The First Book of Michael (6 page)

The integrity of the campaign group Ferguson Action - set up as a part of the protest movement - was reinforced with their statement in response to the death of two white police men killed by a mentally ill black man in an unrelated incident, that was seized upon by the media,

“We are shocked and saddened by the news of two NYPD officers killed today in Brooklyn. We mourned with the families of Eric Garner and Mike Brown who experienced unspeakable loss, and similarly our hearts go out to the families of these officers who are now experiencing that same grief. They deserve all of our prayers. Unfortunately, there have been attempts to draw misleading connections between this movement and today’s tragic events. Millions have stood together in acts of non-violent civil disobedience, one of the cornerstones of our democracy. It is irresponsible to draw connections between this movement and the actions of a troubled man...Today’s events are a tragedy in their own right. To conflate them with the brave activism of millions of people across the country is nothing short of cheap political punditry."

Michael never forgot his humble beginnings, nor the suffering of black America. Indeed, a recent ancestor of his very own had himself been a slave: one named ‘Prince’ by his slavers. The same Prince that Michael named his white son after. The same son who stood trial as a plaintiff in the fight to get justice for his father, who died as a result of a slavish contract.

It may have taken twenty-five years for the minutiae of an event witnessed simultaneously by half a billion people - as well countless hundreds of millions since - to start being deciphered (as starkly obvious as they now seem), but with the ‘Black Or White’ short film, Michael further solidified his position as an artistic visionary. It was not merely that Michael had no other option but to convey his messages subtly, due to an awareness of the pitfalls he was doomed to succumb to; it was also that he remained fully cognisant of humanity's ongoing evolution of consciousness, and thus prepared his art within this context.

Much of Michael’s art will take time to unravel and reveal its true significance; the messages will crystallise over time. The process of change is so often invisible to the naked eye: the weathering of a rock; the growth of a tree. Noticeable catalytic leaps are few and far between. The distance of hindsight is necessary.

As evidenced in the case of the hacked email scandal, and true to Michael’s oft-quoted sentiment, “Lies run sprints, but the truth runs marathons”, our persistence in exposing the truth of Michael - on many fronts - will eventually see justice realised.

With perhaps the most misunderstood and maliciously maligned example of this phenomenon, residing in Michael’s philosophy of the genius of children and society’s tragic dismissal of its usefulness.

CHAPTER TWO

Even a man who is pure of heart / And says his prayers by night / May become a wolf / When the wolfbane blooms / And the autumn moon is bright.

TRADITIONAL

Michael was a master marketeer. He adopted the renowned self-publicist PT Barnum as his public relations mentor, and learned to use Barnum’s legendary tactics and abilities for his own self-promotion: the image of Barnum’s head even appearing on the cover of the
Dangerous
album. Atop of this depiction of Barnum’s head stands a ‘midget ringmaster’, who - in one of two
Dangerous
promos directed by David Lynch (the portent in that surname!) - would be played by
ALF
actor Mihaly “Michu” Meszaros, and hence join Emmanuel Lewis, the crew of
Captain Eo
, and Bubbles the chimpanzee on the ever-expanding list of Michael’s diminutive circus friends.

Michael always knew how to work with the right people to convey the desired image. After working with A-list movie directors Landis, Scorsese, Lucas and Coppola in the eighties, Michael, through necessity, changed tack with the changing of the cultural winds. The self-manufactured eighties controversies of Merrick’s bones and Hyperbaric Chamber had now evolved into the far more damaging issue of race-denial. Michael was now the tabloid press’ Most Wanted. The swift and sudden fall of 1993 had not yet occurred, though Michael portentously alluded to its possibilities on the
Dangerous
album: both overtly in ‘Will You Be There’ and more indirectly in the ‘Jam’ lyric, “I’m conditioned by the system.”

Michael’s eminence in the sphere of self-promotion was unsurprising considering his upbringing. The
Jackson 5
had been used to advertise cereal, and his time with
The Jacksons
was what kick-started Michael’s ill-fated, life-altering relationship with
Pepsi
: a partnership that began with adverts with his brothers and the
Pepsi
-sponsored
Victory
tour (during the ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It’ performances, Michael even wore a subliminally
Pepsi
-themed T-shirt). The joint venture continued for Michael’s solo work, with
Pepsi
also sponsoring the
Bad
and
Dangerous
tours and projects. In response to the 1993 scandal, however, Michael was unceremoniously dumped by the company. Typically, Michael’s riposte to being abandoned by his long-term marketing partners was a musical one. On the subsequent
HIStory
album, Michael placed ‘Come Together’ after the track ‘Money’. ‘Come Together’ containing the lyric, “He shoot
Coca-Cola
”.

The prosperous
Pepsi
partnership was rekindled by Michael’s estate after his death.

The
HIStory
campaign was Michael’s very personal retaliation to the molestation accusations, and for the first time, Michael profaned on record. A typically undermining critic of the time claimed Michael had started swearing to appeal to “the children of Cobain”. In fact, Michael started cursing in his music because he was understandably and justifiably rather upset. (These persistent asinine attacks on Michael even stooped so low as one reviewer of the
HIStory
tour – which grossed as much as the
Bad
tour, with profits given to charity – claiming that Michael must have pushed a sock down the front of his trousers in order for him to have “achieved that bulge”.) Michael also fought back with his message of environmentalism. ‘Earth Song’ was a phenomenal worldwide success (bar the out-of-favour USA, where it wasn’t released), with Michael tapping into a universal anxiety concerning the welfare of the planet.

