Quote of the month

A word on one MJ from another

“In retrospect, the crotch clutch seems at once desperate and abstract. It is as if he were telling us, ‘Fine, you need

to know I’m a man, a black man? Here’s my dick: I’ll thrust my dick at you! Isn’t that what a black man’s supposed to do? But I’m Michael Jackson, so just look but you can’t touch.’ It wasn’t real, it was symbolic.

Not a penis but a phallus.” Pulitzer Prize-winner Margo Jefferson

on the move that launched a thousand groin strains, from

On Michael Jackson, her 2006 commentary on his life and cultural influence, published in Britain for the first time to coincide with what would have been the King of Pop’s 60th birthday in August. Jefferson, who picked up a National Book Critics Circle Award in America for her 2015 memoir Negroland, combines stark analysis with a sensible amount of perspective and compassion in the revised edition, which is too opinionated and short to be a biography, yet is also neither an attack nor apologia. Rather, it is a startlingly forthright consideration of what drove Jackson then and what drives our thinking of him now.

—

On Michael Jackson (Granta) is

published on 3 May