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Michael Jackson: Singer whose personal troubles overshadowed

his status as one of pop"s greatest performers

By Geoff Brown

Saturday, 27 June 2009

Michael Jackson, an icon of popular music culture since the

late 1960s and one of its leading creative influences in the

1980s, had by the 1990s undergone a disturbing metamorphosis

which threatened to overshadow the impact his considerable

artistic contributions.

His early recordings re-energised the greatest

African-American independent label, Motown; his finest solo

album, Off The Wall (1979), defined pop music of its era and

influenced the music of subsequent decades; and its

follow-up, Thriller, sold some 65 million copies, far more

than any other LP of new work; his stage performances, with

their well-drilled, exuberant dance routines visualising the

music, set new standards for spectacle and energy; his

expansion of the use of video broke though MTV"s unspoken

racial barrier. Yet by the end of his life at just 50 years

old, the talented young singer, performer and songwriter had

become a gargoyle, his face much altered by the cosmetic

surgeon"s scalpel, his reputation was shredded by

allegations of child molestation and an increasing

reputation for bizarre behaviour, which conspired to

diminish the importance of his manifest contributions to the

development of pop.

Jackson was the seventh of nine children. His father, Joe,

began coaching the five eldest sons (Jackie, Tito, Marlon,

Jermaine and Michael) at home in Gary, Indiana, as soon as

the maturest showed signs of imitating him on guitar. But it

was Michael, from the age of four, who caught the eye and

ear, displaying precocity as a dancer and mimic of popular

African-American soul and rhythm and blues stars, notably

James Brown. While playing in the Indiana and Michigan

border area, the Jackson 5 were spotted by both Gladys

Knight and Bobby Taylor, leader of the Vancouvers, who

recommended the young group to the Motown label.

Towards the end of the 1960s, the black independent company

founded in Detroit by Berry Gordy and hitherto dominant as

The Sound of Young America, was at a crossroads. Its older

stars sought either a more mature sound or the financial

security of a Las Vegas cabaret audience, or simply left

bearing a grudge, usually involving either money or Gordy"s

preoccupation with his lover Diana Ross"s career.

After months of grooming, rehearsing and recording material

provided by a hit squad of Motown writers/producers known as

The Corporation, the Jackson 5 were unveiled with Ross"s

imprimatur. Their appearance on a Diana Ross TV special

rekindled the use of that medium as a launch pad for pop

stars. The (still) effervescent I Want You Back began a

series of four straight American No 1 pop hits for the

group.

Their success brought Motown a new teen audience and

bolstered its waning finances. Michael, a confident,

sparkling and accomplished performer with a piping, wailing

voice, and his label"s saviour, was 11, and had been

fronting the group for six years. The Jackson 5 heralded pop

fame for imitative white family acts, such as the Osmonds,

and tapped into a new generation of teenybop fans.

By the mid-1970s, however, relations between the autocratic

Motown and the Jackson 5, who wanted to write and produce

their own records, had reached a low ebb. A few years

earlier, another major star nurtured from pre-teens by the

label, Stevie Wonder, had been granted hitherto unheard of

creative freedom by Motown. But they were unwilling to let

go of the Jackson 5"s reins. Four of the group, including

Michael, signed to Epic where, augmented by their youngest

sibling, Randy, and renamed the Jacksons (Motown retained

ownership of their previous name) they attempted to record

more adult albums, touching on spiritual, ecological and

social matters as well as pop"s staple diet, love. Initially

comparison with their best Jackson 5 work was not

favourable, but they had in their ranks an exceptionally

quick learner.

While at Motown, Michael Jackson had recorded several solo

albums (Got To Be There and Ben, both 1972, among them) of

purely teen appeal - in fact, Michael"s elder brother

Jermaine had been the group"s first heart-throb - and now

as a teenager he sought to work outside the group. His

appearance as a scarecrow in The Wiz (1978), a film of an

all-black Broadway version of The Wizard Of Oz, with Ross

miscast as Dorothy, was one of the few serviceable

performances in the movie.

