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As fans of Elvis Presley and Tupac Shakur are aware, death is no impediment to a prolific career as a recording artist. Michael Jackson's posthumous run kicks off today with the release of "This Is it," which popped up overnight on Jackson's Web site.
"This Is It" was originally recorded by Jackson in a spartan piano-and-vocal version, fleshed out here with strings and swooping backup vocals courtesy of Jackson's brothers. It's a sweet, swaying, rather pedestrian number. It is also, to Jackson aficionados, eerily familiar, bearing an uncanny resemblance to "I Never Heard," a song co-written by Jackson and Paul Anka that appeared on a 1991 album by the R & B singer Sa-Fire. In fact, the two songs are identical.
In other words, "This Is It" is not, as Sony Records maintains, a new Michael Jackson song, exhumed from the dusty vaults. It is a demo of "I Never Heard" that was renamed "This Is It" for the purpose of launching the forthcoming Jackson documentary and double-CD package—both titled This Is It. Even by the dubious standards of necrophiliac pop, it's a tacky move.
And a comical move. Listen closely to "This Is It"—or, for that matter, to "I Never Heard"—and you'll hear a simple confession of newfound love. But Sony evidently wanted more: grandiosity worthy of a martyred pop sovereign. Thus the string-slathered arrangement, an attempt to juice a modest song into something epic and windswept. Everyone knows that Jackson had a weakness for, and excelled at, inspirational kitsch. But "This Is It" isn't "Man in the Mirror"—even though it lifts the synthetic finger-snaps straight off of the "Man in the Mirror" rhythm track.
Today's New York Times reports that Sony has unearthed "at least 100" Jackson songs from its archives, "in varying stages of being finished." Undoubtedly, these will eventually be packaged in shiny box sets and gobbled up by insatiable fans. Previously-released demos have provided fascinating glimpses of Jackson's raw brilliance as a vocalist and craftsman, and one hopes that Sony will give us his song-sketches in their bare-bones form, without added jiggery-pokery, or angelic choirs rearing up in background. There's already a genius on those records—who needs a god?
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This week's New York Times Magazine has an epic preview of The Beatles: Rock Band, the video game in which you'll be able to pound plastic instruments to the beat of "I Wanna Hold Your Hand." In the article, we learn that all four of the Beatles' "shareholders"—Paul, Ringo, Olivia Harrison, and Yoko Ono—gave their blessings to the project in 2008. But another big name was missing: Michael Jackson. Didn't M.J. also have to sign off on the project, given his estimated $500 million stake in the Beatles catalog?
No. Jackson wasn't involved in the decision to license the 45 Beatles songs in Rock Band. That negotiation was handled by Sony/ATV Publishing, the company created to manage the Beatles' catalog after Jackson sold half of his stake to Sony in 1995. While it's conceivable that Jackson could have personally nixed the licensing, he was largely a silent partner in Sony/ATV, leaving the day-to-day operations up to company executives. The fact that Jackson had already heavily mortgaged his stake in the company to pay off debts would have made any effort to kill such a lucrative deal improbable.
Jackson didn't really "own" the Beatles' catalog, as has been widely reported. What M.J. did control at the time of his death was 50 percent of the composition rights to about 250 songs written by Lennon and McCartney. While these songs add up to nearly the entire Beatles catalog, Jackson's rights don't apply to the actual recording of, say, "Revolution" as it appeared on The White Album; they covered only the composition—that particular combination of notes and lyrics that make up the song "Revolution." (The rights to the recordings are owned by EMI Records.) These rights meant M.J. got royalties if anyone wanted to perform or re-record the song, play it on the radio, or use it in a movie, advertisement or video game. (Paul McCartney recently complained about having to pay up every time he played "Hey Jude" on tour.) Harmonix, the company behind The Beatles: Rock Band, needed those composition rights in order for the songs to appear in a video game, but it also needed rights to the actual recordings—not to mention the Beatles' name and image.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 8: "Disney Monorail Accidents." Sunday's deadly monorail accident at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Fla., was the most Google-worthy fatality of a pretty dangerous Fourth of July weekend: On Saturday, four workers were killed in a fireworks explosion on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina when 40 minutes worth of fireworks exploded in four seconds; fireworks killed one worker in Eastern Pennsylvania; in Spokane, Wash., a police dog spooked by fireworks pried open the lock to its cage and escaped. (He was found the next morning.)
