Michael's legacy

I was listening to the early albums by the Jackson 5 last night, and I was struck by the genuine emotion in the pre-teen Michael Jackson's voice. You get the sense he really believed the songs he was singing, that he was truly committed to the sentiments in the lyrics. There's a semi-obscure ballad from that period called "Maybe Tomorrow" that I found particularly fascinating, in which Michael reflects,"You are the song that I sing, you are the four seasons of my life. But maybe tomorrow, you'll change your mind, girl. Maybe tomorrow, you'll come back to my arms, girl."

It's a song suffused in a strange kind of hopeful anxiety: Yes, my love is gone, but there's always a chance that if I just keep telling her how much she means to me, she'll be back.

"Maybe Tomorrow" was recorded when Michael was around 12 years old, so it's doubtful that he was pouring a lot of first-hand experience into those words. Yet, near the end, when he builds up the intensity and pleads for a second chance, he's so on-the-mark he was obviously tapping into something that was close to his heart.

That was Michael Jackson in the first 25 or so years of his life, the performer who sought self-expression through his craft, who found the release for his pent-up emotions in music and dance. Look back at the first Jackson 5 records and marvel at how this child effortlessly delivers number after number, whether it's a tender moment like "I'll Be There" or a dance floor workout like "How Funky is Your Chicken?" It's pure talent and bonafide energy.

And I think that's what Jackson lost somewhere along the way, after he'd made "Off the Wall" and "Thriller" and become the most celebrated artist on the planet.

At a certain point, it was no longer about delivering the goods, musically and performance-wise; it was about topping what he'd done before, going another step further, breaking some new record, selling more product than anyone else. Any artist that follows that course is not heading for greater glory: He or she is stepping onto the downward spiral. No actor wins the Oscar year after year, no novelist always gets the Pulitzer Prize, no painter will ever be all the rage forever. Tastes change, styles evolve, and what was once startling and innovative quickly becomes mainstream and unexciting.

I was a big fan of Michael Jackson as a child and kept following him through "Thriller," but after that? I got a press pass to see the Jacksons' "Victory" tour in Detroit at the Pontiac Silverdome in 1984 and, even in a venue that had no business hosting concerts (the sound bounced around the stadium so violently that my sister and I were often turning to each other to ask, "What song do you think this is?"), Michael Jackson had no problem captivating the crowd with his combination of slick choreography and polished professionalism. At the same time, the performance was so calculated and precisely timed there was no spontaneity, no real joy in it. Behind the razzle-dazzle was nothing, except commercialism. You couldn't buy a poster of all the Jacksons together, for instance; you had to buy an individual poster of each of them. (And much as I wanted to proudly hang Tito in the living room, I held on to my wallet.)

To a generation that wasn't around to bear witness to the Jackson 5, or "Off the Wall" or the mania that surrounded "Thriller," Michael Jackson is primarily a punchline to sleazy jokes. They may know his songs, but they know a whole lot more about his bizarre behavior, bogus marriages, the obsession with maintaining some vestige of youthfulness through increasingly eerie plastic surgeries and the way he steadily changed himself from a black man to a chalk-colored androgyne with a freakishly tiny beak of a nose.

One of my friends posted the following on Facebook: "In his first 25 years, he gave us some great music, which we've still got. In his last 25 years, he gave us little but bizarre TV clips of him wearing a surgical mask and acting inappropriate with kids. I'd call it a wash."

Unfortunately, that's just about right. Comparing Jackson's music of the late 1980s and 1990s to "Thriller" and "Off the Wall" is like putting Kraft Slices alongside brie. The songs became background music for elephantine music videos that cost almost as much as feature films and became progressively more laughable as Jackson kept "refining" his looks and indulging in tributes to himself that would have made even the vainest diva blush. Everything seemed geared toward keeping him in the spotlight. When his music was no longer selling, Jackson sold himself, spilling out teary confessional tales of a traumatic childhood and betrayals by backstabbers. He might have found more solace if he'd told these things to a good psychiatrist instead of Oprah Winfrey and a network TV audience.

He got the attention he craved. But he no longer had anything to say or anything new to offer. To the under-25 set, Michael Jackson is a carnival freak who dangled his baby off a hotel balcony, walled himself up in a private playground and had a peculiar attraction to little boys. To understand why anyone cared about him in the first place, you have to turn back the clock a quarter of a century, back to a time when perhaps the singer really did believe in his song, at least enough to make the audience believe that he believed in it.