A Cultural Autopsy of Michael Jackson

A Cultural Autopsy of Michael Jackson
Gregory McNamee - June 30th, 2009

Michael JacksonThe year is 1972. Five young men are boosting the ratings of any one of the dozen-odd variety shows on which they appear regularly, laying down a mainstream-safe version of soul music, closer to Bobby Sherman than Stagolee and Stax. At their head, not yet the quintet’s leader but clearly the main draw, is a just-minted adolescent. He is short, dark-skinned, a little husky, with a nimbus of tight-curled hair forming a halo around him. He works the stage as if he has lived there all his life—which is just as it is.

Fast forward ten years. The young man is now tall and thin, his hair elegantly oiled and groomed. He wears a tux, he is very handsome, and he has grown still more popular as a solo artist. He will soon release what will become the best-selling album of all time.

Fast forward another ten years. The young man has gone from slender to gaunt. His hair is long and slack, hanging into his eyes; his costume now tends to found art from Pepperland. Strangely, his skin color is now very light, and his facial features have changed markedly. He is recognizable, but only just.

Thus the transformation of the subject of Margo Jefferson’s On Michael Jackson, a sometimes elegiac, sometimes exasperated cultural autopsy of the man who once reigned as the King of Pop.

In Jefferson’s chronology, something quite mysterious and quite profound seems to have happened to Michael Jackson along about the late 1970s, when he was finally old enough to separate himself from his “scary family.” His psyche changed: “Think of his mind as a funhouse,” Jefferson instructs, a place populated by Elvis Presley, Diana Ross, Elizabeth Taylor, his parents, James Brown, and, more than anyone else, P. T. Barnum, who well knew the rewards that can come from putting on a good freak show.

Yes, Phineas Taylor Barnum.

By Jefferson’s account, Michael Jackson discovered Barnum’s autobiography about that time. He read it fervently and repeatedly, giving copies to his staff with the remark, “I want my career to be the greatest show on earth.” Soon afterward he started making news regularly, not for musical achievement but for doing such things as sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, wearing a surgical mask in public, spending millions to turn his home into an amusement park, and—well, we all know the rest.

The greatest show on earth turned out to be too much for the world to handle. “By the mid-1980s he had a lot of us paying more attention to the freak than the artist,” writes Jefferson, and Jackson knew it. Ever mindful of his public, he spent much time over the next two decades doing damage control for all the collateral damage he was doing, going on talk shows to explain that his ever-lightening complexion was the result of a rare disease, to deny having had cosmetic surgery, to insist that there was nothing wrong with sleeping with children.

Why these tremendous changes?

Why the behavior that led Jackson to star in the ongoing drama of a California courtroom, from which he emerged victorious but fallen? And what of him afterward?

Jefferson poses as many questions as she ventures a few answers, all of them provocative. Hers is one of those rare books that would have benefited from going on a few dozen pages longer; what we have is a smart, empathetic, and just a little sorrowful forensic analysis of a phenomenon, and a cultural moment, gone awry. The book takes on new urgency, given the sad end to Jackson’s life on June 25, 2009.

Style is knowing what play you’re in, Sir John Gielgud once remarked, which seems good advice for living life as well as taking the stage. Margo Jefferson rejoins, “Rarely does Michael Jackson seem to know this any more.” Her book was published in 2007, when it seemed as if much of the audience for the artist was disappearing. Jackson’s death prompted his record sales to soar. As for the audience for the freak show that will surely follow his demise, a death abetted by parasites and users on all sides—well, only time will tell.