No. 16: "Codex Sinaiticus Online." The oldest bible in the world has gotten the Google Books treatment: Today, the British Library announced it's posting a digital version of more than half of the Codex Sinaiticus, a Bible written in Greek in the fourth century. The Codex contains uncanonical texts, which, a columnist for the Guardian writes, "point up yet again ... the erroneousness of those who insist that the current Biblical text represents the inerrant and unchanging word of God." Visit http://www.codexsinaiticus.org/ to see the Codex. (As of this writing, though, the Web site was down.)
No. 19: "Ok magazine Michael Jackson photo." Michael Jackson queries still account for a quarter of the Top 20 trending searches today. The big story, besides Tuesday's funeral, is the fracas over OK! magazine's $500,000 purchase and subsequent fronting of a photo of Michael Jackson, supine on a stretcher, maybe dead. The New York Post reports that Jay-Z and P Diddy are calling for a boycott of the magazine, but the Los Angeles Times points out that the CBS tabloid news show "The Insider" showed the photo first on Friday.
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To write about Michael Jackson is to write about so many things at once: race, gender, sex, fame, money, music, dance, childhood, child abuse, aging, the media, the law. America, really. Maybe that’s why his death has prompted such an outburst of good writing. Tomorrow will mark one week since Jackson’s death; by the pitiless clock of the news cycle, we should be done thinking about him already. But a lot of smart people are just getting started.
Some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Jackson has appeared in the most unexpected places. Of course you’re going to turn to Robert Christgau on Michael Jackson, or Ann Powers, or Greg Tate, or Slate’s own Jody Rosen (as well you should; all four have written powerfully on the Jackson enigma). But who would have expected to find James Wolcott recounting his attempts to learn the moonwalk? (“My heel caught on a cat toy […] and I found myself reeling backward like Martin Balsam on the staircase in Psycho.”) Roger Ebert, on his indispensable Chicago Sun-Times blog (it's not just about movies, and the man responds to reader comments with the promptness and energy of a 24-year-old blogger with nothing else to do), relates the experiences of his wife, who as a young dancer once opened for the Jackson 5. Joe Posnanski, a sportswriter for the Kansas City Star, interrupted his vacation to write a fantastic blog post about the inescapability of Jackson’s music in the early 80s. And a guy named Bob Rossney, who maintains a seldom-updated blog called “Koax! Koax! Koax!,” wrote perhaps the best thing I’ve read on the unfathomable sadness of Jackson’s personal life.
David Gates’ remembrance in Newsweek contains one image I can’t shake; recalling the wraithlike backup- dancing zombies in the “Thriller” video, he writes: “When you watch it today, it appears to be a whole stage full of Michael Jacksons, the real one now the least familiar-looking, the most unreal of all.” (Newsweek’s photo spread opens with a shot of the Jeff Koons sculpture of Michael and his pet chimp Bubbles, which now looks like the Pietà of the 1980s.) And (I swear this isn’t just logrolling for a colleague and friend) the first piece of Jackson writing to make me cry was Stephen Metcalf’s trenchant and stunningly written reflection on this blog.
Then there’s the experience of coming across things written long before Jackson’s death that, if they were creepy before, seem positively frightening now. In 1983, a 24-year-old Jackson granted a rare interview to the Guardian (insisting, as he often did, that all questions be filtered through his then-teenage sister, Janet), in which he gushed about his love for children: “I feel I'm Peter Pan as well as Methuselah, and a child. ... Thank God for children. They save me every time!” Slate’s Farhad Manjoo, then writing for Salon, reported on Jackson’s 2005 child-molestation trial in chilling detail. Seth Stevenson’s dispatches from that same trial are a glimpse of the macabre spectacle Jackson’s late life had become. (In ’06, Seth also compiled a video roundup of red-flag moments from early Jackson videos.)
Brow Beat readers, what are your favorite pieces of writing (or tributes in other media) that you’ve seen about MJ? Send links to SlateBrowBeat@gmail.com. (And thanks to the Twitter followers who responded to my call by suggesting some of the great links above.)
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 4: “Propofol.”Developments in Michael Jackson’s death continue to be reflected in almost real time by Google Trends: Today, M.J.’s nutritionist, Cherliyn Lee, told the AP that Jackson “pleaded” for the powerful anesthetic Propofol (brand name: Diprivan), and TMZ reports that the drug was discovered in Michael Jackson’s house. Propofol can cause arrhythmic heartbeats.
