What's left to say about Michael Jackson?

What’s left to say about Michael Jackson? Didn’t Jarvis Cocker say everything that needed to be said, incredibly eloquently, back in 1996? He didn’t even open his mouth.

If you remember, Cocker ran onstage during Jacko’s performance of Earth Song at the Brits award ceremony in London, and bared his buttocks. At the time, the King of Pop, in front of a global audience of millions, was pretending to raise children from the dead.

Cocker could take it no more. His statement, surely the very definition of bathos, symbolised the only appropriate cerebral response to Jackson’s overblown self aggrandisement.

At that point in his career – and, after Cocker, it was all downhill - Whacko Jacko seemed to be labouring under some sort of Messiah delusion. The scope of his lyrics, and the imagery of his videos, was all about Jackson, if not exactly dying for our sins, then at least grabbing his crotch for them, and bringing infants back from the dead. Even by the standard of the pop industry’s excesses, it was a bit much.

Is that too harsh an assessment? Perhaps. Jackson sold the better part of a billion records. He’s being acclaimed as the most important musician of the twentieth century, certainly since Elvis.

During the decade from 1985 to 1995, his was unquestionably the brightest star in the firmament. His eccentricities alone were the stuff that legends are borne of: Bubbles the chimpanzee, nights spent sleeping in an oxygen tank, the squeaky voice, the skin bleaching, the glove, the absurd cosmetic surgery. Even the white socks.  

Jackson was so clever at giving the world enough to keep it mesmerised, without ever letting them see anything that was real. And when we did eventually get into Neverland, his famous home, didn’t we wish we hadn’t? As beautiful as Jackson’s art had been, what lay behind the veil of privacy seemed unutterably ugly.

The revelations about Jackson’s private life will no doubt come at us now in battalions. Jackson paid Jordan Chandler, $22m in 1994 to buy his silence over charges of child molestation when Chandler was 13.

Later, further allegations brought by Gavin Arvizo, 13, resulted in a court case during which, after revelations of “Jesus juice” (Jackson’s name for the sweetened alcohol he gave to children during sleepovers at his house) and other strange behaviour, Jackson was acquitted to widespread amazement.

Now that he is dead, and the money is long gone – at the height of his fame Jackson bought the rights to the Beatles’ entire back catalogue for $47m – it will be hard to stop other former ‘friends’ coming forward to sell their stories. Can the music survive the revelations?

Jackson’s army of fans has always defended him stoutly in the public arena, often as effectively as his phalanx of top lawyers had kept him out of prison. His interest in, and desire to be around, children was the result of his extraordinary upbringing, they argued.

Fame at a young age, with the Jackson 5, and a tyrannical father, had combined to rob him of a childhood, a childhood he was only trying to recreate in his forties. He was no paedophile, they said, just a very troubled man touched by genius.

Certainly, Jackson hated his violent father and was frightened by him, to the extent that he said he used to vomit in his presence. Much of Jackson’s desire to change his physical appearance was likely motivated by a desire to no longer see his father in his own features – he wanted to change the man in the mirror.

But whether or not you can accept that Jackson’s behaviour with underage children was merely the actions of a child trapped in a man’s body, rather than something far worse, depends on how much of an ingénue you believed him to be.

Could this man, who in private was said to be incredibly sharp-eyed and sophisticated when it came to negotiating recording contracts and appearance fees, and who was famous for being a perfectionist in the studio, really be so naïve in his personal life? The Jesus juice didn’t seem naïve. It seemed cunning.

Pop music – even the very best pop music ever recorded – is meant to be light and happy. But does anyone today listen to Michael Jackson records without a slight wince of compromise?

Yes, the music is amazing, life affirming even, but how do we justify listening to it when we know it was made by a man who paid $22m to stop accusations of child molestation against him reaching court, rather than defend himself against them?

It is said that art lives separate from the artist; that once it is created, it is free and exists on its own merits. Can we make this distinction between Jackson and his work? To judge from the deluge of his music being played on the radio now, it would seem we are trying.

Today, the media is desperate to second guess posterity – to determine how history will remember Jackson. The irony is it that it probably won’t, no more than as a very strange, colourful and troubled man. The music, however, will live on, more liberated with every passing day from the man who made it.

Mozart’s life, after all, is a footnote in the life of his symphonies and operas. Generations to come will enjoy Jackson’s music far less guiltily, and therefore more easily, than we can today.

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