Reviewed by Carlin Romano
Inquirer Book Critic
By Margo Jefferson
Jefferson on Jackson.
Could one ask for a more classic back tune in scrutinizing a
paramount American icon of our time?
The first fine touch in this debut book from Margo
Jefferson, a New York Times cultural critic who regularly transcends the
routine prose rhythms of her newspaper surroundings, is that quaint
"On" title, evoking the 19th-century cultivated meditation on a
subject that deserves some.
It signals her successful, compelling message here: The ups
and downs of the onetime King of Pop present serious business to cultural
thinkers, and demand serious reflection. While the astonishing coverage of Jackson's
California trial by 2,200
journalists relentlessly focused on "Did he or didn't he?,"
Jefferson prefers to ask, more or less, "Who is he?
What formed him? What do our reactions to him say?"
In short, the respectful focus of the critic replaces the
cynical attentiveness of the cable host. Jefferson feels
Jackson's pain - the anguish of a
sentimentalist who claims to have seen the movie The Elephant Man 35 times and
cried through every sitting - enough not to mock him, to want to understand
him.
"There is nothing natural about the making of child
stars," writes Jefferson with typical expansive
vision. "They are little archeological sites, carrying layers of
show-business history inside them, fragments of history and tradition."
Though her book isn't remotely a standard bio, Jefferson
distributes facts of Jackson's life
in a way that bolsters her thematic pondering. She examines his beginnings in a
working-class family in Gary, Ind.;
the "trace elements" in Jackson
of traditions stretching back to minstrelsy and Barnum's sideshow exhibition of
"freaks"; the adult creation of his own "Neverland,"
the odd plastic surgeries, the chalk-white "ceremonial mask," the
constructed image of a "gothic dandy."
Familiar material, perhaps, but it calls to mind Hegel's
insight that "what is well-known is not known because it is
well-known." In Jackson's
case, journalists, commentators and even fans seem to lose hold of his past in
passing judgment on his present.
So Jefferson, in smart, dart-like sentences, reminds us of
the virtual indenturehood of his early life, when he
and adjustable sets of his eight siblings became "singing and dancing
machines" under the sometimes brutal management of his philandering
father, Joseph. Paraphrasing Jackson,
Jefferson depicts a childhood of "no birthdays, no
Christmases, no happy memories of fun and play; only endless work and
sacrifice."
Drawing on outside biographies and family memoirs by Michael
and LaToya Jackson, Jefferson
describes how Joseph beat Michael till the boy threatened never to sing again
if he were hit one more time.
In reflecting on Jackson's
development, Jefferson sympathetically observes,
"The world is full of people who cannot get over childhood damage,"
but who were not child stars or artistic geniuses. Why do we deny such
understanding to Jackson?
For Jefferson, who takes an agnostic stand on whether Jackson
has sexually abused children, the star's desire to retreat to a world of
innocence makes sense, as it did for Peter Pan author James Barrie, even if it
may reasonably be characterized by some as a kind of mental illness, or
arrested development. Plainly, she writes in regard to Jackson's
childhood experiences, "e can't get over it. And he's not alone."
"Child stars are abused by the culture," Jefferson
argues, commenting also on Shirley Temple and others, "[and] are
performers above all else. Whatever their triumphs, they are going to make sure
we see every one of their scars. That's the final price of admission."
Still, Jefferson does not defend Jackson
on every point. "Loving children is one thing," she writes.
"Elevating them beyond all adults - setting them up as a sacred species -
is another."
Along the way she also offers provocative takes on related
subjects. "Think of Motown as music's version of great genre
fiction," she quips, explaining the Jacksons' escape from that
singular soul-music factory. While not every Jefferson
verdict persuades - it's not clear, for instance, why she thinks Sammy Davis
Jr. followed a similar "downward path from precocity to stardom to
revilement" - she's never less than incisive.
Finally, her jazzy style - particularly set to a different
drummer when she riffs word-chords of the famous Jackson
videos such as "Thriller" (1983) that she interprets as a running
autobiography of his life - makes On Michael Jackson a literary entertainment
of its own, the somber subject notwithstanding.
Brace yourself, then, for a Jackson
sunwalk - a burst of welcome light on a performer
whose career calls for rumination, not scorn.
1/17/06
Source: Philadelphia
Inquirer
Return to: Black Music Archives