USA TODAY International Edition
THE MAKING OF A MUSICAL ‘ GENIUS’
‘ MJ’ does not ignore dirt, but it focuses on music
Steve Knopper is on a rescue mission: to restore Michael Jackson’s legacy as a significant artist.
Go elsewhere, in other words, if what you want from Knopper’s MJ: The Genius of Michael Jack
son is to wallow in the lurid farrago of indictments, trial records and baffling behavior that characterized Jackson’s final years. Not that this book ignores that stuff. Indeed, Knopper’s meticulous accounting in the final chapters all but mires the narrative in a swampy crawl toward an unbearably sad, stunning denouement.
But Knopper, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone who is more conscientious historian than tabloid newshound, deals only with what can be substantiated. OK, so did Jackson molest children? Concludes Knopper: “All evidence points to no — although sleeping in bed with children and boasting of it on international television did not qualify him for the Celebrity Judgment Hall of Fame.”
That phrase, as much as any other, exemplifies the book’s clear- eyed composure regarding its endlessly complicated, weirdly compelling subject. It should also alert readers that Knopper’s principal objective is to re- establish Jackson’s historic stature, six years after his death at age 50, as the greatest song- and- dance man of the 20th century’s latter half ( Fred Astaire owning the other); a global cultural phenomenon whose influence on pop music was matched only by those of the Beatles and Elvis Presley; and a creative visionary whose meticulous studio coups were as notable as those of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ similarly eccentric — and similarly troubled — genius savant. Knopper doesn’t use that latter analogy, though his mode of analysis makes it easy for us to make such connections on our own.
Through reminiscences and observations Knopper gathers from more than 400 interviews, MJ deftly recounts the familiar aspects of the story, which begins with Joe Jackson, a cold, hard Gary, Ind., steelworker pressing five of his talented children into the rhythm- and- blues circuit. Those magnetic “Jackson 5” kids become child stars of the Motown music stable by the early 1970s, though Knopper writes that even in those years Michael was distancing himself from his brothers. There are anecdotes scattered throughout the early chapters of the younger Michael incessantly drawing pictures and closely scrutinizing dancers, singers and even mimes — which is how he all but patented the Robot dance.
The turning point of Jackson’s life was his partnership with jazzpop impresario- arranger Quincy Jones, who produced the three signature albums of Jackson’s solo recording career, 1979’ s Off the Wall, 1982’ s Thriller and 1987’ s Bad. As Knopper’s book cannily elucidates, it was Jackson’s own painstaking, mostly intuitive creative process that helped shape these masterworks — and those that followed.
“He couldn’t play an instrument,” one studio keyboardist who worked on Thriller recalls. “He could barely play a few notes on a keyboard. He’d come up with not only elaborate songs but elaborate arrangements in his head and stick to them… He’d keep his vision and be as patient as he could until he’d finally say, ‘ Yeah, that’s it.’ ”
Knopper shows similar critical and reportorial savvy in assessing Jackson’s creative peaks and valleys: The epochal “Billie Jean” moonwalk on the 1983 Motown 25 TV spectacular; the controversial trio of albums, 1991’ s confrontational Dangerous, 1995’ s grandiloquent HIStory and 2001’ s perplexing Invincible, all of which Knopper makes persuasive cases for; the Jackson- Jones 1984 collaboration, “We Are the World,” whose messianic gathering of music royalty was considerably more impressive than the “cloying, self- aggrandizing” song on behalf of Ethiopian relief.
MJ: The Genius of Michael Jackson does not try to condemn or ennoble its subject. Nor does it pretend to answer all your questions about Jackson, who one suspects was as much a mystery to himself as he was to others. But among the book’s many answers that can’t be questioned is the resonating influence of Jackson’s boundary- shattering talent.