First published June 2009
In German, the word 'gift' means 'poison'. This double meaning is appropriate to a consideration of the life of Michael Jackson. Jackson's gift as a musician was a lifeblood that drove him to the heights of celebrity. However that world also proved toxic to him.
Jackson's achievements as a pop artist can be appreciated even by those who were not fans of his music. As a child in the 1960s, he was a prodigious vocalist. His enormous, soulful voice helped drive family vocal group the Jackson 5 to Motown superstardom. (Continued below)
Later, as a solo artist in the 1980s, he revolutionised pop music with his inimitable, percussive vocal technique and the erratic fluidity of his trademark style of dance.
In 1984, 'Thriller' and its accompanying short film revolutionised the music video; Jackson's appreciation of visual mediums came to match his aural mastery, and the scale of his live shows came to match the scale of his immense celebrity. He was dubbed the 'King of Pop', but to many, he was more than royalty; he was a god.
But the Michael Jackson story has the hallmarks of a tragedy. For him, the burdens of being so famous, at such a young age, were compounded by physical and emotional abuse from his father. He was the epitome of the proverbial 'troubled former child star'.
He became attached to an aura of oddness. In the 1980s it was rumoured that he slept in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to slow the effects of aging and, later, that he had purchased the remains of The Elephant Man.
Jackson's ultimate fall from public grace began in dramatically seedy fashion. In the 1990s, there were allegations of child abuse against him. True or not, the damage to his reputation was permanent. The name Michael Jackson was forever mossed with sleaze.
Gradually, tragically, Jackson's public persona became divorced from humanity. The skin condition vitiligo may have explained his ever-paler countenance, but more unsettling were the repeated bouts of plastic surgery that transformed his face into an alien mask.
His perceived freakishness was behavioural, as much as physical. The tabloids had a lot to answer for. Scandal and scuttlebutt plagued Jackson like a swarm of insects. But he made few appeals to normalcy. His extravagant lifestyle, and baffling deeds such as the stupid 2002 prank of dangling his infant son off a hotel balcony, helped to shape the eccentric self-caricature he had