Out Of His Life: Michael Jackson
25 years ago, in New Jersey, I watched Michael Jackson perform with his brothers on the overhyped Victory tour. Two weeks later I put down my thoughts about him--and the sheer unreality of his megafame--in a column for England's New Statesman.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages
By now, of course, you've been told more than you could possibly want to know about Michael Jackson. Such has been the media saturation of the huge American tour undertaken by Michael and his brothers this summer that the only thing that will henceforth make them interesting is total and irreversible decline.
Above all, what you've been told about this strange, almost deified youth is that we know nothing. We don't know what he feels, we don't know what he thinks. Nor does he, apparently. In Gerri Hirshey's superb new history of soul music, Nowhere To Run, Michael is searching for a '60s film of James Brown that he thinks will help him to "understand what I do."
Now, while I can't deny that I'm as much a Jackson junkie as the next hack, the feverish need to explain Michael--somehow to bind up the contradictions of his life--strikes me as faintly unhealthy. Surely the whole enigma of Michael has been created by the pressure of the fame that we have built up around him. We were already asking him what he was before he had the chance to be anything at all. Consequently he runs in terror, not just from the press, but from anyone whose personality isn't as much a by-product of show business as his own.
Joan Didion called Howard Hughes "the last private person." She didn't allow for an entertainer so famous that he hardly exists for himself. Fame cocoons Michael to the point where his own existence is no longer a real, tangible process, and the tension of his best songs is that he is having to confront the reality of his own fame, his own unreality. When he sings about the "vegetable" in "Wanna Be Startin' Something," he is describing himself as the sacrificial object we are trying to devour. Recluses like Brian Wilson turned to drugs when they couldn't handle the fame. Michael chose abstinence from reality.
The concert I saw at the Giants football stadium in New Jersey two weeks ago revealed little to me that I hadn't already felt. Once I'd got past the sense of the event as simply a 400-ton Mass American Fantasy constructed for white suburbia, as grossly hyped and materialistic as a war, I was at last a few hundred yards from the thing that is Michael--and that was...well, I'm not a teenybopper anymore. (I'm nearly as old as him, actually.)
44,000 people and a couple of helicopters watched as five narcissistic knights of the San Fernando Valley descended to the churning, stuttering pulse of ‘Wanna Be Startin' Something;' as emerald-green laser beams were diffracted into the sky; as magnesium explosions were triggered between songs; as the famous white socks tapped and twirled on a giant holograph screen; and as Michael lay on his back in self-consuming grief for "She's Out Of My Life." Every set piece, every bumbling monster and every evil, purpled-eyed triffid seemed to be part of the Never-Never Land of his mind.
The synchronization of effects and the brothers' dance moves was enthralling but the fact that not a single song was taken from the Jacksons' awful Victory album was further proof that the show revolved around one thing alone: the spectacle of Michael Jackson, in flawless voice and total command, "getting out of himself."
I saw that this figure lost in song and dance was in the right place, and it was all I needed to know.
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