And then along came Jarvis Cocker: the historical footnote frontman for Britpop band,
Pulp
.

The day after Cocker’s cynical stage invasion of Michael’s performance of ‘Earth Song’ at
The Brits ‘96
, one newspaper headline read, “The Night Our Young Dreams Were Pulped”.

This surprising message of media support for Michael was ephemeral, however. Once it had been noted that young and trendy Brits were not in agreement with the media stance, the backlash began. The following week, Cocker was interviewed on cult TV programme,
TFI Friday
. The programme contained a live audience of young adults, who mocked Michael and championed Cocker throughout. The host, Chris Evans, concluded the interview with the words, “We all support you and know it was just a bit of a laugh.”

What it actually was, was a cultural watershed: a paradigm shift in the morality of a generation. Those children who had grown up entranced by Michael transforming into cars and robots in an effort to defeat a drug baron, suddenly became ‘Cool Britannia’ Blairites. But it was okay. At least they were all ‘Sorted for E’s and Wizz’.

A year previously, Chris Evans, who was also a
BBC Radio 1
DJ, had been the person to premiere ‘Scream’ on UK radio. After the song’s unveiling- its opening lyric being, “Tired of injustice” - Evans immediately commenced a campaign to castrate the track: adamantly refusing to play the original version, insisting on the minimal playing of a remix (and not the ‘Scream Louder’ version, which incorporates the bassline from ‘Thank You’ by
Sly and the Family Stone
- one of Michael’s favourite songs).

Upon the release of the
HIStory
album a few weeks later, Evans then proceeded to use his popular breakfast show to disproportionately slate Michael and the album. The subsequent success of the album and its singles (‘You Are Not Alone’ laying claim as the first ever song to debut at number one on the
Billboard
Charts; ‘Earth Song’ outselling
‘
Billie Jean’ in the UK, with it holding the number one spot for seven weeks - including the much-coveted and hotly-contested Christmas Number One position), meant Evans then had to backtrack.

***

The
AEG
trial that exposed Randy Phillips’ damning email correspondence, also revealed that if Michael had lived, he could have expected to earn over a billion dollars from the
This Is It
venture. The unprecedented demand for tickets to see
This Is It
meant - had Michael been physically capable of following orders - he would have eventually played to one million people. That’s a tremendous amount of people representing a whole range of demographics who wanted to go and see Michael: a man who had essentially become a cult following during the noughties, having gone full-circle since the cult following of his band, the
Jackson 5
in the sixties. Before they exploded onto the world stage.

The day Michael died, the social network
Twitter
collapsed at 3:15pm, exact.
Upon this internationally-sensed, seismic
-
shock, the resultant grief expressed by the planet at such an irreplaceable loss for humanity became manifest in myriad ways.

Conspiracy theories abound: had Michael known he was going to die when he did? When he had whooped the
This Is It
press-conference crowd into frenzied delirium with the chant, “This is it! This is it!” – had he literally meant
this
- this
moment
– is
it
? Conspiracy theories ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime: had Michael been targeted by secret
NASA
technology possessing the capacity to identify and exterminate any specific target on the globe – their motive being that, during the
This Is It
run of shows, they had reason to believe he was going to expose the insidious Illuminati elite?

Then there were those that point-blank refused to accept that he had died. A theory spawning a faction of fans who persevere in referring to themselves as ‘BeLIEvers’: a small group of seemingly sorry souls.

(I appreciate this could ostensibly be interpreted as an insensitive stance, but – from the BeLIEvers I’ve had the misfortune to encounter, at least – they promote their agenda for reasons much less fuelled by the denial synonymous with grief, and much more by one powered by necromaniacal voyeurism.)

BeLIEvers are inordinately proud of themselves for having noticed that, in the English language – on occasion – shorter words sometimes exist within longer ones (although the rudimentary rules of any language discourage those words ever being capitalised). This apparently startling syntactic revelation is the bedrock of the BeLIEver self-delusion system: an ethos that actively promulgates the idea of Michael being alive – with him merely residing on the sidelines of civilisation, in the guise of various individuals ranging from tragic burns victim and famous recipient of Michael’s philanthropic aid, Dave Dave, to the very man convicted of killing Michael himself - Conrad Murray.

This lunatic fringe group put stock in such things as the reading of messages in the creases of the lips of the images of Michael that adorn posthumous album covers. The beyond-the-grave (nudge nudge, wink wink) messages vary; depending, of course, upon the native language of the interpreter.

BeLIEvers claim that the picture taken of Paris Jackson prior to her suicide attempt, in which she is sporting self-harm scars on her arm, was photoshopped - and that she is both aware of and complicit in perpetuating the hoax. Or else – with frightening contrariety – that Paris’ attempt to take her own life was a ruse to draw Michael from hiding; that – for all Michael’s self-defining concern for the welfare of other people’s children – it’s impossible for him to emerge from exile, and so simply refuses to intervene and console his own children in their agonised grief. Because the sanity of his kin must be duly sacrificed in lieu of the accomplishment of the bigger plan – a scheme of insidious deceit that essentially boils down to the most distasteful magic trick in history. The reveal to which, would be Michael’s instant arrest and incarceration as a consequence of the somewhat misjudged endeavour being responsible for an innocent man having spent time in jail.