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The Jackson 5

The “king of pop”, child molestation accusations, financial difficulties, and death.

How did Michael Jackson become famous?

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Michael Jackson

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Who was Michael Jackson?

Michael Jackson was an American singer, songwriter, and dancer who was the most popular entertainer in the world in the early and mid-1980s. Even today he is widely regarded as the “King of Pop .”

How did Michael Jackson die?

On June 25, 2009, Michael Jackson died of cardiac arrest in Los Angeles, California, at age 50. Jackson’s death, which was caused by a lethal combination of sedatives and propofol , an anesthetic , was ruled a homicide. In 2011 Conrad Murray, Jackson’s personal doctor, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

Where was Michael Jackson born?

Michael Jackson was born in Gary , Indiana , on August 29, 1958.

Michael Jackson got his start in a group called the Jackson 5 . After signing with Motown Records in 1969, the Jackson brothers produced such hits as “ABC” and “I Want You Back.” Michael Jackson’s first solo album, Off the Wall , was released in 1979 and contained the massive hit “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” and others.

Michael Jackson won 13 Grammy Awards , including 8 for the album Thriller . Jackson was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame twice: in 1997 as a member of the Jackson 5 and in 2001 for his solo career. Jackson also helped open the doors for Black artists on the radio and on television (particularly MTV ).

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Michael Jackson (born August 29, 1958, Gary, Indiana, U.S.—died June 25, 2009, Los Angeles , California) was an American singer, songwriter, and dancer who was the most popular entertainer in the world in the early and mid-1980s. Reared in Gary , Indiana , in one of the most acclaimed musical families of the rock era, Michael Jackson was the youngest and most talented of five brothers whom his father, Joseph, shaped into a dazzling group of child stars known as the Jackson 5 . In addition to Michael, the members of the Jackson 5 were Jackie Jackson (byname of Sigmund Jackson; b. May 4, 1951, Gary), Tito Jackson (byname of Toriano Jackson; b. October 15, 1953, Gary), Jermaine Jackson (b. December 11, 1954, Gary), and Marlon Jackson (b. March 12, 1957, Gary).

Motown Records president Berry Gordy, Jr. , was impressed with the group and signed them in 1969. Sporting the loudest fashions, the largest Afros, the snappiest choreography, and a youthful, soulful exuberance, the Jackson 5 became an immediate success. They scored four consecutive number one pop hits with “I Want You Back,” “ABC,” “The Love You Save,” and “I’ll Be There” in 1970. With Michael topping the pop charts as a solo performer with “Ben” and reaching number two with “Rockin’ Robin,” and with the Jackson 5 producing trendsetting dance tracks such as “Dancing Machine,” the family’s string of hits for Motown lasted through 1975. As Michael matured, his voice changed, family tensions arose, and a contract standoff ensued. The group finally broke with Motown, moving to Epic Records as the Jacksons. Jermaine remained at Motown as a solo performer and was replaced by his youngest brother, Randy Jackson (in full Steven Randall Jackson; b. October 29, 1961). As a recording act, the Jacksons enjoyed consistent success through 1984, and their sister Janet Jackson embarked on her own singing career in the early 1980s; however, Michael’s solo albums took on an entirely different status.

Jackson’s first solo effort for Epic, Off the Wall (1979), exceeded all expectations and was the best-selling album of the year (it eventually sold more than 20 million copies). Produced by industry veteran Quincy Jones , Off the Wall yielded the massive international hit singles “Don’t Stop ’til You Get Enough” and “Rock with You,” both of which showcased Michael’s energetic style and capitalized on the contemporary disco dance fad. Three years later he returned with another collaboration with Jones, Thriller , a tour de force that featured an array of guest stars and elevated him to worldwide superstardom. Thriller captured a slew of awards, including a record-setting eight Grammys; remained on the charts for more than two years; and sold more than 40 million copies, long holding the distinction of being the best-selling album in history. The first single on the album, “ The Girl Is Mine ,” an easygoing duet with Paul McCartney , went to number one on the rhythm-and-blues charts and number two on the pop charts in the fall of 1982. The follow-up single, “ Billie Jean ,” an electrifying dance track and the vehicle for Jackson’s trademark “moonwalk” dance, topped the pop charts, as did “ Beat It, ” which featured a raucous solo from famed guitarist Eddie Van Halen . Moreover, “Beat It” helped break down the artificial barriers between Black and white artists on the radio and in the emerging format of music videos on television.

