paradigm: a man who rose to prominence promulgating sweeties for teens and tweenies, and it made him a gazillionnaire and bought him that mansion on the hill, the most odious avatar of the all-corrupting American Dream.
If in Mediterranean society the big man in the community is defined by how many people he knows, how many folk tip their hat to him on the plaza, how many citizens in trouble can come to him for help, then the American Dream is isolationist. It leads you up that long and winding Mulholland Drive to a Masque Of The Red Death gated estate overlooking the earthly aurora borealis of Hollywood, where you rot in shuttered and synthetic splendour like Des Esseintes in Against Nature or Bowie in his coke years or Marilyn Manson anytime. It’s the last act of Citizen Kane or The Aviator, Spector as Philip K Dick’s Man in the high castle, The King in Gracelands.
Inside this haunted mansion there are many rooms, high ceilings and draughty halls, echoes and silence giving unto delusion, madness and isolation, Shakespeare’s great palsy of the spirit, the fate of the soul that, having no company from which to draw sustenance, consumes first its reflection and then its essence.
Mick Pyro: “That’s the way capitalism is – the ultimate end of it is isolation and misery. If these are the people we’re all aspiring to be, if the millionaires or the famous people are supposed to be our heroes, then we’re all aspiring to the most depraved type of existence. It’s a really perverse value system. That thing about the Italian guy in the community, that’s the healthy way, a man of power should be amongst the people and of the people and is able to communicate with the people, but the ultimate end of late capitalism is that kind of isolation. It’s basically onanistic: you’re left with your mickey hanging out and your balls blowing in the wind. You’re on your own.”
And in the love-hate relationship between idolater and idol, the object of adoration must become the sacrificial lamb in order to satisfy the bloodcult’s lust. Fame, like Christian iconography or any martyr myth, demands blood. There will always be blood. Michael Jackson’s last great song was called ‘Scream’.
Mick Pyro: “I do think there’s a certain element of... it’s us that did it. I mean, it says something about our culture, how philistine we are. We really think we’ve evolved from other civilisations and this is how we treat people who create beauty, we just want to destroy them. In other cultures they’re elevated, but our culture wants to punish and tear apart people who bring brightness and beauty into it. It’s the same ritual played out over and over again, with Tupac or Biggie or whoever. It’s that Flipper song: “We demand a sacrifice.” People want an effigy. It just shows you how merciless the way we live is, and how we con ourselves into thinking we live in this civilised world. You could say it was of Michael Jackson’s own making, he shouldn’t have been hanging out with kids or whatever, but if you put any human being under the conditions he was put under, even as he was growing up, they would have ended up skewed. People want to have this thing of the tragic flaw from their artists, they want them to die. And he got caught in that system (which) is built to chew people up and spit them out. It’s done the same thing to every great artist, from Judy Garland to Jimi Hendrix to Elvis.”
I would dispute the last part. Plenty of great artists choose not to follow that narrative: Dylan or Springsteen or anyone with enough horse-sense to maintain direct contact with their audience through touring and writing and recording and all the stuff that replenishes and not diminishes (ie anything directly related to the art itself) and to hell with the sales stats. Fame is an affliction that can be easily cured, an illusion that can be dispelled in a second. If you really want to be anonymous, lose the entourage and – like Bob – put your hood up. I once stood next to Mick Jagger on an Aer Lingus shuttle bus and nobody paid him a blind bit of attention, mainly ‘cos nobody expects Mick Jagger to take the Aer Lingus shuttle bus.
‘Scuse my latent Calvinism, but it always boils down to the work. Michael Jackson may have been a hero to millions, but he was no Louise Bourgeois or Flannery O’Connor or Frida Kahlo, folk who felt equally freakish and apart, who suffered but endured and stayed plugged into the electricity of their art and whose work if not negated then transcended vanity or ego and the rest of that messy all-too-human stuff that we the audience seek to be delivered from and elevated above, through the magic of films and painting and dance and sport and books and music.
That’s all there is. So if that’s all there is, then let’s keep dancing.

See also Dermod Moore, Bootboy and The Message.
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