The First Book of Michael (9 page)

Then, in the seventies, as soon as Michael was granted the opportunity to record his self-penned music, he wrote lyrics such as “All the children of the world should be / Loving each other wholeheartedly.” The idea of the use of childhood innocence to redeem humanity had been entwined in his soul at an early age.

There is an absurd conspiracy theory promulgated by some that denies Michael the talent of songwriting. He remarked on this odd perspective,

“People used to underestimate my ability as a songwriter. They didn’t think of me as a songwriter, so when I started coming up with songs, they’d look at me like: “Who really wrote that?” I don’t know what they must have thought - that I had someone back in the garage who was writing them for me? But time cleared up those misconceptions. You always have to prove yourself to people and so many of them don’t want to believe.”

Michael was a man who had grown up in recording studios; recording studios in which he was the protégé of the genius songwriter Stevie Wonder. Why wouldn’t he be able to write songs? Indeed, perhaps his most prolific songwriting phase was during the period he duetted with Stevie Wonder, on the tracks ‘Get It’ and ‘Just Good Friends’
–
though it is somewhat ironic that ‘Just Good Friends’ was one of only two tracks on the
Bad
album that Michael didn’t write. Michael’s creative fertility at this stage was further demonstrated on the
Bad 25
bonus disc, which featured a collection of
Bad
era demos evidencing nothing short of an embarrassment of unreleased riches. (Though most eventually did see the authorised light of day as finished tracks in one way or another – ‘Free’ becoming ‘Elizabeth I Love You’, ‘Al Capone’ evolving into ‘Smooth Criminal’ and ‘Price Of Fame’ reminiscent of ‘Who Is It’. The chord sequence in ‘Abortion Papers’ ultimately evolved into ‘Jam’. Now there’s a sentence.)

Michael’s songwriting process is sometimes dismissed as being vague, what with his perpetual referral to the music ‘coming from God’ or the ‘Giving Tree’ – and in his insistence that he was naught but a vessel. However, in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, the contemporaneous accepted belief system was that creativity is the effects of celestial spirits expressing an awareness of their existence through human acts of artistry: that a genius was a divine entity abiding in the walls of an artisan’s house, invisibly assisting the corporeal creator. In Plato’s
Realm of the Forms
, the philosopher muses that the ideal
form of everything already exists, with everything on Earth being only an inferior copy. For example, there does exist a perfect circle in the world of the forms, but there can never be one on Earth. Plato dismissed art as unnecessarily distracting from the forms – that art is an imitation of a copy, and that any good art would have to come from knowledge of the forms; whereupon - such as in the case of Michael - it could manifest through a terrestrial recipient as an uninterrupted divine stream.
The earthbound creator merely being - to borrow Jermaine Jackson’s take on Conrad Murray’s responsibility for the death of Michael – “the finger to a bigger hand.”

The childlike quality of Michael’s artistry is precisely what makes it so estimable; the capacity to successfully express emotion and ideas so succinctly is the exclusive domain of the artistic greats. Paul McCartney mentioned to Michael that he should modify the lyrics to ‘The Girl Is Mine’, as he thought they were too naïve. Michael responded that he was more concerned with “the feel” of the piece. Michael’s utilisation of childlike qualities in his music is exemplified in such songs as ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ and ‘They Don’t Care About Us’ – the choruses of both being reminiscent of playground chants. The “feel” Michael referred to in conversation with McCartney is very evident in these tracks, though neither the theme nor the lyrics to these examples could ever be construed as “naïve.”

When Michael spoke of his work being inspired by children, it was perhaps in a more direct way than people interpreted. 

Michael’s refusal to take credit for the rhythms and melodies that inspired and entertained a planet – consistently attributing the results to a force beyond himself - is a beautiful depiction of Michael’s level of humility.

There is a demo version of ‘Beat It’ that simultaneously showcases Michael’s creative process and inherently modest nature. The track begins with a mumbled introduction, in which Michael stumbles over his words with a humble hesitance. He then proceeds to immaculately vocalise every instrument and sonic nuance that he wants the musicians to reproduce in the studio with their instruments. It is mind-blowing.

There is a further example that demonstrates how Michael managed to retain this admirable trait of humility even after a life lauded with plaudits and insidious sycophancy. It is exhibited in the ‘Billie Jean’ rehearsal featured in
This Is It
. As Michael performs, his molten dance moves etch expressions of pure astonishment onto the faces of the small crowd watching him. At the conclusion to the spectacle, Michael shyly bats off the resultant standing ovation with the embarrassed words, “Ah… at least we get a feel for it.”

Michael naturally took his awareness of the presence of the divine during moments of creativity into the recording studio with him.
During the recording process, Co-Executive Producer Quincy Jones held dear the philosophy, “always leave some space
to let God walk through the room.” (
Incidentally, some suggest that Michael’s early solo success was purely down to the input of Quincy. However, Quincy had been reluctant to include ‘Smooth Criminal’ on the
Bad
album - a track that would become one of the most iconic of Michael’s career.)

There is an audio clip in existence that was recorded during the genesis of ‘Give in to Me’, in which Michael is heard suggesting that the session guitarist should just jam, as that’s where ideas come from,

“It would be neat for you sometime to just hook up your electric guitar… and just start playing, and get me a mic’ and… out of the moment… a lot of magic is created out of the moment like that… it really is.”

The musician Prince is renowned for his jam sessions and for his belief in their capacity to create - something that burdened Michael with a sincere concern. Michael worried that, if he fell asleep, the genie would bypass him. As he divulged in conversation with longterm artistic collaborator Kenny Ortega, “You don’t understand – if I’m not there to receive these ideas, God might give them to Prince.”