By 1984 Jackson was renowned worldwide as the “King of Pop.” His much anticipated Victory reunion tour with his brothers was one of the most popular concert events of 1984. In 1985 Jackson and Lionel Richie cowrote “ We Are the World ,” the signature single for USA for Africa, an all-star project aimed at famine relief. Further solo albums— Bad (1987), which produced five chart-topping hits (among them the title song and “Man in the Mirror”), and Dangerous (1991), much of which was produced by New Jack Swing sensation Teddy Riley —solidified Jackson’s dominance of pop music . In 2001 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ; the Jackson 5 were inducted in 1997.

Jackson’s eccentric , secluded lifestyle grew increasingly controversial in the early 1990s. His reputation was seriously damaged in 1993 when he was accused of child molestation by a 13-year-old boy he had befriended; a civil suit was settled out of court. In 1994 Jackson secretly married Lisa Marie Presley , daughter of Elvis Presley , but their marriage lasted less than two years. Shortly thereafter Jackson married again, this marriage producing children, though it too ended in divorce. While he remained an international celebrity, his image in the United States was slow to recover, and it suffered even more in November 2003 when he was arrested and charged with child molestation. Called to testify in Jackson’s defense during the trial that ensued was actor Macaulay Cuklin , who had met and become friends with Jackson when he was nine years old and Jackson was an adult. Culkin said they bonded over their common experiences of having to deal with fame at a young age and having overbearing fathers. Culkin maintained that he had never experienced anything inappropriate with Jackson. After a 14-week trial that became something of a media circus, Jackson was acquitted in 2005.

In the wake of these events, Jackson suffered a financial collapse that resulted in the sale of many of his considerable assets, including, ultimately, his lavish Neverland ranch. He was preparing for a series of high-profile concerts he hoped would spark a comeback when he died suddenly of cardiac arrest on June 25, 2009—prompting a widespread outpouring of grief from his fans that culminated in a memorial celebration of his life and legacy on July 7 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, featuring tributes by friends and luminaries such as Stevie Wonder , Berry Gordy, Jr. , Brooke Shields , and Al Sharpton . In August 2009 the coroner ruled Jackson’s death a homicide; the cause was a lethal combination of sedatives and propofol, an anesthetic. In November 2011 Jackson’s personal physician was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.

The documentary film This Is It , which drew from more than 100 hours of footage compiled during rehearsals for Jackson’s scheduled 50-concert comeback engagement in London, premiered in October 2009. Also in 2009 Jackson’s 14-minute music video “Thriller” (1983), directed by John Landis, was inducted into the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress —the first music video to be so honoured. Later documentaries included Leaving Neverland (2019), which centres on two men who allege that Jackson sexually abused them when they were children.

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Michael Jackson

Introduction.

Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana. When he was 5 he joined four of his brothers in a musical group called the Jackson 5. In 1969 they signed a recording contract with Motown Records. They soon became stars with several hit songs, and Michael became the lead singer.

Solo Career

While he sang and performed with the Jackson 5 he also made recordings on his own. By the late 1970s he began to pursue a career on his own. His first solo album, Off the Wall , appeared in 1979. It was the best-selling album of the year.

In 1982 Jackson released his album Thriller . It would become one of the biggest-selling albums of all time. Several songs on the album were hit singles as well, including “Thriller,” “Billie Jean,” and “Beat It.” The music video for the album showed off Jackson’s dancing abilities as well as his singing. Other albums included Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991), HIStory: Past, Present, and Future, Book One (1995), and Invincible (2001).

Other Projects

Jackson also worked on various projects with other artists. In 1978 he acted in the film The Wiz . Seven years later he wrote a song with Lionel Richie. Performances of the song, called “We Are the World,” raised money for starving people in Africa.

In 1997 Jackson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Jackson 5. In 2001 he was inducted as a solo performer. In the 1990s, however, his reputation had begun to suffer. Some people thought that he acted oddly. He was accused of mistreating children and went on trial. He was found not guilty, but he lost much of his fortune during this period.

Jackson was planning a series of concerts to make a comeback when he died suddenly on June 25, 2009, in Los Angeles, California. This Is It , a film featuring rehearsals for the concerts, was released in October 2009.

