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A review by archytas
On Michael Jackson by Margo Jefferson
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
This was originally published in 2007 - before Jackson's 2009 death, but after his 2006 acquittal on abuse charges - and Jefferson added a preface in 2017. It is also worth noting that Jefferson wrote a Guardian piece in 2019 expressing regret and shame that she did not acknowledge that Jackson was "almost certainly a sexual predator". It is interesting to me, however, that reading this book before that article, I certainly assumed she thought he was.
Jackson has become a discordant figure for popular culture. While figures such as Kevin Spacey, Rolf Harris and Gary Glitter have shifted in our lexicon into bywords for abuse, featuring prominently in-jokes and otherwise about predation, a lingering awkwardness and often silence remains around the King of Pop. In part, this may be because he was acquitted at trial, and died before more accusers emerged. But also in part, I think, it is because Jackson was a child star, and so many watched him grow into the world's biggest pop artist. A man who gradually shed every scrap of the appearance of that bopping boy filled with apparent joy on stage, and whose slide into increasingly bizarre and red-flag behaviour was carried out in front of a global audience. We could explain away anything as long as his talent for music, for dance, for reinvention, for using spectacle to question who we are, shone out. And perhaps it is because all that means we know Jackson is as much likely victim as he was perpetrator. A boy whose own abuse the world ignored before they ignored that which he perpetrated.
Jefferson's book drew me, despite my feeling that this was better left alone, because it appeared to delve into the mess, and it did - brilliantly and courageously. While she does not explicitly state that she believes his accusers, she doesn't exonerate him either. That is not the point of this book, which is to explore the cultural phenomenon of a man whose art was for a while one of the most influential in the world. She looks at how Jackson's work explores the spaces around race, and gender. She documents how he built off the work of queer artists, always unacknowledged (even Little Richard, who Jackson never mentioned), deconstructs how all his music videos build off the idea of transformation and polarity and how deeply that speaks to a society anxiety ridden about how to come together on anything like equal ground. She leans perhaps into the idea of this as a way of finding freedom, when it is also easy to view this as a result of dissociation and discomfort. But this is the smartest take I've read on Jackson (with the possible exception of the grief-infused 1991 Alice Walker poem Natural Star, with its unforgettable opening "I am in mourning. For your face." and it feels like these are conversations that need to accompany our attempts to understand what he meant to us. We are not good at navigating conversations about cycles of abuse, never mind what culpability a society might have for wanting to believe a joyful lie.
Which is a way of saying I think a revised version of this book, contextualised at least by the content of Jefferson's essay, would be a great accompaniment to any biopic or attempt to write a cleaner story. To quote from Jefferson's 2019 Guardian piece (if it is still online, go read it, it is great): "What makes us love _and_ hate an artist, feel pleasure and unease, confusion and bliss all at once? What private needs and longings do we each bring to the work we love? When the dark materials of a life pervade, even taint the work, does that mean we must cast it off? It might mean that, but it might also mean that we fight for the parts of it that matter to us. We gather our resources in all their plenitude and variety: intellectual, emotional, moral; aesthetic, political. And we use them to analyse and demystify the work, to probe its clashes and contradictions, feel their power without being at their mercy. No evasions, no simplifications. The task is to read the art and the life fully as they wind and unwind around each other, changing shape and direction."
Jackson has become a discordant figure for popular culture. While figures such as Kevin Spacey, Rolf Harris and Gary Glitter have shifted in our lexicon into bywords for abuse, featuring prominently in-jokes and otherwise about predation, a lingering awkwardness and often silence remains around the King of Pop. In part, this may be because he was acquitted at trial, and died before more accusers emerged. But also in part, I think, it is because Jackson was a child star, and so many watched him grow into the world's biggest pop artist. A man who gradually shed every scrap of the appearance of that bopping boy filled with apparent joy on stage, and whose slide into increasingly bizarre and red-flag behaviour was carried out in front of a global audience. We could explain away anything as long as his talent for music, for dance, for reinvention, for using spectacle to question who we are, shone out. And perhaps it is because all that means we know Jackson is as much likely victim as he was perpetrator. A boy whose own abuse the world ignored before they ignored that which he perpetrated.
Jefferson's book drew me, despite my feeling that this was better left alone, because it appeared to delve into the mess, and it did - brilliantly and courageously. While she does not explicitly state that she believes his accusers, she doesn't exonerate him either. That is not the point of this book, which is to explore the cultural phenomenon of a man whose art was for a while one of the most influential in the world. She looks at how Jackson's work explores the spaces around race, and gender. She documents how he built off the work of queer artists, always unacknowledged (even Little Richard, who Jackson never mentioned), deconstructs how all his music videos build off the idea of transformation and polarity and how deeply that speaks to a society anxiety ridden about how to come together on anything like equal ground. She leans perhaps into the idea of this as a way of finding freedom, when it is also easy to view this as a result of dissociation and discomfort. But this is the smartest take I've read on Jackson (with the possible exception of the grief-infused 1991 Alice Walker poem Natural Star, with its unforgettable opening "I am in mourning. For your face." and it feels like these are conversations that need to accompany our attempts to understand what he meant to us. We are not good at navigating conversations about cycles of abuse, never mind what culpability a society might have for wanting to believe a joyful lie.
Which is a way of saying I think a revised version of this book, contextualised at least by the content of Jefferson's essay, would be a great accompaniment to any biopic or attempt to write a cleaner story. To quote from Jefferson's 2019 Guardian piece (if it is still online, go read it, it is great): "What makes us love _and_ hate an artist, feel pleasure and unease, confusion and bliss all at once? What private needs and longings do we each bring to the work we love? When the dark materials of a life pervade, even taint the work, does that mean we must cast it off? It might mean that, but it might also mean that we fight for the parts of it that matter to us. We gather our resources in all their plenitude and variety: intellectual, emotional, moral; aesthetic, political. And we use them to analyse and demystify the work, to probe its clashes and contradictions, feel their power without being at their mercy. No evasions, no simplifications. The task is to read the art and the life fully as they wind and unwind around each other, changing shape and direction."