No. 12: “Canada Day.” Happy 142nd anniversary of your becoming a semi-autonomous territory of the British Empire, Canada! Today is Canada Day, which celebrates the creation of the Dominion of Canada on July 1, 1867. (The holiday was originally called Dominion Day but changed in 1983 to downplay Canada’s colonial origins.) Canada Day celebrations usually include outdoor barbecues and fireworks, but in Toronto,a municipal workers’ strike has put the kibosh on most of the city’s official celebrations.
No. 16: “DV 2010 results.” The Diversity Visa lottery is one of the only ways many foreign workers can hope to enter the United States legally. Today, lottery results were posted online, so would-be immigrants can see whether they qualified to receive one of the 50,000 Diversity Visas available each year. The odds are only a little better than those for the $113 million Mega Millions lottery jackpot: In 2007, just 99,600 applicants qualified for the 2009 Diversity Visa out of more than 9.1 million entries. (Not all applicants accept the visa.)
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 11 a.m.)
No. 8: "Don Cornelius." Google Trends today are full of searches relating to Sunday's BET Awards, which were retooled at the last minute as a Michael Jackson tribute. Soul Train creator Don Cornelius was just one of dozens of black entertainers who honored Jackson. Over the weekend, Cornelius told Time about the first time he saw Jackson perform in the mid-1960s: "He's only 4 ft. tall and you're looking at a small person who can do anything he wanted to do onstage—with his feet or his voice. To get to that level ... you're talking about James Brown as a performer. Michael was like that as a kid."
No. 40: "8 st 1 oz." The results of Michael Jackson's autopsy were released today, and according to reports in the British press he was bald, needle-pricked and "severely emaciated," weighing just "8 st 1 oz." That's short for 8 stone 1 ounce, or about 112 pounds. Metric is the official system for measuring weight in England, but the stone (14 pounds), is commonly used to express body weight.
No. 45: "Lynndie England." The Associated Press has interviewed former Army reservist Lynddie England, the subject of some of the most iconic pictures in the 2004 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. Today, England lives in West Virginia, where she's unemployed and spends most of her time in her house for fear of being recognized and harassed. England granted the interview to promote a new biography of her: Tortured: Lynndie England, Abu Ghraib and the Photographs that Shocked the World.
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When word of Michael Jackson's death first spread, Google News went on the defensive. CNET is reporting that Google initially interpreted the tremendous spike in Jackson queries on Thursday as evidence of nefarious web sabotage and, in response, did the search-engine equivalent of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and singing "la-la-la" (or "ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa"): Many users who searched for Jackson news around 3 p.m. received an error message that read, "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
Slate's Jody Rosen is among those who have remarked that, with Jackson's death, the "monoculture," long on the wane, enjoyed one (final?) astounding spasm: For a few days, everyone was talking about, reading about, and listening to one man. The Google News story—along with stats demonstrating that Jackson drew in Yahoo's biggest single-day audience ever (16.4 million unique visitors, surpassing the previous record of 15.1 million set on election day, 2008) and dwarfed Iran and swine-flu posts on Twitter—raises a related question about what happens when the supposed agents of the monoculture's fragmentation—Google searches, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, MP3 blogs, etc.—all collude to resuscitate it. With the possible exception of Obama's win, Jackson's death is the most significant culturequake of the 2.0 era (which missed 9/11, Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the O.J. chase). And so it's not just that, for a spell, everyone was talking about the same thing again. Isn't it also the case that more people were talking about the same thing than was ever possible before?
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He has strangely colored skin, a legendarily dysfunctional family, and is perpetually 10 years old. No wonder Michael Jackson identified with Bart Simpson. On a DVD commentary track that's part of The Simpsons: The Complete Third Season box set, the show's executive producer, James L. Brooks, says he fielded a call from Jackson early in the show's run. "I love Bart," the King of Pop said. "I want to give Bart a No. 1 single."
Jackson delivered on his promise, ghostwriting the chart-topping "Do the Bartman." (OK, it only went to No. 1 in the United Kingdom; it wasn't released as a single in America.) The song came out in November 1990—a year before 11-year-old Macaulay Culkin starred in Jackson's "Black or White" video—and sounds as dated as every other two-decade-old, light-rap ditty voiced by a cartoon character. (Also see: "Opposites Attract.") "Do the Bartman" did, however, accomplish the feat of uniting two cultural icons. The most-memorable lyric: "If you can do the Bart, you're bad like Michael Jackson."