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History Cooperative

Michael Jackson Bio: Life, Career, and Death of the King of Pop

Michael Jackson, often hailed as the “King of Pop,” was more than just an iconic American singer, songwriter, and dancer; he was a global phenomenon who reshaped the landscape of music, dance, and popular culture.

His influence extended beyond his Michael Jackson-level dance moves and vocals, touching the hearts and souls of millions worldwide.

Table of Contents

Early Life, Family, and Musical Beginnings

Born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, Michael Joseph Jackson was the seventh child of Katherine Jackson and Joe Jackson. The Jacksons were a large, working-class family, with Michael growing up alongside his brothers and sisters, including notable siblings like Jermaine Jackson and Janet Jackson. From a young age , Michael showed an extraordinary amount of charisma and energy, often charming every room he entered with his smile and lively personality.

Growing up in a small house on Jackson Street in Gary, Michael’s early life was marked by close family bonds and a shared love of music , although his home life had its complexities, largely due to his father’s strict discipline. Despite these challenges, Michael’s childhood was filled with moments that showcased his artistic talents. He would spend hours singing with his siblings and exploring different dance moves that hinted at his future in entertainment. His lively spirit and natural talent made him stand out even in his large family, setting the stage for his later success on global platforms.

Michael was introduced to music through his family, particularly under the guidance of his father, Joe Jackson, who recognized early on the potential in his children. The musical atmosphere of his household was Michael’s first school , where he and his siblings would rehearse rigorously, encouraged by their father’s ambition for them. The ensemble of brothers soon formed the Jackson 5 , a group that would lay the groundwork for Michael’s illustrious career.

The Jackson 5 was more than just a family band; it was the launchpad for Michael’s future. Under Joe’s management, young Jacksons honed the skills through constant practice and by participating in local talent shows. Michael, even as the youngest member of the group, quickly became the standout performer with his impressive vocal range and dynamic stage presence.

This early phase was crucial, as it not only showcased his natural talent but also ignited his passion for performing. As the Jackson 5’s popularity soared in their community, they began to attract more significant attention, which eventually led to their first major break in the music industry, marking the start of Michael’s journey to becoming a global icon.

Rise to Fame and Important Moments in His Career

Michael Jackson’s fame skyrocketed in the late 1970s and 1980s when he pursued a solo career. Michael Jackson was most popular during the 1980s, a decade in which he transformed the landscape of pop music. Yes, Michael Jackson wrote many of his songs; he has hundreds of songs credited to his name, showcasing his prolific talent as both a songwriter and performer.

Michael’s solo career began with the release of his first solo album , ‘Off The Wall,’ which marked a pivotal turn in his journey to stardom. This album included hits like Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough and Rock with You , which became a #1 single. These songs not only showcased his unique vocal prowess but also his ability to blend pop and funk. His follow-up album, ‘Thriller,’ barely needs an introduction but deserves a mention for setting new records: it won an unprecedented eight Grammys in a single night and became the best-selling album of all time .

As Michael’s career progressed, he continued to release hit after hit. Albums like Bad , Dangerous , and HIStory were all monumental in their own rights. ‘Bad’ was significant as it produced five #1 singles, making Michael the first artist to achieve this feat. His 1993 performance at the Super Bowl XXVII halftime show set new standards for live performances, and his interview with Oprah Winfrey in 1993 became the most-watched interview ever.

Thriller Era and Global Stardom

The Thriller era marked a monumental phase in Michael Jackson’s career, propelling him to global stardom unlike any other artist before. Released in 1982, the Thriller album broke all records and set new benchmarks for success in the music industry. It became the best-selling album of all time, a title it still holds, with sales exceeding 66 million copies worldwide.

This incredible achievement was a testament to Jackson’s genius as a performer and an innovator, solidifying his status as a global superstar. The album’s success was driven by a blend of pop, rock, and post-disco sounds that appealed to a broad audience, transcending age, race, and geography.

Thriller featured a lineup of hit songs that became cultural phenomena, each contributing to the album’s massive success. Tracks like Billie Jean , Beat It , and the album’s titular song, Thriller , were not just popular but became iconic pieces of 20th-century music. Billie Jean and Beat It each topped the charts in many countries, with Billie Jean holding the #1 position on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for seven weeks. The music video for Thriller , directed by John Landis, was a masterpiece of visual storytelling, blending music and cinematic effects to create a 14-minute horror-themed performance that was unprecedented at the time.

