3/19/2024 0 Comments Michael jackson concert soundboard![]() He had most physical evidence of it sliced out of his body-but his music and work are filled with an abiding appreciation for the music, art, and deeply powerful soul of black folks. This is the complexity of Jackson’s relationship with blackness. (Vitiligo can arise spontaneously or be inherited it can also be triggered by bleaching.) Whether or not the disease was behind the dramatic change in his skin color, Jackson surely was motivated, at least in part, by a belief common to Americans: that light skin, thin lips, small noses, and straight hair represent the most perfect example of beauty. He claimed to suffer from vitiligo, which causes skin to lose its pigment in patches-a condition his autopsy confirmed, though that explanation had always been met with skepticism from the black community. ![]() He lightened his skin and, over the years, his public explanations for doing so varied. It is estimated that he underwent dozens of procedures, many of which were botched or of shoddy quality. Everyone knows about his pathological relationship with plastic surgery, which turned him from classic man to plastic man right before our eyes. Perhaps this set of circumstances is what allowed some of Jackson’s more dubious behaviors to continue unchecked. “Michael began to run perilously low on people who could tell him what not to do,” Knopper writes. The bigger he got, the more people he cut out of his life, until about 1990, when, in Knopper’s telling**,** everyone who genuinely cared for the young, pre-“Thriller” Jackson had been forcefully denied access to his life. Having never learned how to be a responsible adult, he made terrible choices about how to handle his otherworldly power. All that really happened is that he was great, and those around him became fixated on how much money he could make. Instead, he sinks lower and lower, until death finally finds him, millions of dollars in debt, battling a crippling addiction to painkillers, attended to by a shady doctor who administered the insane doses of anesthesia that Jackson came to rely on in order to sleep. There is no long walk down the hallway to adoring fans chanting his name at a final show. But, unlike the rags-to-riches tales of Hollywood, Jackson never finds redemption. ![]() In its broad outlines, the story doesn’t deviate from the standard rock-biopic script: man with a gift becomes man with a burden. The details of that life are well covered in Steve Knopper’s new book, “MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson.” Knopper, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, takes a journalist’s approach to the story, chronicling M.J.’s journey from a working-class family, in Gary, Indiana, to unequalled fame and riches and, finally, to a deformed, reclusive, and obsessive middle age, hemmed in by leeches and ne’er-do-wells. In so doing, it has sentenced him to a lifetime of indescribable enchantment and consummate suffering. And this spirit appears to have randomly inhabited the body of this particular mortal kid. The other being seems to be a spirit of sorts, one who knows only the truest expression of human feeling. He is subject to the same laws of life-pain, age, confusion, fear-as we all are. One is a child-a smart kid, to be sure, and cute, but not more special than any other child. And it feels, for a moment, as though there are two different beings here. He stares into the camera, shakes his head, and blinks back tears in perfect imitation of a sixties soul man. Not only does he sing exactly on key but he appears to sing from the very bottom of his heart. He transforms from nervous child at a talent show into timeless embodiment of longing. The first note he sings is as confident, sure, and purposeful as any adult could ever be. When the music starts, we see something else entirely. Yet he somehow finds his way back and stumbles through. It suddenly doesn’t seem right that a kid should be made to perform live in front of an entire country. ![]() It’s an alarmingly vulnerable moment, one only possible in the era of live television. Halfway through, he forgets his lines and freezes, looking back at his older brothers for help. He does a jokey spoken preamble about how kids can understand the blues, too, because he once fell in love with a girl in the sandbox, toasted their love during “milk break,” and broke up during finger painting. well, like an eleven-year-old with a decent ability to ham it up. It is one of his first times on national television. Go on YouTube and find the footage of Michael Jackson singing “ Who’s Lovin’ You” on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He is eleven years old. ![]()
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