Michael Jackson as cultural icon

Michael Jackson as cultural icon

Respectful reflection on Man in the Mirror
Reviewed by Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic

On Michael Jackson

By Margo Jefferson

Jefferson on Jackson.

Could one ask for a more classic back tune in scrutinizing a paramount American icon of our time?
The first fine touch in this debut book from Margo Jefferson, a New York Times cultural critic who regularly transcends the routine prose rhythms of her newspaper surroundings, is that quaint "On" title, evoking the 19th-century cultivated meditation on a subject that deserves some.
It signals her successful, compelling message here: The ups and downs of the onetime King of Pop present serious business to cultural thinkers, and demand serious reflection. While the astonishing coverage of Jackson's California trial by 2,200 journalists relentlessly focused on "Did he or didn't he?," Jefferson prefers to ask, more or less, "Who is he? What formed him? What do our reactions to him say?"
In short, the respectful focus of the critic replaces the cynical attentiveness of the cable host. Jefferson feels Jackson's pain - the anguish of a sentimentalist who claims to have seen the movie The Elephant Man 35 times and cried through every sitting - enough not to mock him, to want to understand him.
"There is nothing natural about the making of child stars," writes Jefferson with typical expansive vision. "They are little archeological sites, carrying layers of show-business history inside them, fragments of history and tradition."
Though her book isn't remotely a standard bio, Jefferson distributes facts of Jackson's life in a way that bolsters her thematic pondering. She examines his beginnings in a working-class family in Gary, Ind.; the "trace elements" in Jackson of traditions stretching back to minstrelsy and Barnum's sideshow exhibition of "freaks"; the adult creation of his own "Neverland," the odd plastic surgeries, the chalk-white "ceremonial mask," the constructed image of a "gothic dandy."
Familiar material, perhaps, but it calls to mind Hegel's insight that "what is well-known is not known because it is well-known." In Jackson's case, journalists, commentators and even fans seem to lose hold of his past in passing judgment on his present.
So Jefferson, in smart, dart-like sentences, reminds us of the virtual indenturehood of his early life, when he and adjustable sets of his eight siblings became "singing and dancing machines" under the sometimes brutal management of his philandering father, Joseph. Paraphrasing Jackson, Jefferson depicts a childhood of "no birthdays, no Christmases, no happy memories of fun and play; only endless work and sacrifice."
Drawing on outside biographies and family memoirs by Michael and LaToya Jackson, Jefferson describes how Joseph beat Michael till the boy threatened never to sing again if he were hit one more time.
In reflecting on Jackson's development, Jefferson sympathetically observes, "The world is full of people who cannot get over childhood damage," but who were not child stars or artistic geniuses. Why do we deny such understanding to Jackson?
For Jefferson, who takes an agnostic stand on whether Jackson has sexually abused children, the star's desire to retreat to a world of innocence makes sense, as it did for Peter Pan author James Barrie, even if it may reasonably be characterized by some as a kind of mental illness, or arrested development. Plainly, she writes in regard to Jackson's childhood experiences, "he can't get over it. And he's not alone."
"Child stars are abused by the culture," Jefferson argues, commenting also on Shirley Temple and others, "[and] are performers above all else. Whatever their triumphs, they are going to make sure we see every one of their scars. That's the final price of admission."
Still, Jefferson does not defend Jackson on every point. "Loving children is one thing," she writes. "Elevating them beyond all adults - setting them up as a sacred species - is another."
Along the way she also offers provocative takes on related subjects. "Think of Motown as music's version of great genre fiction," she quips, explaining the Jacksons' escape from that singular soul-music factory. While not every Jefferson verdict persuades - it's not clear, for instance, why she thinks Sammy Davis Jr. followed a similar "downward path from precocity to stardom to revilement" - she's never less than incisive.
Finally, her jazzy style - particularly set to a different drummer when she riffs word-chords of the famous Jackson videos such as "Thriller" (1983) that she interprets as a running autobiography of his life - makes On Michael Jackson a literary entertainment of its own, the somber subject notwithstanding.
Brace yourself, then, for a Jackson sunwalk - a burst of welcome light on a performer whose career calls for rumination, not scorn.

................................................

(philadelphia inquirer)

scheint kein schlechtes buch zu sein...

The meaning of 'Jackson'

By Deirdre Donahue, USA TODAY

The prospect of reading another syllable about Michael Jackson would ordinarily make this reader thrust rusty nails into her eyeballs.

Michael Jackson, cultural icon? That's the thrust of Jefferson's book.

But Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Margo Jefferson offers a thought-provoking perspective that focuses more on the historical and less on the sleaze.

If you're looking for fresh dirt from disgruntled ex-employees, this is not your book.

If, instead, you want to see Jackson placed along an American continuum of freaks, song-and-dance men and child stars, then consider On Michael Jackson.

In this slim but trenchant book, Jefferson touches on Edgar Allan Poe, P.T. Barnum, Shirley Temple, Elvis Presley, Motown and the chitlin' circuit as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Among the book's more interesting insights: Jackson's plastic surgery can be seen as a precursor of what has become a national obsession with physical transformation as displayed by various TV shows like Extreme Makeover.

Jefferson also points out that people's fascination with what they consider freaks predates television by many generations. Remember 33-inch Tom Thumb? And the author writes wonderfully about Jackson's dancing.