Around the same time Jackson launched Bart's singing career, he asked Simpsons creator Matt Groening whether he could be on the show. By 1992, when the M.J.-starring "Stark Raving Dad" aired as the third-season premiere, the show was transitioning from a T-shirt-selling fad (the "Eat My Shorts, Man!" era) to a work of pop art. Jackson's guest appearance, well before the era in which the likes of Helen Hunt and Lucy Lawless appeared on a weekly basis, marked him as part of the cultural vanguard.
The greatness of "Stark Raving Dad" has a lot more to do with the The Simpsons' writing staff than with Jackson's voice-over talents. (As with "Do the Bartman," M.J. insisted on keeping his name off the episode; he was billed as "John Jay Smith.") The show's scripters came up with a plot device far more ingenious than simply dropping the singer into Springfield, instead placing the singer's falsetto voice inside a 300-pound mental patient who believes he's Michael Jackson. On the DVD commentary, writer Al Jean says the script run-through at the singer's manager's house was "the most nerve-racking table read I've been to in my life." To Jackson's credit, he didn't flinch at being depicted as a crazy Caucasian. The only two notes he gave on the script: an appeal to replace Prince with Elvis in a joke about mentally unstable musicians, and a request for a scene in which he stays up all night writing a song with Bart.
Put aside Jackson's professed desire to spend the evening with a young (albeit two-dimensional) boy and it's impossible not to be charmed by "Lisa, It's Your Birthday." The minute-long song—written by Jackson but voiced by an imitator because, according to James L. Brooks, M.J. wanted to play "a joke on his brothers"—is one of the least-essential in the singer's catalog. It's also incredibly endearing, a sweet jingle written by a childlike adult for his favorite cartoon. That brief moment on The Simpsons feels like the perfect encapsulation of a life and a career. Michael Jackson: pop genius, forever young at heart, mental case.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 85: "who died yesterday." Though far down on the rankings, this search term pretty much sums up what comes before it. About two-thirds of the list has to do with Michael Jackson, RIP, from song lyrics to the method of death to long-standing associates. Poor Farrah Fawcett was quickly buried in the rankings—but for No. 3, her playboy images, and several misspellings of her name. A confusing addition to this picture is No. 35, "Jeff Goldblum dead," which resulted from Twitter-fed rumors generated by prank Web sites that the Jurassic Park actor had passed away. He has not.
No. 2: "maria belen chapur photos." Seems like people want to know whether South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford's Argentine lover was worth destroying his career for. Although The State newspaper, which publicized the pair's steamy e-mails, kept her full name a secret, Latin American news sources tracked down the 43-year-old professional mother of two and tossed her to the wolves. The actual images are so far few and far between, but go ahead and see for yourself.
No. 14: "nancy benoit hustler pics." This isn't your typical porn-star photo search—a federal appeals court ruled yesterday that Hustler was wrong to print nude photos of Nancy Benoit, who two years ago was killed by her husband, professional wrestler Chris Benoit. The photos are from 20 years ago, and a suit filed by Nancy's family alleges that she asked the photographer destroy the images as soon as they were taken. A lower court originally ruled for the magazine in October 2008.
—Lydia DePillis
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Forgive me if I don’t linger on the man’s music.
Thriller was released on November 30, 1982, but it was an album of 1983. The label led with the single “This Girl Is Mine” before releasing “Billie Jean” on January 3. “Billie Jean” was an instant hit for Jackson, but full beatification and canonization was yet to come.
On March 25, 1983, NBC aired “Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever,” featuring a reunion of the Jackson 5, a group the Peacock’s audience no doubt remembered fondly from AM radio play, variety hours, and Saturday morning cartoons. As their medley wound down, volume came up on the predatory beat of Billie Jean; and something new and else began to throb through both Jackson and the audience.
An astonished Fred Astaire was in the home audience of 47 million—the most ever to watch a TV music special—and he was moved to phone up Jackson the next day. The two have similar body types: sylph-like elongations for limbs, responsive to every unlikely command. Astaire had seen what everyone had seen. The fedora, the spangled jacket, the slink, the moonwalk—in sum, the rebirth of the total superstar—but he also saw something else. “You’re an angry dancer,” he reportedly told Jackson over the phone.