On the face of it, this seems an almost comical and stereotypically ‘Michael-esque’ concern to possess. Yet, he is by no means the sole artist to have been discomfited by such worries. The American poet Ruth Stone regaled a story of how - when growing up and working in the fields of rural Virginia - she would often sense a poem suddenly approaching her from the horizon, whereupon she would have to physically race the poem back to the house before it could hit her without her having the means to write it down. Sometimes she would lose the contest - at which point, the poem would continue on its enigmatic voyage through the ether, and she would have to reluctantly concede that the work was meant “for another poet”.

Of course, the success to which any artist interprets their perceived divinations from the celestial is entirely subjective. But it’s interesting to ponder what Michael would have done with Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’; or, indeed - what Prince would have done with ‘Earth Song’. Prince has had many attempts at world-redemption songs, though these have always been expressed through the thinly veiled guise of the Jehovah’s Witness solution. Michael also – unsurprisingly - utilised the Jehovah’s Witness approach (especially as a member of
The Jacksons
), but seemed more capable of employing Biblical passages without sounding like he had just knocked on your door with a copy of
The Watchtower
in hand.

The origin of the expression “with great power comes great responsibility” is unknown, though both prime candidates of Stan Lee and Franklin D. Roosevelt were heroes of Michael’s. Its essence is synonymous with Christ’s words, “To whom much has been given, much will be expected”, which again, is something Michael would have been very familiar with due to his upbringing. And what did Michael choose to use his great power for? To spread an ethos of love.

Michael had far greater commercial success with his ‘redeemer records’ than Prince did, and perhaps there exists some correlation between these relative successes and the respective echelons of fame achieved by the two artists. Michael shall forevermore inhabit a more prestigious plane of fame than Prince does (the litmus test for this being the showing of a photograph of someone famous to the inhabitants of a remote African village, then seeing if they are familiar with the person in said picture. Not only is Michael recognised where Prince is not, but Michael was actually crowned
King
of the Sanwi in the west African village of Krinjabo – whose people observed two days of mourning upon receiving the news of his death
).

Further examples of Michael’s level of fame are evidenced in such accolades as the
Thriller
album being chosen as the only music video preserved in the United States Library of Congress; that he featured in
Smithsonian
magazine’s list of the ‘100 Most Significant Americans of All Time’; and that the
British Council
regarded ‘The influence of the life and music of the American singer Michael Jackson, 1958-2009’ as one of the 80 most significant cultural events in the history of the world.

At school, we used to play a game in which the question posed was whether one would rather be rich or famous. I can’t remember which way I swayed, but I’d say it’s a good bet Michael would have chosen fame, whereas Prince would have chosen wealth. This is not to infer that either of these options were the artists’ primary motivation for success - for both of them, the freedom of artistic expression was paramount
,
as evidenced by the pair protesting about their treatment at the hands of their respective record companies. Regardless, all great art – which the two men indubitably created - comes first and foremost from a house of honesty.

In contrast to Michael’s back catalogue being instantly available to access and enjoy on YouTube (bar any uploaded voice comparison tests of the Cascio tracks, incidentally – they’re taken down in minutes), Prince is notoriously precious over copyright infringement, employing an army of legal staff to trawl the Internet and wave cease-and-desist demands at anyone construed to be crossing the copyright line.

In Michael’s song, ‘Price of Fame’, he lets us know that his father made him fully aware of the dangers correlative to the altitude of fame that Michael was shooting for. The risks were nonetheless confronted by Michael. As he sang in ‘Dirty Diana’,

“I'll be the freak you can taunt /And I don't care what you say / I want to go too far / I'll be your everything / If you make me a star”.

These risks ultimately becoming manifest through the infamy that arrived with the molestation allegations. With the tragic irony being Michael’s pursuit of fame being driven by a desire to spread his message of love as a healing force for the disadvantaged children of the world; whilst the architects of his fall from grace were motivated by money. The consequence of this tragedy was that the vacuum created by the potency of Michael’s drug of fame became inversely correlated with his self-defeating reliance on analgesics.

Of course, Michael’s penchant for a Salvation Army bargain and his lyrical complaints in songs such as ‘Leave Me Alone’, in which he sings, “Time after time I gave you all of my money” contradict the idea of his being apathetic towards financial success - although the bone of contention that inspired the ‘Leave Me Alone’ lyric appears to be borne more of a sense of being wrongly done by, rather than a reluctance to help. In the Glenda Jackson tapes - in which Michael is recorded without his knowledge - Michael bemoans the regular requests for money asked of him by his father. In this particular instance, half a billion dollars.

Yet, Michael’s willingness to stump up the surplus cash required to finance his short films -  the most expensive of all time - provide a more concrete idea of Michael’s frame of mind in the quandary between money and fame. Too, was his complete lack of hesitation in profligacy when it came to hiring recording studios (though the sumptuousness of the sonics contained in the music produced - compared to that of Prince’s - speaks for itself). And let’s not forget Michael’s fondness for booking out multiple floors of hotel rooms whilst on tour (though the opportunity of having all that space in which to ride around in golf carts might account for this particular fiscal idiosyncrasy).

Michael’s relationship with money was certainly a complex one. In his song ‘Money’ he condemns greed with all the venom of - to quote Prince - “snakes of every colour, nationality and size”. And the parlance with which he rattles off the list of money moguls, “Vanderbilt, Morgan, Trump, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Getty... Getty… Getty, Getty, Getty, Getty” is nothing short of sinister. There is even a version of the song ‘Money’ in which Michael calls out press emperor Rupert Murdoch: a man often with the balance of power in swaying the opinion of the populous of entire countries - be that who should win
X-Factor
, who should rule a country, or whether or not a country should engage in war.