The Case of Michael Jackson

On the back of acclaimed and lucrative runs in New York and London, the Michael Jackson musical MJ opened in Sydney last weekend. The Broadway production has won four Tony Awards. The London show has been hailed as the most spectacular in the West End. By the end of the Sydney premiere, the whole audience was on its feet, electrified by a heady succession of superbly choreographed, show-stopping reinventions of Jackson’s greatest hits.   
 
Produced by the Jackson estate, MJ is a hard show for any respecter of fact to enjoy without qualm. Visually and sonically, it’s unbelievably good. Unfortunately, it’s unbelievable in another sense too. It has a truth problem. Spitting in the face of historical reality, it portrays Jackson as a virtual saint: a selfless, put-upon victim, persecuted by a world obsessed with nasty gossip.
 
Billed as a celebration of Jackson’s “unparalleled artistry”, MJ also ends up celebrating the man himself, defiantly, audaciously, unashamedly. But surely we all agree by now that Jackson is not a man to be celebrated? It’s one thing to believe his music can still be enjoyed despite the wealth of credible evidence that he was a serial child molester. It’s quite another to pretend the evidence doesn’t exist.
 
MJ, however, does precisely that. It dodges the issue of Jackson’s alleged criminality by setting itself in 1992, which just happens to be the year before the first public charge of child abuse was levied against him. MJ doesn’t so much rewrite history as pretend that history stopped happening in 1992. It behaves as if the alarm bells about Jackson can be unrung, and we can all return to a prelapsarian time when the worst you could say about him was that he was a weirdo with a pet chimp.
 
On the face of it, it seems bizarre that MJ is happening at all, given the zero-tolerance attitude that America’s cultural watchdogs have taken, in recent years, towards the moral shortcomings of their entertainers. Celebrity misbehaviour – ranging from the monstrously criminal to the not even illegal, and from the solidly demonstrated to the far from proven – has been cracked down on all over the place.
 
So what’s going on with the MJ musical? Nobody, at this point in history, would dare to stage an all-singing, all-dancing tribute to the artistry of Rolf Harris or Bill Cosby.
 
What makes Jackson’s case so different from theirs? Have we decided that his extreme talent is a wildcard, which obliges us to suspend our otherwise fanatical moral vigilance? Or do we think the case against him hasn’t yet been made?
 
There was a time when it was just about possible to think it hadn’t been, if you squinted at the facts from a lenient enough angle. The evidence of Jackson’s alleged crimes came out piecemeal, by way of several cases spread over several decades.
 
In 1993, he was accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy named Jordy Chandler. Unfortunately, Chandler’s father muddied the waters of that case from the start, by pursuing his complaint against Jackson in a very American way. Instead of going straight to the police, he invited Jackson to pay him US $20 million to keep the allegation quiet.
 
Jackson refused to pay, and sued Chandler for extortion. Chandler counter-sued, now seeking $30 million. Simultaneously, police launched a criminal investigation of Jackson. His Neverland Ranch was raided. Child erotica was seized. Jackson’s genitals were photographed for evidentiary purposes.
 
Then Jackson himself further muddied the waters – or perhaps clarified them – by settling Chandler’s civil suit for US $23 million. The criminal investigation collapsed shortly afterwards.
 
Jackson and his lawyers stressed, of course, that his payment of this gargantuan sum did not suggest, in any way, shape or form, that he was guilty. He just wanted to spare himself the tiresome hassle of a trial. “I wanted to go on with my life,” he explained.
 
Regrettably, the life he wanted to go on with would continue to revolve around his creepy habit of inviting young male fans around for sleepovers. One of these boys was 13-year-old Gavin Arvizo, who was recovering from cancer when Jackson befriended him.
 
In 2005, Jackson was charged with molesting Arvizo. This time the case went to trial. Several former sleepover buddies of Jackson, including the actor Macaulay Culkin, swore on the stand that Jackson had never touched them inappropriately. Persuaded by such testimony, the jury found Jackson not guilty.
 
When Jackson died in 2009, his personal reputation wasn’t exactly spotless. But his defenders could still claim, correctly, that he’d never been convicted of anything in a court of law.
 
The fantasy of Jackson’s innocence finally came crashing down in 2019, with the release of the documentary Leaving Neverland. That damning four-hour film was built around excruciatingly detailed interviews with two fresh Jackson accusers: the Australian-born choreographer Wade Robson, who charged that Jackson had repeatedly raped and assaulted him over an eight-year period in the 1990s, starting when Robson was 7; and the former child-actor James Safechuck, who claimed to have been similarly abused by Jackson between the ages of 10 and 14.
 
