By Andy Metzger
January 16, 2006

Let it never be said that there is a shortage of material written about Michael Jackson. In his tumultuous 35-year career of alternating megastardom and ignominy, the man has moved nearly as many magazines as he has records.

From the bright-eyed 11-year-old gazing out from atop the cover of JET Magazine in 1970, to the conquering uberstar gracing the front of Time in 1984, all the way through to his less glorious period: The opprobrium of being plastered across the cheap newsprint of countless National Enquirers in the 1990s, to finally, having his cultural relevance dissected on these pages, his is a story that is well-documented but poorly told.

You could build a small library around the scholarly writings about the Beatles and turn up any dozens of serious books about Dylan, Hendrix, the Dead, or Cobain. Even a hack like Elvis has had his every experience from his cliché-ridden Mississippi childhood to his final clammed guitar note analyzed as if he were Beethoven writing five-movement symphonies amid the last gasps of a moribund Holy Roman Empire. But the art and life of Michael Jackson, inarguably the most talented performer of his generation – not to mention a singular cultural touchtone – has gone unexplored beyond the man’s bizarre predilections.

Michael Jackson is less a man than an idea. He’s a commodity, or rather, a publicly owned utility. The man has lived in ubiquity since age 10, and for every salacious story that’s been written, every tired punchline he’s provided, and every ratings point he’s pushed “Celebrity Justice’s” way, America understands him none the better. But perhaps that’s by design. You have to remember that we’re talking about a man who’s walled himself off in a literal and figurative carnival for the better part of two decades, who waited ten years to even acknowledge that his complexion changed from black to pallid white, and who credits his songwriting genius to a tree. These are not the makings of a man longing to be understood.

But that should make Michael Jackson’s story all the more interesting; it should pique the hunger for information beyond the sensational. It’s human nature to seek to understand that which cannot be understood. Here’s a tragedy starring the most famous person on the planet with all the classical plot devices: fame, success, riches, talent, greed, forbidden sex, and a nearly unparalleled fall from grace. A sign of the cultural milieu, it’s a story that’s been left to be told by Court TV, People Magazine, and your compassionate narrator, Nancy Grace. There’s been one serious biography of Jackson written. It was published in 1991 and is now out of print in the United States.

That’s where Margo Jefferson, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, comes in. Breaking from the axiom that everything about Jackson must be treated as some kind of joke, Jefferson attempts some serious cultural analysis through the exploration of the enigma that is Jackson. She subscribes to the Jackson-as-a-public-utility theory. The question she posits, roughly: What does it say about a society when its public utility is more fucked-up than the Monrovia Sewer and Water Authority? Her ensuing analysis, On Michael Jackson (out this month from Pantheon Books), is a noble pursuit, but unfortunately, one ultimately rooted in futility. But Jefferson certainly deserves credit for trying; her failure is hardly of the likes of the hour of bruxism-inducing frustration that was ABC News’ 2003 special on Jackson’s nose, and its many sensational ilk.

Unlike the serial offenders of intellectual curiosity that have thus far monopolized the Jackson story, Jefferson presents us with a serious treatise into Jackson and his relation to the larger culture. What kind of society can build a man up to such heights, burden him with nonpareil fame, adulation, and expectations, saddle him with social, sexual, and cultural cues he’s expected to fulfill, only to rip him down so suddenly and nonchalantly when those constructs prove untenable?

This is the prism through which Jefferson explores Jackson. She digs into Jackson’s childhood and explores the toll that abuse, poverty, religious indoctrination, sex, and fame took on his psyche. She writes about the symbiotic and destructive relationship between Jackson and society in his awkward catapult to adulthood, adult fame, global superstardom, megalomania, and ultimately, obloquy. It makes for an intriguing socio-psychological study, but the problem with this line of analysis is that because Jackson is such an anomaly, such an enigma (in common parlance, a circus freak, a wacko), every conclusion raises three new questions. But Jefferson’s analysis, long overdue, is one worth noticing. Though the reader won’t walk away from Jefferson’s book enlightened, Jefferson absolutely deserves congratulations for addressing the web of sociological issues she attempts to tackle in her writing.

Society has treated Michael Jackson unfairly. Sure, he’s odd, a spectacle, an outlier. But it’s lost on a people who place the highest value on gossip, sensationalism, and a cheap laugh that the man’s talent – at least at one point – equaled his penchant for the extremely bizarre. And rather than laughing along with Jay Leno’s latest twist on the boys’ underwear half off quip while suppressing our memories of shouting along with the chorus of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something,” we’d be much better served by forgoing the easy put-downs and bad jokes and asking, for once, Why? Bullying, after all, is the preferred behavior of people who have no confidence in themselves. The same can be said of an incurious and bloodthirsty society that values the tawdry above talent, and schadenfreude over substance.

© Copyright 2006 Andy Metzger. All rights reserved. Do not republish without explicit permission.

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