More important was his work on the soundtrack with its

producer Quincy Jones, a former jazz musician whose

arrangements, compositions and productions for a wide

variety of artists from Frank Sinatra to Lesley Gore had

made him a back-room legend. When Jackson decided to

reactivate his solo career, Jones collaborated as producer

on Off The Wall (1979). Ten years after his emergence as a

teeny-bop idol, Jackson was revealed as a singer of

maturity, with a natural ear for writing tuneful pop

melodies, who could generate compelling rhythm tracks

perfect for the dancefloor. The record sold more than

contemporaneous albums by the Jacksons and although he would

continue to work with and dominate the group"s music for a

few more years, his main creative energies now went into

solo projects.

On the Jackson 5"s first visits to London, Michael had

seemed much like any child in his teens, sometimes

inquisitive, interested in gadgets, toys and horseplay, but

common sense told one that his upbringing could not have

been normal. His less talented brothers had escaped the

family home, married and had children of their own, while

some had divorced.

Michael Jackson"s personality, by contrast, developed along

radically different lines. He had rarely mixed to any great

extent with others of his own age, apart from his brothers,

was educated on the road by tutors and was taught by both

his father and Motown to be mistrustful of others, secretive

and closeted. His brothers, perhaps envious of his talent

and pre-eminence, teased him about his spots and his skin,

which was darker. Later, Michael and several of his brothers

and sisters accused his father of child abuse. His

romantic involvements centred on young actresses of

roughly his own age, such as Brooke Shields, or, again

later, friendships with much older women who had known

stardom from an early age, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Jane

Fonda.

As the group"s creative focus, the weight of their

expectations (and those of its audiences) fell on Michael"s

shoulders. A natural, increasing shyness was exacerbated in

his mid-teens by acne and a sudden growing spurt which

off-stage made him even more self-conscious.

He was a teenage millionaire, with enough money to finance

whatever whim he fancied. His Californian homes, to where

the family moved, became part-menagerie, part-playground,

part-entertainment complex. The sculpted changes in Michael

Jackson"s physical appearance quickly became alarming. Two

snips narrowed his nose, a cleft in his chin became more

pronounced and his pigmentation became perceptibly lighter,

which he attributed at various times to a skin condition or

a new diet. In January 1984, while Jackson was filming an

extremely lucrative advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, an

accident caused severe burns which altered his hairline.

Jackson followed a strict dietary and exercise regime,

intermittent health scares became the norm and any joke he

might make was taken at face value. Thus a picture was

painted of an increasingly dotty character, part-Peter Pan,

part-Howard Hughes.

However, none of this could obscure the radical changes his

work wrought on pop music in the first half of the 1980s.

The record-breaking Thriller (1982), which has sold 65

million copies worldwide, formed the mould for a large

percentage of dance-orientated pop records, and the tone,

timbre and tics of his voice became much imitated.

In content, Thriller had been Jackson"s darkest and most

personal work to date. Songs such as Billie Jean, about a

paternity suit, expressed lucidly one of the pressures on

him. More pertinently, Jackson and his producer Quincy Jones

hired the heavy metal guitarist Eddie Van Halen to play on a

track, Beat It, which broke an unspoken colour bar by

becoming the first single by a black artist to be repeatedly

played on the American television channel MTV. It opened up

a huge new white rock audience to African-American artists,

which rap and hip hop artists would subsequently appreciate.

The title track"s video, a homage-cum-lampoon of a horror

movie, complete with Vincent Price voiceover, came at

precisely the time when this medium increased in importance

as a promotional vehicle for pop music. It established a

standard for production values, if not budget. Like many

things he did, and could afford to do, it was exorbitantly

expensive. Thriller furnished Jackson with the financial

wherewithal to do whatever he wished and at first he was

astute in his business dealings - acquiring the Beatles"

publishing rights, for instance.

Few artists coped as well as Jackson with the expectations

of pop and rock show audiences in the 1980s and 1990s. Tens

of thousands of fans gathered in huge stadia to watch a

spectacle rather than listen to a concert in a hall. His

inventive dance routines and an imagination which drew on

theatrical and cinematic imagery, visualised his songs. But

he could never emulate the sales and worldwide appeal of

Thriller. No one has, but this rankled. Bad (1987) and

Dangerous (1991) both presaged sold-out world tours. During

the first, he announced his retirement from live performing.

No one took him seriously. His autobiography Moonwalk,

published a year after Bad, was a profoundly unrevealing

work rendered in a wide-eyed tone.