This period of his career was marked by memorable live performances, including the moonwalk during Billie Jean on the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever television special, which remains one of the most iconic moments in live entertainment history. The album earned Michael a record-breaking eight Grammy Awards in 1984, including Album of the Year, further cementing its place in music history.

READ MORE: Backward Steps: Unraveling Who Invented the Moonwalk

During the 1980s, Michael Jackson’s impact on popular culture was evident across various fronts, from his live performances to his fashion and dance moves.

His live performances often featured the moonwalk , a dance move that became synonymous with Jackson himself. This particular dance move, along with his complex choreography in music videos such as Thriller and Beat It , influenced a generation of dancers and pop artists who sought to emulate his style. Michael’s concerts were not just musical events; they were spectacular visual experiences that often incorporated advanced technology, elaborate costumes, and detailed set designs, setting a new standard for live pop performances.

In terms of fashion, Michael Jackson developed a signature style that became instantly recognizable. His military-style jackets, adorned with badges, zippers, and sequins, paired with the iconic single white glove, sparked fashion trends that flooded the streets and nightclubs. Even his choice of wearing black loafers with white socks became a trend, emphasizing the intricate footwork of his dance routines.

Discography

Got to be there (1972).

• Ain’t No Sunshine
• I Wanna Be Where You Are
• Girl Don’t Take Your Love From Me
• In Our Small Way
• Got to Be There
• Rockin’ Robin
• Wings of My Love
• Maria (You Were the Only One)
• Love Is Here and Now You’re Gone
• You’ve Got a Friend
• Greatest Show on Earth
• People Make the World Go ‘Round
• We’ve Got a Good Thing Going
• Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool
• What Goes Around Comes Around
• Shoo-Be-Doo-Be-Doo-Da-Day
• You Can Cry on My Shoulder

Music & Me (1973)

• With a Child’s Heart
• All the Things You Are
• Happy (Love Theme from Lady Sings the Blues )
• Doggin’ Around
• Johnny Raven
• Morning Glow
• Music and Me

Forever, Michael (1975)

• We’re Almost There
• Take Me Back
• One Day in Your Life
• Cinderella Stay Awhile
• We’ve Got Forever
• Just a Little Bit of You
• You Are There
• Dear Michael
• I’ll Come Home to You

Off the Wall (1979)

• Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough
• Rock with You
• Working Day and Night
• Get on the Floor
• Off the Wall
• She’s Out of My Life
• I Can’t Help It
• It’s the Falling in Love
• Burn This Disco Out

Thriller (1982)

• Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’
• Baby Be Mine
• The Girl Is Mine (with Paul McCartney )
• Billie Jean
• Human Nature
• P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)
• The Lady in My Life
• The Way You Make Me Feel
• Speed Demon
• Liberian Girl
• Just Good Friends
• Another Part of Me
• Man in the Mirror
• I Just Can’t Stop Loving You
• Dirty Diana
• Smooth Criminal
• Leave Me Alone (CD Bonus Track)

Dangerous (1991)

• Why You Wanna Trip on Me
• In the Closet
• She Drives Me Wild
• Remember the Time
• Can’t Let Her Get Away
• Heal the World
• Black or White
• Give In to Me
• Will You Be There
• Keep the Faith
• Gone Too Soon

HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I (1995)

Disc 1 – HIStory Begins (Greatest Hits)

Disc 2 – HIStory Continues

• Scream (duet with Janet Jackson)
• They Don’t Care About Us
• Stranger in Moscow
• This Time Around
• Come Together
• You Are Not Alone
• Childhood (Theme from Free Willy 2 )
• Tabloid Junkie
• Little Susie / Pie Jesu

Invincible (2001)

• Unbreakable
• Heartbreaker
• Break of Dawn
• Heaven Can Wait
• You Rock My World
• Butterflies
• You Are My Life
• Don’t Walk Away
• The Lost Children
• Whatever Happens

Awards and Honors and Other Accomplishments

Michael Jackson’s career was marked by numerous awards and honors. Among the most significant was his record-breaking sweep at the 1984 Grammy Awards , where he won a total of eight Grammys in a single night, a feat that set a record for the most Grammys won by an artist in one evening. These awards included Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for Thriller and Album of the Year for the same album. This achievement highlighted the critical acclaim that matched his commercial success.

In addition to his Grammy wins, Michael Jackson also made history with his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice; first as a member of the Jackson 5 in 1997 and again as a solo artist in 2001. If that wasn’t enough, he was also awarded the Legend Award at the 1993 Grammy Awards.

