The Daily Swarm

New York Times:

Which Michael Jackson will be remembered? The unsurpassed entertainer, the gifted and driven song-and-dance man who wielded rhythm, melody, texture and image to create and promote the best-selling album of all time, “Thriller”? Or the bizarre figure he became after he failed in his stated ambition to outsell “Thriller,” and after the gleaming fantasy gave way to tabloid revelations, bitter rejoinders and the long public silence he was scheduled to break next month?

In the end, the superstar and the recluse were not so far apart.

Mr. Jackson built his stardom on paradox. As a child star he was precocious; as an adult he was childlike. His only competition was himself. Within the razzle-dazzle of his songs, he sang about fears and uncertainties in that high, vulnerable voice: flinching from monsters in “Thriller,” wishing he could just “Beat It” when trouble began.

He was a racial paradox, too: an African-American whose audience was never segregated, but whose features grew more Caucasian and whose skin grew lighter through his career, to discomfiting effect. His own face had become a mask.

Los Angeles Times:

Baby boomers have “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” and “Pet Sounds,” but for many younger than that, “Thriller” remains pop’s ultimate artistic endeavor. Jackson not only crafted a sound that is still being imitated by every young star who wants to claim territory in rhythmic Top 40, a genre “Thriller” invented; he also explored serious themes—obsessive love in “Billie Jean,” street violence in the “West Side Story” homage “Beat It,” the scourge of gossip in “Wanna Be Startin’ Something.”

Even the title track, an old-fashioned horror tale seemingly meant for kids, held something more ominous. In the groundbreaking video, director John Landis transformed Jackson into a monster, an early metaphor for the struggles with identity that would later dominate the singer’s life.

For Jackson was also completely of this world, his often tragic life and complicated art formed by the phenomenon of global celebrity in the age of late capitalism. What Marilyn Monroe’s life and death said about Hollywood, and what Elvis Presley’s said about the rise of rock ‘n’ roll, Jackson’s says about pop in the time of media saturation, when our stars became truly global and omnipresent, across genres and media platforms.

In one way, Jackson’s stardom was very old-fashioned. He was born in a trunk, like the vaudevillians of yesteryear, driven to perform by a classic unrelenting stage father. Possessing multiple skills, including a good sense of comic timing, he seemed like a character more than a person.

Guardian:

If ever there was an illustration of the adage that celebrity destroys what it touches, Jackson was it. Highly sensitive and impressionable, he was unsuited to fame – ironic, given that his became one of the most recognised faces in the world. Despite loving the razzle-dazzle of performance – even his off-duty wardrobe, with its epauletted jackets, looked like stagewear – he was crushed by the pressure of maintaining a cherubic public persona. He probably would have been happiest working behind the scenes, in the mode of his collaborator and mentor, Quincy Jones, producer of the 50m-selling Thriller.

Jackson’s success deprived him of his childhood – at least, that was the stock explanation for his more outlandish behaviour. From the age of 10, he spent most of his time recording and touring, and consequently spent the rest of his life yearning for what he thought he had lost. As an adult he attempted to recreate the lost childhood, enabled by a fortune that was at one time estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Times:

Born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, Michael was the seventh of nine children born to Joe Jackson and his wife Katherine (neé Scruse). Joe was a steel mill worker who in his spare time played guitar in a local R’n’B group called the Falcons. Katherine, a devout Jehovah’s Witness who played clarinet, piano and sang, worked as an assistant in a department store.

Under Joe’s strict tutelage and with encouragement and support from Katherine, five of the brothers formed a group called the Jackson 5 with Michael as the lead singer. The sixth, Randy was still too young but eventually joined the line-up much later on while, of the sisters, LaToya enjoyed limited success as a solo act in adult life and Janet eventually became a superstar in her own right. “I was so little when we began to work on our music that I don’t remember much about it”, Jackson mused in his autobiography Moonwalk, published in 1988. “When you’re a showbusiness child. people make a lot of decisions concerning your life when you’re out of the room.”

Joe Jackson managed the group with a rod of iron and in later life Michael spoke regretfully of the rift which subsequently developed and was never healed between him and his father. Nevertheless, Jackson Snr successfully steered the group from talent competitions and a residency in the local strip-tease parlour, to a recording contract with Tamla Motown records, signed in 1969 reputedly for a dismal 2.7 per cent cut of the royalties.

Success with Motown was both instantaneous and spectacular, as the group’s first four singles — I Want You Back, The Love you Save, ABC and I’ll be There — all went to the top of the American chart, each title registering sales in excess of one million copies. Michael was aged 11 when he first saw his own little face on the cover of Rolling Stone. In 1971, two years after the Jackson 5’s first hit, Michael was signed separately to Motown as a solo act and immediately sallied forth with a string of his own hits — Got to be There, Rockin’ Robin , Ben (a US No. 1 in 1972) and others — which were released in tandem with his work as a member of the group.