Who is Michael Jackson?

There has been enough written about the identity of Michael Jackson to fill libraries. In his roughly forty years (1969-2009) in the public spotlight, people speculated wildly over every aspect of his life. Who was he? What was he really like? What of his sexuality, his skin color, his plastic surgery, his costumes, his masks, his mythical home, his eccentricities, his infatuation with animals and children and nature? How do we make sense of him? Has there ever been anyone, real or imagined, like Michael Jackson?

“Over the years,” writes cultural critic Greg Tate, “we've seen him variously as our Hamlet, our Superman, our Peter Pan, our Icarus, our Fred Astaire, our Marcel Marceau, our Houdini, our Charlie Chaplin, our Scarecrow, our Peter Parker and Black Spider-Man, our Ziggy Stardust and Thin White Duke, our Little Richard redux, our Alien vs. Predator, our Elephant Man, our Great Gatsby, our Lon Chaney, our Ol' Blue Eyes, our Elvis, our Frankenstein, our ET, our Mystique, our Dark Phoenix.”

Indeed, one might easily add to this list: our Shirley Temple, our P.T. Barnum, our Edgar Allen Poe, our Keats and Shelley, our Howard Hughes, our J.M Barrie, our Bert Williams, our Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, among hundreds of other characters.

Clearly, Michael Jackson represents many things to many people. As a person, persona, and artist—three distinct identities that were nonetheless always interconnected—he was complex, paradoxical. He was beloved by millions yet profoundly lonely. He was the world’s biggest entertainer—and wanted to be—yet deeply shy and private. He was sensitive, vulnerable, and fragile. He was shrewd, bold, and powerful. He was distrustful, paranoid, and insulated. He was childlike, playful, and ebullient. He was open, yet elusive, popular, yet polarizing, otherworldly, yet profoundly human.

“I'm just like anyone,” he once said. “I cut and I bleed.” But for most of the world, and for most of his life, he was always something more or less. From his album covers, he gazes back at us from various stages of his life, through various representations and masks. Each suggests a rendering of the self; each provokes associations, assumptions, questions.

Yet his “true” identity remains enigmatic. Michael Jackson loved such mystery. While he hated the media’s viciousness and intrusiveness, he loved confusing, manipulating, and surprising the public. He loved disguises. He loved becoming a character. His public life, he realized from a young age, was an ongoing “performance.” And as a showman he understood the art of keeping his audience’s attention.

In his songs and videos, metamorphosis is likewise a persistent theme. He is constantly evolving, transforming, becoming something surprising and new: a werewolf, a robot, a panther, a shaman. On one track he sings sweetly and innocently; on the next, he bites into the lyrics with pain and fury; on the next he sounds broken and lonely. Clearly, this mercurial presentation is part of what has made him so captivating over the years. From the beginning of his career, people had a difficult time making sense of him. First he was a 45-year old in a ten-year-old body; then he was a ten-year-old in a 45-year old body. He simply never fit into traditional boxes or labels. Millions were able to connect with him, yet he was never an everyman like Springsteen or Dylan. As he famously put it in the “Thriller” video: “I’m not like other guys.”

So people imagined him out of the scraps they could grasp from tabloids and interviews, articles and appearances, pictures and songs. Unfortunately, a large portion of the resulting characterizations, particularly in the mass media, depicted him as a caricature. He was the “Wacko Jacko” of British tabloid invention; he was the freakish monster of American anxiety; he was the eccentric recluse living in Neverland; he was the megalomaniacal pop star; he was strange, naïve, removed from reality, reckless.

Beginning in the mid-1980s, even reviews of his music couldn’t help but focus on Michael Jackson the media caricature. Responding to Jackson’s work became an excuse to engage in patronizing pseudo-psychoanalysis. Every critic seemed to know what was wrong with Michael Jackson, why he was the way he was, and how to change him. He became a blank screen onto which people could project, dissect, and theorize. Yet the result of such writing became, for the most part, blandly reductive and uniform. It simply didn’t do justice to his artistry. Rather than explore the richness, depth and paradoxes of his work, it settled for formulaic prescriptions and smug dismissals. The substance of his music was always ancillary. This was the pattern for most articles, reviews and analyses over the past two decades of his life.

Yet in the summer of 2009, following Jackson’s tragic death, some of these long held responses finally began to give way. Suddenly a man who had been almost completely dehumanized by the media was being recovered in all his vitality and dynamism. His body of work, of course, hadn’t changed; it was simply being paid attention to again.

Not that the spectacle and controversy surrounding his life stopped entirely. Sensationalism and opportunism continued to thrive following his death (it was tabloid website TMZ, after all, that broke the story and infamously shoved a camera up against his ambulance to get one last picture).

But for many—from Harlem to Moscow to London to Japan—something else was happening, something more personal and unmediated. All the millions of people who had grown up with Michael Jackson’s music (over at least four generations), the millions who had bought his albums or attended his concerts, who remembered watching him on the Ed Sullivan Show or Motown 25 or MTV, who wore out vinyl’s and cassette tapes and CDs, were now returning to those moments.

They were remembering the emotions; they were remembering the magic, the excitement, the energy. They were re-listening to the songs, re-watching the videos, re-experiencing the performances and dances. By comparison, much of the media chatter seemed mundane, trivial, senseless. “Tragic wages-of-fame stories and celebrity disasters are a dime a dozen,” wrote Rob Sheffield, “but there has never been anyone who wrote or sang like this man.” Indeed, this was the man the world was mourning and celebrating: not Michael Jackson, the celebrity; Michael Jackson, the artist.

This thoughtful, complex, human Jackson wasn’t the freakish monster the media typically presented; nor was he the perfect messiah some fans imagined.  Rather, he was an artist who recognized that his deepest emotions—the anxieties and ecstasies, the pain and joy, the alienation and connection—found expression in his work. That’s where he “bound his soul.”