“This
Is It,”
a psuedomentary of Michael Jackson’s final days, opened
Wednesday amid all the fanfare Sony Pictures and it’s music arm,
Sony Music, could muster. The Michael Jackson accidental death
story having quieted down considerably, Sony has invested
millions in the heavy lifting to get us riled up about it again
and promote their film. Sony wanted This Is It for the end of
August but bowed to director Kenny Ortega’s insistence the film
not be merely a hastily cobbled-together hack job designed to
cash in on the death of one of the world’s leading figures.
Their investment appears to have paid off as, at press time,
This Is It has grossed over $9 million domestically in two days,
and has earned an additional $12 million overseas, creating a
buzz that the film may become one of the best-grossing music
documentaries of all time. Critics have so far universally
applauded the film as a masterpiece, and there is even
(premature) Oscar buzz. Those expecting a great MJ performance
will likely be disappointed, as, in the film, Jackson
concentrates more on the practical aspects of putting his show
together rather than on stellar vocal performances, but the film
itself affords a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at one of
the world's greatest performers, and tells a compelling story of
an ill-fated comeback effort. Sony Music co-released an
accompanying CD of music from the singer, which will benefit
from the assumption that it was the album MJ had been working on
at the time of his death but is, in fact, yet another collection
of hits even casual MJ fans already have.
Both the film and album are most obviously designed to attempt
to recoup a reported $50 million investment by concert promoter
AEG in the singer’s planned “This Is It” tour, an effort which
suffered monumental losses upon the singer’s sudden death. While
I’m sure every effort will be made to make both film and album
(and subsequent merchandising tie-ins, and the rumored Jackson
Family reality TV show and concert tour) tastefully reverent of
the singer’s life, there is no doubt what all of this is about:
Michael Jackson, the monster of all cash cows, is dead. It is
now time to build a lasting legacy such that, even though the
King of Pop is gone, the checks keep coming. “This Is It” is the
first test of the Michael Jackson Legacy Machine.
People have gotten rich writing books claiming to tell us the
truth about a guy who seemingly lied every hour of every day of
his life, a guy we idolized and adored and made excuses for not
out of respect for who he actually was but in homage to the
family-friendly, adorable wunderkind he once was. Only, that
guy—our naive play-vision of Michael Jackson—died a long time
before his body was discovered in a rented house. Jackson was
trained to lie, first as a child by his grotesquely
dysfunctional father, a presence and, surely, a face Jackson
spent most of his life trying to escape. Jackson lied about his
age, lied about who discovered the Jackson 5 (Bobby Taylor, not
Diana Ross), and lied about practically everything from how many
plastic surgeries he had (he claimed only two on his nose), to
whether he lightened his skin to the paternity of his children
and much, much more.
It’s ironic that, only after he died, do we now begin to realize
how famous this guy was. We’ve all had our fun with Michael
Jackson over the years, but the most profound truth about this
deeply troubled and now eternally-young man is that he was,
quite simply, one of the world's most phenomenally talented
people. His vocal style has been often imitated but never
duplicated with any commercial success. I mean, if there was
anybody out there with a more impressively unique vocal style
than Michael Jackson, he or she would have put Michael Jackson
out of the Michael Jackson business—or, at the very least
franchised it a la sister Janet—years ago. Jackson was simply
one of a kind, a marvel. A guy who tended to repeat the same
dozen or so dance moves over and over and yet we never, I mean
never, got tired of seeing him do it. A guy who could hiccup and
sneer his way through Happy Birthday and amaze us with it. He
was every bit the outsize phenomena Elvis Presley had been, only
moreso because Jackson was black. A poor black child from a
blue-collar Indiana family. Both Jackson and Presley had to
overcome poverty, but Jackson had to overcome racism as well. By
racism, I mean there were some radio stations that refused to
play Presley's music because he was considered too sexual. But
there were entire cities in entire areas of this country that
would not play black music in 1968 simply because the artist was
black—cute little boy or not.
During an appearance on CBS' Late Show With David Letterman,
Letterman remarked to Donnie Osmond how the Jackson 5 were kind
of like the black version of the Osmonds. Letterman is one of my
favorite entertainers, but his more than occasional sloppy
interview prep often leaves me gasping, as this did. A singing
religious family, similar to the Jacksons, the Osmonds had
indeed been singing as a family group a lot longer than had the
Jacksons, but MGM Records recruited the Osmonds specifically in
response to the success of the Jackson 5, in an effort to do
what white entertainers had historically done: exploit ideas and
even the intellectual property of blacks. Record producer Rick
Hall crafted an extremely J5 sound at the famous Muscle Shoals
studios in Alabama, the studio that launched the careers of
Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, and the Staple Singers among
others. Every black kid in America knew what Donnie and the
Osmonds were about the minute "One Bad Apple" hit the charts in
1971—this was a declaration of war against the Jackson 5 and,
specifically, young Michael. From all appearances it seemed the
"rivalry" between the two groups was largely fabricated for the
teen magazines, and while the Osmonds indeed enjoyed great
success initially at the Jackson 5's expense, the Osmonds soon
moved more toward rock and roll and then television variety. The
Osmonds factored very little in the continuing meteoric rise of
the Jacksons. As talented a kid as Donnie was, Michael Jackson
wasn't merely a good singer and dancer. His was a gift that
defied description and duplication. Instincts and dynamics that
went far beyond Donnie Osmond's echo of those gifts.
However, Michael's eccentricities soon began to overshadow those
gifts. Ever since Eddie Murphy broke the taboo—it was virtually
against the law to make fun of Michael before Murphy’s 1983
Delirious HBO special—Michael Jackson has been a favorite butt
of cruel jokes. Michael was always looked upon as a kind of
saint. A harmless, devoutly religious, strange young man who may
or may not have been a special needs person and thus well beyond
the scrutiny of conventional social norms. He was a big, shy kid
whose ruthlessness was only apparent onstage or in very sharp
business decisions like beating his close friend Paul McCartney
to the punch in purchasing the Beatles’ music catalog. We
thought nothing, nothing at all, of Jackson’s shy flirtations
with America’s virgin Brooke Shields, and it never once occurred
to us that it was pint-sized Emmanuel Lewis, rather than
Shields, who may have been the object of Jackson’s affections.
The guy was so famous we certainly considered it possible (and for those of us who were at least marginally closer to actually knowing him—a friend of a friend sort of thing—considered it probable) that Jackson’s sleepovers with young boys were, to varying degrees, at least as harmless as he suggested. That he rarely, if ever, invited little girls to his bed suggested an odd sense of propriety reinforcing Jackson's claims that the sleepovers were harmless. The sheer inappropriateness of the notion of underage girls in his bed could make Jackson blush. He considered himself a boy, and boys play was, he maintained, all that was happening behind closed and locked and alarmed doors. And we at least partially bought it—that’s how famous the guy was. He was so famous that, for years, he likely molested and abused young boys right in front of us and we turned our head.