The moment I heard he died I watched the Motown appearance on my iPhone. It is thrilling. It belongs to eternity. But it also belongs to something else. It belongs to 1983, an annus mirabilis, in its way, in American life; a year of economic recovery that, in addition to prosperity and the King of Pop, brought us Madonna, Oprah, Jay McInerney, Tom Cruise, Michael Milken, Vanity Fair, and the resurrection of Andy Warhol, downtown impresario behind the Limelight nightclub. Thus Jackson was a central figure in the re-creation of a viable American mainstream, a mainstream dominated by the larger-than-life, if you’re being polite—or credulous. I prefer the noun form of “grotesque.”
What Jackson made of himself must form part of any honest eulogy. Defendants wish to be found innocent of the charges. Jackson was no usual suspect. He wanted to be found innocent, through and through. Innocent of guile, of all bodily dross and urge. Innocent of adult experience. Instead he found himself, as he sequestered with the bones of the Elephant Man, merged physiognomy with Diana Ross, and bedded down with little boys, at some weird four corners of his own making, where the innocent and the sinister, the icon and the freak, all come together.
The falsetto speaking voice, the licorice eyes, hair steam ironed and Zambonied until it was straight. The skin—what? We still don’t know. Bleached? Blanched? Poached? The barely suppressed facial hair. Effacement, defacement, refacement, unfacement. What word could do justice to the creation, out of a perfectly normal human countenance, of the dilapidated faerie mask that MJ’s eventually became? It was as if the slightest concession to the normal human horizon would let in a besieging pain. To substitute for the childhood he never had, he picked, with uncanny accuracy, exactly those things that don’t substitute for an actual childhood. Amusement parks and toys—the placatory devices of the bad parent.
A genius; an angry dancer; a grotesque among grotesques. What to make of Jacksonian America, now that the King himself is dead? An immense and spectacular frenzy; an urgent celebration; the affect of triumph; at its center a derangement; beneath that, in all likelihood, nothing.
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To anyone who ever bought into the Michael Jackson mythos—for a decade, for an album, for the opening bars of "Billie Jean"—it's something of a cruel and cognitively dissonant indignity that TMZ.com was the coroner at his bedside, scribbling his death certificate. On one hand, we have the "king of pop"—a quaint, archaic title by 21st-century standards. On the other, we have the fiercely irreverent figurehead of the 21st-century gossip-industrial complex, for which there is no such thing as royalty, for which the emperor isn't just naked but naked in a bunch of pictures he was foolish enough to keep on his Sidekick. Michael Jackson famously erected a 30-foot statue of himself in 1995, and the tabloids speeded it along on its way to Ozymandias-style ruin. (At least Ozymandias never had to deal with rumors that his nose was falling off.)
But as tempting as it is to describe a parasitic, inverse relationship between Jackson and the tabloids—as his power and prominence waned, theirs grew exponentially—the coupling was more complex. Jackson didn't go so far as, say, Britney Spears and date a paparazzo, but he paved the way for her brand of tabloid symbiosis in other ways: developing a persecution complex and making antagonists real and imagined the subject of many of his songs; submitting to a Faustian arrangement in which the paparazzi would keep the flashbulbs popping as long as he kept the crazy coming. Jackson's vanity fed into and fed on the vicious news cycle. He never put out for the cameras as much as Spears did at her barefoot, panty-free best, but he never quite slipped the noose the way she seems to have done today, either, cleaning up her act and asserting a degree of control over the situation by turning it into postmodern theater. In part, Jackson's inability to handle the paps comes down to the fact that he was a much, much weirder person than Spears (and, for that matter, Elvis). The only way for him to clean up his act was to haul it to a remote island in the Middle East and do his best to go dark (no pun intended). But in part it's also because of the era he came up in, one that left him ill prepared for the one that followed and that was well on its way out by the time Spears hit the scene: an era in which all meaningful distinction between intense adulation and intense scorn hadn't yet collapsed, in which it wasn't yet written into the standard-issue pop-star contract that, in the end, however it plays out, TMZ gets the last word.
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When Michael Jackson introduced the moonwalk in 1983, people freaked—and then immediately began imitating him. We haven't stopped. Slate V has collected video footage of our best attempts to top the King of Pop in this great video.
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Mike: What is your reaction to M.J.'s death?
Susan: In 1983, at the peak of Thriller fever, my father said, "He'll never be as big as Elvis."
Mike: Your dad may be right. For me, M.J. is associated with watching MTV. They showed his videos every 20 minutes. I still think gangland battles are fought in the manner of "Beat It."
Susan: I learned "Beat It" by its inverse, "Eat It." It was the introduction to Michael Jackson for nerds.
