People are a peculiarly judgmental tribe. Everyone judges and, while intellectually it is often based on the latest bylaws laid out by the rampant political correctness of the day, emotionally it’s an entire story altogether.
Which is to say if people like something or someone well enough, they’ll find a way to separate the art from the artist and enjoy the former while reviling the latter. There’s a reason a director who found guilty of having sex with one teenager once (a teenager who grew up to outspokenly forgive him, mind) gets banished from the country while certain public figures commit far greater and often infinitely creepier wrongs and get away with it. It’s all about how much you care. Who do you love, baby? ABC, it’s easy as one, two, three. Michael Jackson is simply too good of an artist, there’s simply too strong of an emotional connection with his music, to dismiss right out, despite all the alleged (see, there, alleged) crimes he may have committed. I’ve not actually jumped on this insanely popular bandwagon of true crime documentary serials, but did watch the recent Jackson one with two young men with tears in their eyes describing how Jacko traumatized them with his love. Add that to the other accusers (cases that got dismissed and paid off) and there’s simply too much smoke to not be any fire. But then you hear Billie Jean and your feet start tapping. You see Jackson do a moonwalk and your mind is blown. The songs get stuck on repeat in your mind. It’s still that good, still holds up after all these years. Performers like Jackson come along once in the bluest of moons. And we forgive them a lot. But maybe not as much as this book does. This obsequiously fawning biography has outdone itself on the forgive and forget spectrum. Someone must have had the sale on whitewash, because boy oh boy, did they whitewash this thing. And no, it isn’t a stab at the fact that MJ started life as a black man and ended it as a white woman facsimile. Another fairly odd factor that the book avoids discussing. A lot of it might be down to the act that this is a French book and the French are notoriously more permissive when it comes to certain things. They have, after all, welcomes Polanski and just look at the long career Luc Besson has enjoyed. So it’s entirely possible that they are just very comfortable and happy with MJ as he was and are perfectly willing to explain away any controversial aspects. The Frenchness of it also might explain the weird attempts to present Jackson as a sort of playboy or ladies men. No, no, and no. His most significant relationships were with older mommy types celebs, like Diana Ross (possibly the weirdest one in there for a boy who already technically had a mother). So, as far as biographies go, this is a reasonably comprehensive, albeit insanely biased, one. It follows Jackson along from early childhood to death, with all the significant events inbetween. It concentrates heavily on his horribly abusive father. It presents (quite rightly) Jackson as a musical genius and a savvy businessman (buying up that Beatles catalog straight from under his pal Paul), negotiating with MTV for representation, etc. It barely grazes on his kids and how weird, weird, weird that entire thing was. It features Neverland heavily, and it’s worth mentioning that in a dream sequence with Pan discussing Neverland, Pan is, oddly enough, shirtless. And it focuses heavily on how much MJ loved kids (the right way) and how many charities he had donated to. Which is all really great, but to paraphrase the old joke, it doesn’t matter if you give away millions of dollars to charity, you molest one kid and you’re a pedo for life. Except, in France, that is. So that’s content. The rest …well, the book is structured like this, a biographical essay and a comic about it, over and over again. The essays as mentioned are biased, the comics are plain ugly. All except for the last one and the fun one with the chimp Bubbles. Just ugly, grotesque and at times caricaturish enough to be taken as offensive. The sum total leaves a lot, a lot, to be desired. It might be educational for some who doesn’t know a thing about Jackson if such a person can be found in this day and age, but it isn’t a great or even an accurate representation of a complex character, who for all his faults, remains the King of Pop. Pass.
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