It was nearly half-way through 8th grade, and the kids -- some pre-pubescent, most not -- were on either side of the room while the music played, with little inkling of the mixed minglings of dances to come. But when "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" by Michael Jackson came on, I decided that I had enough of middle school indecision, and I started dancing. (Given my height and weight at the time, I can only assume I looked like those Kokopelli with a seizure.) Pretty quickly, the kids gathered around me and started clapping, either with me or at me, and I was lost in the transformative power of the music.
A little bit of MJ's magic was sprinkled on me at that moment, and I luxuriated it for as long as I could. A few years later, when I started to DJ, I found that it was pretty easy to get people to dance if you had the records of Michael Jackson in your pocket, even when tastes started to shift to hip-hop. He was part of the fabric of our monoculture, a child star in the '70s literally and figuratively animated, who became a global phenomenon in the '80s in a way no star (and certainly no African-American male) had been before or since.
What could that sort of unprecedented success and acclaim to do a human being? In the case of Elvis Presley, it drove him to social isolation amid a smothering bed of medication and obesity, a life mercifully cut short at the age of 42. For Michael Jackson, increasingly alone and thin and drugged, hobbled by child molestation cases in the '90s and '00s, he succumbed at the age of 50. (Just before I went to see a band called The Church, I saw the news of his death on the television at my Motel 6 hotel room outside of Detroit.) For the first few years after his passing, there was an artistic rehabilitation of sorts, as his fortunes were slightly renewed with each repackaging and reissue of his greatest musical moments. But after this week, there must be a reexamination of the person behind the body of work, a period of reflection for all those that have enjoyed his singing and dancing.
One cannot watch the two-part HBO documentary Surviving Neverland and not be repulsed and saddened by the emotional wreckage left by Jackson's systematic manipulation of families for the purposes of child (and later, adolescent) sexual abuse. If the name "Michael Jackson" were stripped from the stories, and the two now-adult males were relaying each move in the chess game of pedophilia driven by an unknown assailant, there would be much more uniformity in the condemnation of such acts of power and control, but that simply cannot happen in this context. Given the treasured nature of our collective memories of MJ, there are millions of voices to shout down these two stories, just as there was in the '90s and the '00s. And after this initial fervor, expect the chorus of "yeah, but..." to swell and rise and right the ship, especially with all those legacy dollars at stake.
Sadly, there's a big part of me that wishes I could be one of those voices in the chorus. It's the chorus still singing the praises of Kevin Spacey and Bing Crosby and Louis C.K. and Phil Spector and a thousand other Great Men like them, Great Men whose works of artistic merit stand uncomfortably next to stories of what these men were like with the klieg lights off and the curtains drawn. And I totally get the intellectual and emotional compromises of everyday life, like knowing that pigs and dogs have roughly the same cognitive capacity, yet we industrially farm one and treat the other like our own children. I know that MJ's father was physically and emotionally abusive, and that abuse of that depth and stripe becomes a sick family legacy. And no one can know how the toxic cocktail of religion and fame can warp one's reality to such an aberrant and pernicious extent.
But when I heard "Thriller" in a restaurant on Tuesday, even before I watched the documentary, I cringed. And now that I've seen the documentary in full, not only can I never listen to his music in the same way, but now my memories are forever colored and compromised by the knowledge that I temporarily captured the attention of my 8th grade peers through the artifacts of a serial child molester. In my DJ life, I played "Human Nature" and "You Are Not Alone" (written by R. Kelly, for fuck's sake) so that college students could feel each other up on a dance floor. I often listened to the first few seconds of "Rock With You" over and over, just to feel that build-up of tension and release. And on the way home from work last night, "Scream," his '90s duet with his sister Janet, came up on my iPod. I pressed fast-forward.
The current quarter-century of research puts false claims of sexual abuse somewhere between 2% and 8%, which means that around 95% of claims of sexual abuse are not false, much like the rate of lying about any crime. And the fact that some people testified that they were not molested by MJ doesn't invalidate the stories of those that were. We make decisions based on the evidence available at the time and over time, and based on the current and historical evidence, the decision for me is clear. After all, imagine a person who, after the first wave of child sexual assault accusations were silenced with a $20M court settlement, puts out a song with the following lyrics:
Have you seen my Childhood?
I'm searching for the world that I come from
'Cause I've been looking around
In the lost and found of my heart...
No one understands me
They view it as such strange eccentricities...
'Cause I keep kidding around
Like a child, but pardon me...
People say I'm not okay
'Cause I love such elementary things...
It's been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood
I've never known...
Have you seen my Childhood?
I'm searching for that wonder in my youth
Like pirates in adventurous dreams,
Of conquest and kings on the throne...
Before you judge me, try hard to love me,
Look within your heart then ask,
Have you seen my Childhood?
People say I'm strange that way
'Cause I love such elementary things,
It's been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood I've never known...