READ MORE: Who Invented Rock And Roll? The History and Origin of Rock ‘n’ Roll

Musical Style and Influence

Known for his distinctive voice, complex dance moves, and a strong sense of rhythm, Jackson’s approach to music and performance reshaped the pop genre. His albums often merged elements of pop, soul, rock, and funk, a synthesis most evident in tracks like Billie Jean and Black or White . This ability to blend different musical styles not only broadened his appeal across diverse audiences but also set a new standard for what pop music could achieve. His production techniques, particularly his pioneering use of the multi-track recording system, allowed him to create intricate, layered sounds that became a hallmark of his albums.

His video for Thriller , complete with a storyline and complex dance sequences, turned music videos into mini-movies, a concept that has since become a staple in music video production.

In terms of vocal style and musical impact, contemporary artists like The Weeknd have often been compared to Jackson. The Weeknd’s use of falsetto and his emotive delivery bear a resemblance to Jackson’s vocal technique, a similarity acknowledged by both critics and fans alike.

Similarly, Bruno Mars’ stage performances and his retro style, heavily influenced by the disco and funk eras, echo Jackson’s impact on fashion and performance aesthetics.

The moonwalk, a seemingly simple glide backward while the dancer moves as if walking forward, became synonymous with Jackson after he performed it during his performance of Billie Jean on the Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever special in 1983. This move, which involves a technique of shifting weight and sliding the feet, absolutely entranced audiences with its illusion of defying physics.

The robot dance move, which Jackson often incorporated into his performances, involves isolating various parts of the body and moving them with mechanical, jerky motions, creating the illusion that the dancer is a robot.

This technique requires significant control and precision, focusing on smooth transitions between fluid dance steps and sudden, sharp movements. Jackson perfected this style, which added a dramatic effect to his performances, captivating audiences with his ability to shift seamlessly between different dance styles within a single routine. The robot became particularly notable during his performances of songs like Dancing Machine .

Perhaps more spectacular was Jackson’s anti-gravity lean, first debuted in the music video for Smooth Criminal . This move, where Jackson and his dancers lean forward to a 45-degree angle with their bodies straight and feet flat on the ground, seemingly defying gravity, left viewers astounded. The secret behind this apparently impossible feat was a clever combination of specially designed footwear and stage mechanisms. Jackson co-invented a shoe with a slot in the heels that could latch onto pegs on the stage floor, allowing him and his dancers to lean forward without toppling over.

His stage presence—a blend of immense energy, precision, and emotion—made his live performances unforgettable. One of his greatest shows in terms of dancing was the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards performance, where he combined multiple hits into a single, continuous dance spectacle that showcased his mastery over his art.

Personal Life, Controversies, and Philanthropy

Michael Jackson’s personal life, while filled with monumental success, also had its share of complexities and hardships, especially concerning his relationships and family life. Jackson was married twice; his first marriage was to Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley, in 1994. The union, which ended in divorce in 1996, was highly publicized and often scrutinized by the media.

His second marriage to Debbie Rowe, a nurse he met while undergoing treatment, resulted in two children: Prince Michael Jackson I and Paris Michael Katherine Jackson. This marriage also ended in divorce, with Rowe giving full custody of the children to Jackson.

Despite his troubled marriages, Jackson was devoted to his three children, including his youngest, Prince Michael Jackson II, known as “Blanket,” who was born via surrogate. His relationship with his family, including his famous siblings and parents, was often close but strained, largely due to the pressures of fame and the dynamics of their shared early career in the Jackson 5.

Michael Jackson’s life was heavily scrutinized by the media, with numerous controversies casting long shadows over his career. The most serious of these were allegations of child molestation that surfaced in the 1990s. Jackson was accused of molesting a young boy who had frequently visited the Neverland Ranch, his elaborate home.

This led to a highly publicized court case in 2005, from which he was acquitted on all charges. Despite being cleared legally, the allegations had a lasting impact on his public image and personal life. Jackson’s fame also made him a target for relentless media scrutiny, which often invaded his privacy and led to various rumors and speculations about his personal life and health.

His struggles with privacy and the invasive nature of his fame were well-documented, including in the 2003 documentary Living with Michael Jackson , which presented a very personal and controversial view of his life.

