Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson: The Machine That Made Pop Global

On March 25, 1983, at a Motown anniversary special, a twenty-four-year-old in a rhinestone-studded glove finished a verse of "Billie Jean" and then appeared to walk forward while travelling backwards. He had been taught the step three years earlier by the dancer Jeffrey Daniel. It made no difference. Within a week the moonwalk belonged to Michael Jackson, and so, for most of the following decade, did popular music.

Gary, Indiana, and a Belt

He was born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, the eighth of ten children of Joe Jackson, a crane operator and former boxer, and Katherine Jackson, a musician and Jehovah's Witness. He joined his brothers' group in 1964; by late 1965 it was the Jackson 5, with Michael sharing lead vocals, and in 1970 "I Want You Back" went to number one.

The apprenticeship was violent. Jackson said his father physically and emotionally abused him during rehearsals and often sat with a belt in hand, ready to punish mistakes. Joe acknowledged regularly whipping him. His brothers disputed the word abuse, calling it discipline. Whatever it was, it produced a performer of terrifying precision before he had finished growing.

Off the Wall, and the Thirty-Seven Percent

*Off the Wall* (1979) established him as an adult solo artist and, more consequentially, as a businessman. By 1980 he had negotiated the highest royalty rate in the record industry: 37 percent of wholesale album profit. In 1984 he bought the ATV Music Publishing catalogue for $47.5 million, acquiring the rights to some four thousand songs, most of the Beatles' among them. He understood ownership decades before his peers did.

Thriller

Released on November 29, 1982, *Thriller* remains the best-selling album ever made, with sales variously estimated between sixty and seventy million copies. It spent thirty-seven non-consecutive weeks at number one and produced seven top-ten singles.

It was not a spontaneous act. Working with the producer Quincy Jones, Jackson used sixty-two musicians and twenty-two singers, the newest synthesisers and drum machines, and a deliberately promiscuous set of sources — jazz, rock, Manu Dibango's Cameroonian grooves, the synth textures Prince was then using. Eddie Van Halen played the guitar solo on "Beat It." Toto's players filled out the sessions. Paul McCartney was recruited for explicit crossover reasons. Time later described the partnership as driven by "maniacal competitiveness" and a shared determination to break the colour bar in American radio and television. At the 1984 Grammy Awards Jackson won eight prizes, the most anyone had taken in a single night.

Breaking MTV

The second achievement was structural. MTV in the early 1980s was heavily segregated and routinely declined to play Black artists. Jackson's response was not to complain but to make videos so expensive and so much better than everyone else's that refusal became commercially absurd. The fourteen-minute *Thriller* film, with its zombie choreography, drove album sales by itself and won a Grammy for long-form music video. MTV posted its first quarterly profit in 1984, at the height of the record it had initially resisted.

Bad, Dangerous, and Diminishing Returns

*Bad* (1987) became the first album to yield five American number-one singles, and its tour set attendance records. *Dangerous* (1991) sold thirty-two million; his Super Bowl XXVII halftime performance drew 133.4 million viewers and permanently changed what that slot was for. *HIStory* (1995) sold twenty million, and "You Are Not Alone" became the first song to enter the Billboard Hot 100 at number one.

Then the curve bent. *Invincible* (2001) cost $30 million, the most expensive album ever recorded, and did not repay it. By the middle of the decade he was borrowing $300 million from Fortress Investments against his catalogue.

The Accusations

In 1993 the father of thirteen-year-old Jordan Chandler demanded $20 million, then $30 million; the civil claim was settled for $18.3 million, filed under claims of negligence. No criminal charges followed, and a grand jury investigation ended without damaging evidence being presented. In December 2003 Santa Barbara prosecutors charged him with child molestation. The trial ran to the following spring, and on June 13, 2005, he was acquitted on all counts. FBI files released later showed the bureau had found no evidence of criminal conduct.

He married Lisa Marie Presley in May 1994 and separated in December 1995; he married Debbie Rowe in 1996, and had three children, Prince, Paris and Prince Michael II. After the acquittal he became reclusive and moved for a time to Bahrain. He was diagnosed with vitiligo and discoid lupus erythematosus in 1986, which he cited for the change in his skin. "When people make up stories that I don't want to be who I am," he said, "it hurts me."

Why Michael Is Called a Genius

The word is used about Jackson more freely than about almost any other popular musician, and the honest version is narrower than the usage. He was not a formally trained composer, and the sound of his greatest records is inseparable from Quincy Jones, who assembled the players, arrangements and technology around him. The moonwalk, the image most people attach to his originality, he learned from someone else.

What remains is formidable, and it is a performer's and a producer's intelligence rather than a scholar's. He had an exact rhythmic sense — an ability to place a syllable or a gesture a fraction ahead of or behind the beat, which makes his dancing look as though it happens in a different time signature from everyone else's. He understood earlier than his contemporaries that a song, a video and a choreographed body were one product rather than three, and spent accordingly. He grasped that owning publishing mattered more than any single hit. And he attacked a segregated broadcaster by out-spending and out-making it rather than petitioning it.

The counter-case is real. His late work declined sharply and expensively, and much credited to him was collaborative. His talents were narrow: extraordinary inside a three-minute record and on a stage, little demonstrated outside them. Induction into the Songwriters and Dance halls of fame, and twice into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, suggests the profession's own answer — exceptional at several crafts at once, which is not the same as a singular mind.

Legacy

Preparing the This Is It comeback residency, he died on June 25, 2009, aged fifty, of cardiac arrest caused by acute propofol intoxication administered by his personal physician, Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2011. More than 2.5 billion people watched the televised memorial.

He left thirteen Grammy Awards, a Grammy Legend Award and a Lifetime Achievement Award, twenty-six American Music Awards, eight MTV Video Music Awards and estimated sales above five hundred million records. In 2024 half his catalogue sold to Sony for $600 million, the largest acquisition ever made for a single artist's work. The industry he entered as a child in Gary is still organised, commercially and visually, around decisions he made before he turned thirty.

Achievements

• Four consecutive Billboard No. 1 singles with the Jackson 5 at age 11
• 'Thriller' — best-selling album of all time
• 13 Grammy Awards
• Two-time Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee