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Hitting the mark

Marcus Berkmann

Wednesday, 2nd July 2008

Marcus Berkmann on Michael Jackson

It seems hard to believe, but on 29 August Michael Jackson will be 50 years old. Maybe fortunately in this case, the music industry doesn’t really go a bundle on 50th birthdays: I believe there’s another half-hearted greatest hits coming out, but that’s about it. How will Jacko celebrate? I think we can all imagine him alone in one of his vast decaying houses, Charles Foster Kane crossed with Miss Havisham, playing his Nintendo all day and pausing from time to time to pick up the latest nose and stick it back on. If George Orwell was right, he will have the face he deserves — surely a punishment far greater than any crime he committed. All that money, all that success, and what was the point of any of it?

Madonna, of course, is celebrating her forthcoming 50th in a more traditional manner: by getting divorced. She hits the mark on 16 August, which she’ll no doubt spend at home with her children and favourite lawyers. It’s no small matter, this 50 thing. I am two years away from mine, and, as so many of my friends seem to be slightly older and more decrepit than me, I have already been to a few 50th birthday parties and am looking forward to behaving like a deranged teenager at several more. Forget all this nonsense about 50 being the new 40, or even the new 35: 50 is 50, which is to say 15 on the inside, and make sure you smash every mirror in the house. Either you have achieved what you were going to achieve, or you haven’t, and if you’re lucky you don’t care any more anyway. If you are a pop star, though, the chances are that you achieved what you were going to achieve so long ago that it must seem like a different person who achieved it. Worse than this is the fact that everyone on the planet knows this. You may have enjoyed ten years of magnificence at most, followed by decades of being rich, famous and washed up.

Now, if I’m to be honest, I have never heard much in Madonna’s music, a handful of memorable singles notwithstanding. The nakedness of the ambition and the feebleness of the voice always put me off. But Michael Jackson was once genuinely extraordinary. In the early 1980s he seemed the natural heir to Stevie Wonder, a musician of such awesome natural talent you simply felt grateful he was there at all. Stevie and Jacko were the great black crossover acts of their times; their best music reached everyone, everywhere. For Jacko the first hint that things weren’t as they might be came with ‘Bad’ in 1987 (when he wasn’t even 30). ‘I’m bad, I’m bad, I’m reely reely bad,’ he sang with all the menace of a black American fotherington-tomas. By now he was hanging out with Elizabeth Taylor, and shaping his eyebrows like hers too. ‘Billie Jean is not my lover...’, well, by now we didn’t need much convincing of that. The pivotal album in his decline was Dangerous in 1991. Apparently he recorded more than a hundred tracks, at terrifying expense, and then chose the best 14: surely the actions of a very rich man who had lost confidence in his own tastes and talents. The album is a bizarre combination of impenetrable dance tracks (of a now forgotten subgenre called ‘new jack swing’), straightforward pop songs and schmaltzy ballads, all aimed at completely different audiences, none of whom would ever be able to listen to the whole album all the way through. It still sold 27 million copies, thus funding his subsequent years of lunacy.

The worst thing, though, is that this is all ancient history. Last December Jim White wrote a piece in the Telegraph celebrating Thriller’s 25th anniversary. He found, after all this time, that he could no longer listen to the album: all that had happened since had tainted its memory. Myself, I still think it’s wonderful. On Off The Wall and Thriller we can hear a young man in absolute control of his music and, apparently, of his destiny. He had as little idea of what was to come as we had. Happy 50th, Jacko, if that’s at all possible.

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