One of Michael Jackson’s notable efforts was the founding of the Heal the World Foundation in 1992, named after one of his hit songs. This organization was dedicated to providing aid to children and the disadvantaged across the globe. It tackled issues such as poverty, environmental degradation, and children’s welfare. Heal the World was known for its efforts, such as airlifting six tons of supplies to Sarajevo during the Bosnian War and organizing children’s immunizations worldwide.

In addition to his own foundation, Michael Jackson supported numerous other charities and causes during his lifetime, contributing to more than 39 charities as per various reports. His donations were often substantial; for example, he donated the entire profit from his Victory Tour to charity in the 1980s.

Furthermore, the proceeds from his single Man in the Mirror went to Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times, a camp for children suffering from cancer. His support extended to massive fundraising efforts, including his role in the song We Are the World , written along with Lionel Richie.

This single generated millions of dollars for famine relief in Africa and is one of the best-selling singles of all time, demonstrating how Jackson leveraged his popularity for charitable causes.

Today, several of Michael Jackson’s philanthropic initiatives continue to influence charitable efforts and maintain functional operations through the Michael Jackson Estate. His estate continues to donate to causes he cared about, maintaining his legacy of philanthropy. For example, proceeds from certain productions and projects related to Jackson’s music and life continue to benefit his favorite charities.

Final Years and Death

Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009, at the age of 50. He passed away in his home in Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, California. The official cause of death was acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication, which led to cardiac arrest. The circumstances surrounding his death were highly controversial, leading to the conviction of his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray, for involuntary manslaughter. Jackson’s death was ultimately ruled a homicide due to the circumstances of the administered medications. If he were alive today, Michael Jackson would be 65 years old.

In his final years, Michael Jackson faced numerous challenges, including significant health problems, ongoing legal battles, and mounting pressures related to his planned comeback tour titled This Is It . His health issues were often discussed in the media, with reports of severe insomnia and physical pain that he managed with prescription medications. These issues were partly due to the physical demands of his years of performing. In preparation for his comeback tour, it was reported that Jackson was rehearsing rigorously, which further strained his already fragile health.

Legally, Jackson continued to confront allegations and lawsuits. Despite being acquitted of child molestation charges in 2005, the legal battles took a financial and personal toll, impacting his public image and causing significant stress. Financial pressures also loomed large during this period, as Jackson faced debts reportedly running into hundreds of millions of dollars. These financial and legal issues compelled him to stage the comeback he hoped would revive his career and alleviate his financial distress.

The announcement of the This Is It tour was met with tremendous enthusiasm, demonstrating that his popularity remained high despite the controversies. Tickets sold out within minutes; however, the stress of preparing for such a demanding tour, coupled with his health and legal issues, created a storm that ultimately led to his untimely death.

The news of Michael Jackson’s death sent shockwaves through the music world and among his fans globally. News channels and social media platforms were flooded with reactions as fans and fellow artists alike struggled to process the sudden loss. Major networks interrupted their regular programming to cover the news. Artists across various music genres publicly expressed their sorrow and respect, citing Jackson’s influence on their own careers and on the music industry as a whole.

Many fans found themselves revisiting his music, videos, and performances, causing a significant surge in sales and streaming of his catalog. Fans also turned to online forums and social media to share their memories and discuss the mark he left on their lives.

Memorials and Legacy

Following Michael Jackson’s death, a global outpouring of grief led to numerous memorials and tributes to honor the legendary artist. One of the most notable memorials was the public service held on July 7, 2009, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, which was broadcast live around the world, drawing millions of viewers.

During the service, performances and speeches by family members and celebrities highlighted his influence on music and pop culture, reflecting the depth of his impact. Additionally, fans across the globe organized flash mobs, vigils, and tribute concerts, celebrating his life and contributions to music. The Michael Jackson memorial also saw fans gathering at significant landmarks related to his life, such as his childhood home and the famed 2300 Jackson Street, to pay their respects.

Jackson’s legacy as a cultural icon remains profound and far-reaching, influencing countless artists across various music genres. From pop and hip-hop to R&B, new generations of musicians cite Jackson as an immense influence in their artistic development. His innovative approach to music production, stage performances, and his distinctive vocal style continue to be studied and emulated. Artists like Beyoncé, Usher, and Justin Timberlake have openly expressed how Jackson’s work influenced their own.