In 1992, faced with both the personal humiliation of the

comparative failure of the album Dangerous and the raised

expectations of Sony, the new Japanese owners of his record

company, Jackson engineered a series of remarkable publicity

coups, the most significant of which were his performance

during the half-time interval of the Super Bowl and an

invitation to the American television personality Oprah

Winfrey to visit his home and interview him. The week after

the latter was screened, Dangerous rapidly climbed up the

charts again and has now sold 29 million copies.

He embarked on another world tour but during the long slog

his health again gave cause for concern and allegations that

he had sexually abused young boys came to a head. A few days

before the end of the tour, when he was due to return to the

United States and face his accusers, Jackson cancelled the

few remaining tour dates and fled to Europe to enter a

detoxification clinic, his doctor claiming that he had

become addicted to painkillers soon after the filming

accident. He lost the massive Pepsi-Cola sponsorship deal

and, after a brief prurient surge in sales, his records

quickly fell from the charts.

At the start of 1994, he attempted to reassemble his career

by settling out of court the child abuse charges made by a

former companion, the 14-year-old Jordan Chandler. The deal

was part-brokered by Jackson"s attorney Johnnie Cochrane,

who would later successfully defend O.J. Simpson on murder

charges. Although many in the African-American community

disliked Jackson"s image, which appeared to deny his

blackness, they felt he had been set up by a racist law

enforcement and judicial system - having his penis

photographed and minutely examined by Los Angeles police was

deeply humiliating, he said, but results of the examination

suggested that his accuser had not seen this particular

appendage as alleged.

To widespread disbelief and some jocularity, Jackson, the

king of pop, married Lisa Marie Presley, only daughter of

Elvis, the king of rock "n" roll, in May 1994 in the

Dominican Republic. Announcement of an imminent happy event

was met with even greater incredulity. The marriage lasted

some 18 months and was childless, but Jackson later did have

two children by his second wife, Debbie Rowe, and a third

with an unnamed woman. With his personal crises circumvented

for the time being, Jackson returned to the recording studio

to cut three new tracks to accompany a Greatest Hits

collection.

He was enthused by his new work and three tracks became 15,

in 1995 forming the second CD of HIStory: past, present and

future book one, the first CD being the promised hits

collection. Although met with a lukewarm critical response,

like most of his work since Thriller, his singing had a new

intensity and anger as he ranged across personal and global

issues. News of another illness in December 1995 helped

Earth Song, a track off the album, keep the Beatles off

the top of the UK charts.

Jackson"s private life attracted intermittent attention,

punctuated by various charm offensives usually consisting of

exclusive interviews granted to television personalities,

but his music would never again be vital and defining, and

it was around the time of yet another career-spanning

retrospective, The Ultimate Collection (2004), that further

charges of child molestation were made which resulted in a

court case in Santa Barbara, California, that held the

entertainment and gossip media in thrall for many months

before he was cleared of all charges. Its start was

punctuated, perhaps inevitably, by another brief health

scare.

Jackson"s albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad were

benchmark pop recordings; his live shows set standards in

staging and spectacle; his videos broke new ground for

production values and budgets. And although he could never

throw off the Peter Pan image of a man-child with, at best,

a very quirky, dangerously naïve take on life and,

ultimately, a quirky take on personal health and diet, his

musical legacy will stand the test of time.

He earned more money, for himself and others, than any other

entertainer of his generation, yet in the new century his

business empire, unsteady in the "90s, crumbled, debts rose,

his Neverland estate in Los Angeles was shuttered. At the

time of his death he was rehearsing for a massive series of

dates, 50 in number, at London"s 02 Arena due to start on 13

July, which were aimed at injecting cash into his ailing

accounts, regenerating demand for his music and cementing

his place in the pop pantheon. But always there seemed to be

an unspoken caveat: if his body will take it.

Michael Joseph Jackson, singer and dancer: born Gary,

Indiana 29 August 1958; married 1994 Lisa Marie Presley

(marriage dissolved 1996), 1996 Deborah Rowe (one son, one

daughter; marriage dissolved 1999), (plus one son); died Los

Angeles 25 June 2009.

抱歉因为字数太多,没有现成的中文翻译。

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