“He lost happiness somewhere in his childhood, and spent his life trying to go back there and find it. When he played the Scarecrow in ‘The Wiz’ (1978), I think that is how he felt, and Oz was where he wanted to live. It was his most truly autobiographical role. He could understand a character who felt stuffed with straw, but could wonderfully sing and dance, and could cheer up the little girl Dorothy.”
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But the best piece – and I don’t think I’m being a homer in saying so – I read yesterday was a 1992 essay by Wyman. Ostensibly a review of two books on the Jackson family, it’s more a long, smart critical biography of the star with regards to his work, his sexuality, his relationship to race, and his financial affairs. For me, this is the key paragraph:
One caveat: Jackson clearly had something to say with “Billie Jean,” and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, out of a remarkable body of hits, it’s far and away the best thing he ever recorded. It also set a standard in the exceedingly difficult genre of rich, famous people trying to do substantial and personally meaningful music that’s rarely been matched, notably by Kanye West.
Well, part of an ultimate American narrative, maybe, the same one that Citizen Kane and Elvis’s story are part of. (Weinman expects a good bio in a couple years; I think it’ll take as long as it took Peter Guralnick to do his masterful two-volume Elvis bio, which is to say a couple decades.) That narrative is inseparable from his musical legacy; it’s not even worth trying, much as we’d like to focus on the music, since the narrative is as or more resonant than his work.
But I think it’s possible to take this argument too far. There are plenty of people who grew up without love in abusive and authoritarian families, spent too much money, did too many drugs, and died too young in anonymity. Jackson had the fame and the money to make a spectacle of his demons, to make manifest the fragments shored against his ruins (the rich are different from you and me: they have more money). It heighens the tragedy, insofar as we think that his tremendous resources and personal connections should have saved him, but I don’t know that the difference is one of kind.