"Every choreographer has signature moves and combinations. Here was the core of Jackson's style: the angled feet and knock-knees of the Funky Chicken (gritty) and the Charleston (more soigné); various runs and struts; the corkscrew kicks forward (as fast as judo kicks); the spin turns; the moonwalk and the sudden crouch when, instead of falling to his knees, he rises on his toes."

The book does not dwell on the singer's dysfunctional childhood. Rather than focusing on the driving patriarch, Joe Jackson, the author theorizes about the influence of Katherine Jackson, Michael's musically gifted mother, a devout Jehovah's Witness.

Though Jefferson is interesting on the intersection of race, sex, gender and America, the subject of pedophilia does not lend itself to free-floating riffs. Consequently, the material on the prosecutor and defendant lacks the depth found in other sections of the book.

Still, because Jefferson explores Jackson as a cultural icon rather than as a ratings/sales media booster, the book seeks to explain rather than exploit the pop star.

Excerpt of 'On Michael Jackson'

By Margo Jefferson

Why does Michael Jackson sleep with children, even if he doesn't sexually molest them? People who love Michael Jackson will talk about his terrible childhood: the beatings, the rumors of sexual abuse, the ceaseless rehearsing and performing from age five. And people convinced of his guilt or, at the very least, his insufferable narcissism will snap back: Lots of people had terrible childhoods; he should get over it. But he can't get over it. And he's not alone. The children Michael Jackson has made friends with share some crucial part of his background: poverty, isolation, some kind of ambition, emotional deprivation and, from Macaulay Culkin's father to Gavin Arvizo's mother, at least one exploitative parent. The world is full of people who cannot get over childhood damage or adult trauma. If they could, psychoanalysis, therapy and social work would not exist. Neither would all the forms of self-abuse and self-destruction ordinary people practice. At this point Michael Jackson's damage is equal to what his talent was, and that means it is extraordinary indeed. This is deeply upsetting to witness. Who wants to try and map that kind of compulsion and regression? Who wants to watch mental illness in panoramic close-up? What language is available to us when talking about it?
Within just three paragraphs of her book An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, the psychiatrist and manic-depressive Kay Redfield Jamison uses three different terms: "mental illness," "madness" and "abnormal mental states and behavior."5 She knows that unstable states of being unnerve people and create unstable language. "Mental illness" may sound patronizing, but at least it's clinical; "madness" in the wrong mouth amounts to a stigma. So, how do people talk about conditions, states of being, that wrench, confuse, disgust and scare them? People take refuge in the vernacular: it offers a form of mastery.

Inventive. Brutally frank or slyly euphemistic. During the Jackson trial, the pallid, officious "mentally disturbed" showed up when a certain gravitas was required. But the vernacular was the irate pundit's favorite. Jackson was crazy, nuts, cracked or around the bend. He needed to get a grip. And of course he was "off the wall," wasn't he? The title of Jackson's first hit album as a solo performer was thrown back at him with near-triumphant sarcasm.

There was no narrative space for real talk about mental illness: what it looked like or felt like; its symptoms and causes; its many shades and consequences. The trial revealed an almost primitive refusal to examine any of this. The defense wanted to call a psychiatrist who would explain to the court why Jackson's book collection showed he did not fit the profile of a pedophile. But the prosecution threatened to call a psychiatrist who would study the same books and explain why he did. Both sides retreated. Articles would sometimes quote psychiatrists about his mental state during the trial-and the probability of his guilt or innocence-much as dermatologists had been asked their opinions as to whether or not he had vitiligo, and plastic surgeons queried as to how many operations his nose had endured. There was no reasonable discussion of how Jackson might be innocent of molestation, though not of gross emotional improprieties; how he might not be able to stop himself or take in how he was viewed by the rest of the world.

Mental illness distorts and maims, but it does not have to be criminal.

It is a given of Michael Jackson's life that he cannot really connect to anyone but children. In his videos, children hold candles and sing with him about a world free of hatred; they flee war beneath his protective shadow. Children embody the innocence he was denied. And he is the all-powerful parent whom no human child can really have. Children give unconditional love.They are dependent, they must be cared for, and that gives the parental figure power along with responsibility. Is it possible that Michael Jackson sexually engages children? Yes. He compulsively reimagines the violation of his own innocence, then purifies himself with kind, caring acts. Isn't it just as possible that he is asexual? That he basks in that innocence and shelters it just as compulsively-that he is tempted but resists time and again? He sets the scene of his own violation, repeats the scenario but rewrites the ending. He rescues himself and the child. And yet, he experiences the excitement-the eros-of being tempted.

"Please don't judge me / Just try to love me," Michael sings in the video Have You Seen My Childhood? He sits on a grassy knoll, arms wrapped around his knees. His hair is short and curly, like Peter Pan's.

His face is rapt and full of wonder as he watches children-multiracial boys and girls-float through a starry sky in little boats. If you want to know about my life, look at this video, he has said. What does he see? What do we? A man who wants to be androgynous and beyond race? An artist of genius who has given us acute excitement and pleasure? A willful celebrity who wants everything his way, yet insists that everyone love him unconditionally? A man driven to shed his identity, while denying what pains him? Our man in the mirror? Or a creature we no longer wish to acknowledge?

Michael Jackson speaks to and for the monstrous child in us all.

(usa today)