Mike: If it's getting cold, reheat it. I also remember being acutely aware of which of my friends was the best moonwalker. I could never really do it.
Susan: The boy who could do it best at our school owned a tie with the pattern of an electronic keyboard. It seems like both of our associations with Michael Jackson begin and end with Thriller.
Mike: He kind of lost me with that face-morphing video, though I did think it was kind of cool at the time. Didn't M.C. Hammer enter the scene at this point?
Susan: Really the next thing I know about Michael Jackson is the child hanging from the open window. I often worry that someone across the way from us in Brooklyn will think I'm a Michael Jackson mother when I hold our baby seven stories above the street and he tugs at the window guards.
Mike: At least we did not nickname our kid Blanket.
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As saddened as I am by Michael Jackson's death, I'm equally shocked that it didn't happen sooner. A few years back when I covered M.J.'s trial and sat a few feet from him on a daily basis, I found myself constantly marveling at his frailty. Jackson wore his suits tailored tight, with fitted jackets and stovepipe trousers, yet still the fabric billowed around his bird-boned frame. He was always limping down the courtroom aisle, clutching at his ribs, taking shallow breaths. He showed up late to court one day looking on the verge of a violent retching attack. The consensus within the trial's press corps held that Jackson spent his days in a haze of Jesus juice.
Now that he's gone, obsessive Jackson watchers will wonder what hidden truths might at last emerge. Some theorized that Jackson had been paying off his ex-wife Debbie Rowe and perhaps others in an effort to conceal the actual biological provenance of his children. Will anyone come forward now and clear up the origins of Prince, Paris, and little Blanket?
Jackson's many creditors will no doubt lament the death of his ability to tour and to rack up new revenue. They'll squabble over his valuable song catalogs and his less valuable tacky home furnishings.
And then there are the rest of Michael's fans, the millions who loved the music but were unsure what to think of the man. I've always been agnostic on the question of Michael's guilt or innocence and felt that he was, at heart, an 8-year-old boy with the equivalent excitability and moral sophistication. And so I'm mainly sad that the gloved one won't get a chance to bask in his inevitable cultural reappreciation. M.J. was due, somewhere down the line, for a Johnny Cash-style re-emergence. An Elvis-in-black-leather moment. It would have been tinged, of course, with the lingering memory of M.J.'s alleged transgressions. But never underestimate people's thirst for a comeback. Michael would have lit up like a small child at the opportunity to make one more moonwalk across the world's stage.
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Michael Jackson died of a heart attack today. He was 50. Volumes have been written about Jackson's music, his bizarre personal life, and his legal troubles. Here's a selection of Slate's coverage of the King of Pop over the years:
Seth Stevenson filed two dispatches from Jackson's 2005 sexual-abuse trial. Click here to read Part 1; click here for Part 2. During that same trial, Jacob Weisberg didn't believe Jackson was a pedophile, and Dahlia Lithwick wondered whether the threat of imprisonment would make Jackson stop acting like such a freak. Pulitzer Prize-winner Margo Jefferson and Slate music critic Jody Rosen discussed M.J. as a cultural object and a troubled human being. Seth Stevenson charted the evolution of the star's persona by examining his greatest music videos.
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Directed by John Landis, specially effected by Rick Baker, and choreographed by the step-designer of Broadway's Dreamgirls in collaboration with the moonwalker himself, the "Thriller" video, of course, earns its accolades as the greatest music video of all time. This is not just a matter of its lavish detail or its loving grandiosity. Nor does its distinction owe simply to its self-reflexive wit as a riddle within a video within a film—"the Chinese-box humor," as Robert Christgau once said, worth regarding as "Michael's most effective anti-star move." (Contrary to popular belief, or at least Wikipedia, "Thriller" is not a spoof of zombie flicks but an inside-out horror film connecting R&B lust with the erotics of fear and proposing a superstar as an extrahuman.)
But all that is just the payoff. What mattered was the giddiness of the buildup to the video's MTV debut on Dec. 2, 1983. For the generation that came of age, or thought it was coming of age, in the first half of the 1980s, that afternoon was its "Who Shot J.R.?" moment, a Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan societal spectacle. Maybe its only companion piece was the wedding, two years earlier, of Jackson's pal Diana Spencer. We were gathered around the TV set with everybody after school, practically trying to stick our heads in the cathode-ray tube, and it was the tension of the anticipation that made us jump, as a unit, at that first flick of creepy yellow peppers. Our eyes weren't yet jaundiced, and the hype was the thrill.