Have you seen my Childhood?
I'm searching for that wonder in my youth
Like fantastical stories to share
The dreams I would dare, watch me fly...
Before you judge me, try hard to love me.
The painful youth I've had
Have you seen my Childhood...
A little bit of MJ's magic was sprinkled on me at that moment, and I luxuriated it for as long as I could. A few years later, when I started to DJ, I found that it was pretty easy to get people to dance if you had the records of Michael Jackson in your pocket, even when tastes started to shift to hip-hop. He was part of the fabric of our monoculture, a child star in the '70s literally and figuratively animated, who became a global phenomenon in the '80s in a way no star (and certainly no African-American male) had been before or since.
What could that sort of unprecedented success and acclaim to do a human being? In the case of Elvis Presley, it drove him to social isolation amid a smothering bed of medication and obesity, a life mercifully cut short at the age of 42. For Michael Jackson, increasingly alone and thin and drugged, hobbled by child molestation cases in the '90s and '00s, he succumbed at the age of 50. (Just before I went to see a band called The Church, I saw the news of his death on the television at my Motel 6 hotel room outside of Detroit.) For the first few years after his passing, there was an artistic rehabilitation of sorts, as his fortunes were slightly renewed with each repackaging and reissue of his greatest musical moments. But after this week, there must be a reexamination of the person behind the body of work, a period of reflection for all those that have enjoyed his singing and dancing.
One cannot watch the two-part HBO documentary Surviving Neverland and not be repulsed and saddened by the emotional wreckage left by Jackson's systematic manipulation of families for the purposes of child (and later, adolescent) sexual abuse. If the name "Michael Jackson" were stripped from the stories, and the two now-adult males were relaying each move in the chess game of pedophilia driven by an unknown assailant, there would be much more uniformity in the condemnation of such acts of power and control, but that simply cannot happen in this context. Given the treasured nature of our collective memories of MJ, there are millions of voices to shout down these two stories, just as there was in the '90s and the '00s. And after this initial fervor, expect the chorus of "yeah, but..." to swell and rise and right the ship, especially with all those legacy dollars at stake.
Sadly, there's a big part of me that wishes I could be one of those voices in the chorus. It's the chorus still singing the praises of Kevin Spacey and Bing Crosby and Louis C.K. and Phil Spector and a thousand other Great Men like them, Great Men whose works of artistic merit stand uncomfortably next to stories of what these men were like with the klieg lights off and the curtains drawn. And I totally get the intellectual and emotional compromises of everyday life, like knowing that pigs and dogs have roughly the same cognitive capacity, yet we industrially farm one and treat the other like our own children. I know that MJ's father was physically and emotionally abusive, and that abuse of that depth and stripe becomes a sick family legacy. And no one can know how the toxic cocktail of religion and fame can warp one's reality to such an aberrant and pernicious extent.
But when I heard "Thriller" in a restaurant on Tuesday, even before I watched the documentary, I cringed. And now that I've seen the documentary in full, not only can I never listen to his music in the same way, but now my memories are forever colored and compromised by the knowledge that I temporarily captured the attention of my 8th grade peers through the artifacts of a serial child molester. In my DJ life, I played "Human Nature" and "You Are Not Alone" (written by R. Kelly, for fuck's sake) so that college students could feel each other up on a dance floor. I often listened to the first few seconds of "Rock With You" over and over, just to feel that build-up of tension and release. And on the way home from work last night, "Scream," his '90s duet with his sister Janet, came up on my iPod. I pressed fast-forward.
The current quarter-century of research puts false claims of sexual abuse somewhere between 2% and 8%, which means that around 95% of claims of sexual abuse are not false, much like the rate of lying about any crime. And the fact that some people testified that they were not molested by MJ doesn't invalidate the stories of those that were. We make decisions based on the evidence available at the time and over time, and based on the current and historical evidence, the decision for me is clear. After all, imagine a person who, after the first wave of child sexual assault accusations were silenced with a $20M court settlement, puts out a song with the following lyrics:
Have you seen my Childhood?
I'm searching for the world that I come from
'Cause I've been looking around
In the lost and found of my heart...
No one understands me
They view it as such strange eccentricities...
'Cause I keep kidding around
Like a child, but pardon me...
People say I'm not okay
'Cause I love such elementary things...
It's been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood
I've never known...
Have you seen my Childhood?
I'm searching for that wonder in my youth
Like pirates in adventurous dreams,
Of conquest and kings on the throne...
Before you judge me, try hard to love me,
Look within your heart then ask,
Have you seen my Childhood?
People say I'm strange that way
'Cause I love such elementary things,
It's been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood I've never known...
Have you seen my Childhood?
I'm searching for that wonder in my youth
Like fantastical stories to share
The dreams I would dare, watch me fly...
Before you judge me, try hard to love me.
The painful youth I've had
Have you seen my Childhood...
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