A Prolific Talent, Ravaged by Fame

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The New York Sun

The story of Michael Jackson’s fall from grace and into tabloid spectacle is a little bit Marlon Brando and a little bit Robert Blake. He’s the indomitable talent and mysterious recluse who transmogrified into a punch line and a fright; the child star who grew up to live in a Neverland Ranch of suspended adolescence and 24-hour-news channel controversy. With his mirrored glasses, waxen features, collapsible nose, and unhinged behavior, he’s willfully become a caricature of himself.

Yes, time has been unkind to Michael Jackson, but as a new career-spanning boxed set, “Michael Jackson: The Ultimate Collection” (Epic), proves, time will ultimately vindicate him. Long after memories of dangling babies and car-top dancing fade from the mind, his music will remain, and it is so vivid and influential, and has been a vital part of the pop-cultural fabric for so long, that it will redeem his legacy no matter what he does to complicate or detract from it.

If Jackson seems alien to us, it is partly because he grew up on a different planet than the rest of us. He has lived most of his life in a bubble of fame the likes of which few others have known. With his brothers, he had three no. 1 Billboard pop singles by the time he was 11 years old in 1970. By 1985 – at the height of “Thriller” mania – radio stations were staging “No Michael Jackson” weekends to protest his ubiquity on the airwaves. MTV lavished so many awards on him that they eventually named one after him: the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award.

In the liner notes to “The Ultimate Collection,” Nelson George writes, “Michael Jackson made his first recordings during the Age of Aquarius and continues on in the era of downloading. In that respect he has no peers.” But these are the wrong benchmarks and bookends. More telling is that he began in the time of the chitlin circuit and black talent show, then ushered in the era of the music video, a medium that had been unwelcoming to black artists before his arrival and is now dominated by them. He was the first great video star, a pop performer who was as riveting to watch as he was to listen to, and one who treated his visuals as seriously as his music.

Even after his own career passed into the realm of parody, Jackson acolytes have continued to dominate pop music by aping his moves and sounds. Usher and R. Kelly both bear the mark of his influence. Justin Timberlake’s entire solo career to date can be viewed as a kind of Michael Jackson homage. Even those that mock him pay him compliments. Eminem, who is merciless toward Jackson on his new album “Encore,” recently told Rolling Stone, “When ‘Thriller’ came out, you couldn’t tell me nothin’ about Michael: Dude was the ultimate, dude is a legend.”

Jackson has been releasing greatest hits albums since he was 17, but this is his first career-spanning boxed set. At four discs of music (57 tracks) and one concert DVD (a previously unreleased show in Bucharest from 1992), it is enormous but far from comprehensive. The advantage of the collection is that it allows you to experience the entire sweep of Jackson’s career, from 1969, when he was merely a child, to 2004, when he is but a ghost.

As with any boxed set for an already exhaustively marketed artist, this one is an effort to remind you of his major achievements and provide enough rarities to entice the hard-core fans. Jackson’s unreleased and rare material is generally of a high quality, as these things go, but it still stands in for better, more familiar stuff. The solo version of “We Are the World” is worth a listen, as is the Diana Ross duet “Ease on Down the Road” from “The Wiz” soundtrack, but none but the most rabid collector will care much for “Someone in the Dark,” Michael Jackson’s contribution to “The E.T. Storybook” album.

Fortunately the high points are also well represented. Disc one begins explosively, with helium-voiced Jackson 5 hits like “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” and “I’ll Be There,” songs that are still familiar to old and young alike 35 years after their release. The adult Michael Jackson begins to emerge by the end of disc

one on songs from his 1979 solo album “Off the Wall.” “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” is a duet between Jackson’s falsetto and his natural-voice, and “Rock With You” is powered by a sexual heat that sounds almost like Prince of the same period: seductive and a bit dangerous.

All but three songs from “Thriller” appear in some form or other on disc two. Released in 1982, “Thriller” of course is the album that launched Jackson into the stratosphere. It spent 37 weeks at number one on the Billboard Pop Chart, and sold an astounding 47 million copies worldwide, becoming the best-selling album of all time.

It was so big and omnipresent that it’s hard to get any distance from it today. Still, parts of it have aged better than others. The bubbly funk of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” is as fresh as ever, as is the paranoid synth on “Billie Jean,” a song which showcases Jackson’s skill as a one-man effects studio – he fills every available space with vocal flourishes. But the sappy sound of his later work also creeps in on “The Girl Is Mine,” an unconvincing duet with Paul McCartney in which they argue – too-good-naturedly – over a shared lover. The same can be said of the horror camp of “Thriller,” which in retrospect is a great music video but a mediocre song.

“Thriller” was an impossible act to follow, and Jackson put off doing so for as long as he could. After another Jackson family album, the star-studded single “We Are the World,” and the release of the Lucas-Coppola 3-D IMAX short film “Captain EO” at Disney theme parks, he finally returned with “Bad” in 1987. And it dominates disc three of “The Ultimate Collection.”

Despite the studded leather jacket and graffiti on the album cover, and all the overheated hip-thrusting of the “Bad” video, it was by now clear that Jackson wasn’t bad. He was chaste and androgynous, and frankly a little weird around women. That said, he could still put together a hell of a pop song. The propulsive drum machine and percussive delivery of “Smooth Criminal” is irresistible, and “Dirty Diana” is a steamy song – again reminiscent of Prince – with a credible sense of temptation and longing. You can almost see Jackson succumbing to the wiles of a dogged groupie.

But if discs one through three make a forceful case for Jackson’s lasting importance, disc four serves almost as a rebuttal. Covering the period from 1994 to the present, it includes 13 songs I’d never heard before and don’t care to again. Some are genuinely bizarre, like “Childhood”: “before you judge me / try hard to love me / then ask / have you seen my childhood?” It’s the theme from “Free Willy 2,” but the lyrics read like autobiography or confession.

Any final assessment of Jackson will have to accommodate this period in his life and career. And while there’s no denying that fame ravaged him in the end (both in body and spirit), that needn’t diminish our appreciation for the prolific talent and real accomplishment that were its basis.


The New York Sun

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