To say that Robson and Safechuck’s stories had the ring of truth would be an understatement. In the wake of Leaving Neverland, a stunned, nauseated, and near-universal consensus seemed to set in. The King of Pop had been a very, very bad man.
 
For a while, everyone seemed determined to do something about this. “We’ll never listen to Michael Jackson the same way again,” declared CNN, a week after the documentary went to air. Radio programmers in Australia, and around the world, announced they would no longer be playing Jackson’s songs.
 
That righteous backlash didn’t last long. A New Zealand radio station that stopped playing Jackson’s songs in March 2019, when the documentary came out, was already playing them again by November, citing “positive listener survey results.” In 2023, online consumption of Jackson’s music grew by 38%. For better or worse, the public has spoken. Jackson’s music is just too good to throw away.
 
Does this mean people have chosen to forget or ignore the weight of the evidence against him? Or have we decided, in this case at least, that it’s possible to like a song without necessarily endorsing the morals of its creator?
 
It’s hard to tell, because a culture, like a jury, doesn’t have to explain or justify its verdicts. It just decides things and moves on, voting with its feet and wallets.
 
Maybe the best we can do, in Jackson’s case, is try to articulate and understand our own responses. Speaking for myself, I have no doubt that Jackson was a reprehensible person. But I feel no attendant moral obligation to stop enjoying his music.
 
I have younger friends who take a harder line. For them, Jackson’s music is now as unacceptable as the man himself. I understand their view, but I can’t share it. How do I justify my position, if indeed it needs to be justified?
 
One answer is that I couldn’t excise Jackson’s music from my life even if I tried. If you grew up in the 1980s, as I did, Jackson’s songs were the sonic wallpaper of your youth. They were everywhere. When the “Thriller” video debuted on prime-time TV in 1983, everyone you knew stayed up to watch it. We all practiced moonwalking in front of our bedroom mirrors, even if our floors had carpet on them.
 
When a musician’s work saturates an era the way Jackson’s did, it’s redundant to ask if we can separate the art from the artist. Of course we can. Jackson’s songs became public property the moment they were released. They became everybody’s. They embedded themselves deep in the weave of millions of individual lives.
 
Moreover, Jackson’s music was pure pop. It never pretended to offer you any access to the contents of the man’s mind. If he’d been an earnest singer-songwriter like Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell, I don’t doubt that I would now find his work repugnant. It would all feel like a giant betrayal and lie.
 
But Jackson’s music never claimed to be in the truth business in the first place. He didn’t even write half the songs he’s famous for, and the ones he did write told you nothing about his inner life except that he liked to dance. Nobody ever seriously believed that he was the hardened street tough depicted in “Beat It” and “Bad”. Those songs were exercises in sheer fantasy; they weren’t implicated in anything Jackson got up to in real life. And I don’t think we implicate ourselves by continuing to listen to them.
 
Leaving Neverland ended with a sequence in which Wade Robson burned his Jackson records and memorabilia. You could see why such a catharsis felt necessary for Robson. But the film was too nuanced to demand that its viewers should immolate their own memories of Jackson. It merely asked us to accept the facts, and reckon with the thorny paradox Jackson presents. He was one of the most lavishly gifted entertainers of the 20^th century. He was also – as one participant in the documentary mildly put it – “not a good guy.”
 
MJ the musical tries hard to make us forget the second part of that paradox. Reportedly, the Jackson estate is working on a biopic that will go even further, and actively contend that the charges against him are bogus. This kind of creeping denialism must be resisted.
 
In another respect, the appearance of MJ is heartening. It suggests that cancellation, that other form of crude denialism, has had its day. The moral authority of the cancelling craze – if it ever had any – collapsed for good when Jackson slipped through the cancellers’ net. Less beloved artists have been banished from the culture on the strength of evidence far less compelling. Jackson escaped cancellation not because the case against him lacked merit, but because he was too big to fail.
 
And now MJ is happening, in plain sight. You can either go to it or not go. The choice is yours: it hasn’t already been made for you by an online mob.
 
This is surely a welcome development. The questions that Jackson’s case confronts us with are too important to be outsourced to strangers. They’re questions for the individual conscience. For most of us, the question of his guilt is settled. The trickier question is whether we gain anything by sweeping his artistic achievements into the dustbin of history.
 
Those achievements were indeed glorious, as MJ scintillatingly reminds us. But MJ himself was a far from glorious person. I see why some people wish the facts didn’t say that, but they do. The case of Michael Jackson offers clinching proof that the excellence of a work of art implies nothing – nothing at all – about the moral excellence of its creator.