Wrapping Up the Michael Jackson Bio

Michael Jackson’s life was a rollercoaster, full of ups and downs, incredible highs, and heartbreaking lows. He was a musical genius, no doubt, and his impact on pop culture is undeniable. There’s no denying that Michael Jackson’s story is one we won’t soon forget.

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https://www.billboard.com/music/awards/1984-grammys-michael-jackson-highest-rated-recap-1235613583

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/michael-jackson-child-sexual-abuse-allegations-timeline-785746

https://www.truemichaeljackson.com/altruism/charity

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Michael Jackson

• Born August 29 , 1958 · Gary, Indiana, USA
• Died June 25 , 2009 · Holmby Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA (acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication and involuntary manslaughter)
• Birth name Michael Joseph Jackson
• The Gloved One
• Wacko Jacko
• King Of Pop
• Smelly - called this by Quincy Jones because " Michael wouldn't say &#145;funky.&#146; He&#146;d say &#145;smelly jelly.&#146;"
• Height 5′ 9″ (1.75 m)
• Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29, 1958 in Gary, Indiana, and entertained audiences nearly his entire life. His father, Joe Jackson (no relation to Joe Jackson , also a musician), had been a guitarist, but was forced to give up his musical ambitions following his marriage to Michael's mother Katherine Jackson (née Katherine Esther Scruse). Together, they prodded their growing family's musical interests at home. By the early 1960s, the older boys Jackie, Tito and Jermaine had begun performing around the city; by 1964, Michael and Marlon had joined in. A musical prodigy, Michael's singing and dancing talents were amazingly mature, and he soon became the dominant voice and focus of the Jackson 5 . An opening act for such soul groups as the O-Jays and James Brown , it was Gladys Knight (not Diana Ross ) who officially brought the group to Berry Gordy 's attention, and by 1969, the boys were producing back-to-back chart-busting hits as Motown artists ("I Want You Back," "ABC," "Never Can Say Goodbye," "Got to Be There," etc.). As a product of the 1970s, the boys emerged as one of the most accomplished black pop / soul vocal groups in music history, successfully evolving from a group like The Temptations to a disco phenomenon. Solo success for Michael was inevitable, and by the 1980s, he had become infinitely more popular than his brotherly group. Record sales consistently orbited, culminating in the biggest-selling album of all time, "Thriller" in 1982. A TV natural, he ventured rather uneasily into films, such as playing the Scarecrow in The Wiz (1978) , but had much better luck with elaborate music videos. In the 1990s, the downside as an 1980s pop phenomenon began to rear itself. Michael grew terribly child-like and introverted by his peerless celebrity. A rather timorous, androgynous figure to begin with, his physical appearance began to change drastically, and his behavior grew alarmingly bizarre, making him a consistent target for scandal-making, despite his numerous charitable acts. Two brief marriages -- one to Elvis Presley 's daughter Lisa Marie Presley -- were forged and two children produced by his second wife during that time, but the purposes behind them appeared image-oriented. Michael Jackson died on June 25, 2009 in Los Angeles, California. His passion and artistry as a singer, dancer, writer and businessman were unparalleled, and it is these prodigious talents that will ultimately prevail over the extremely negative aspects of his troubled adult life. - IMDb Mini Biography By: Gary Brumburgh / [email protected]
• Spouses Debbie Rowe (November 15, 1996 - April 2000) (divorced, 2 children) Lisa Marie Presley (May 26, 1994 - August 20, 1996) (divorced)
• Children Prince Michael Jackson Bigi Jackson Paris Jackson
• Parents Joe Jackson Katherine Jackson
• Relatives Jackie Jackson (Sibling) Tito Jackson (Sibling) Jermaine Jackson (Sibling) Marlon Jackson (Sibling) Randy Jackson (Sibling) Brandon Jackson (Sibling) La Toya Jackson (Sibling) Janet Jackson (Sibling) Rebbie Jackson (Sibling) Yashi Brown (Niece or Nephew) Austin Brown (Niece or Nephew) Siggy Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Jermaine Jackson II (Niece or Nephew) Jaafar Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Marlon Jackson Jr. (Niece or Nephew) Billie Bodega (Niece or Nephew) Brittany Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Taj Jackson (Niece or Nephew) TJ Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Jermajesty Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Donte Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Genevieve Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Taryll Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Eissa Al Mana (Niece or Nephew) Autumn Joy Jackson (Niece or Nephew) Stacee Brown (Niece or Nephew) Brandi Jackson (Niece or Nephew)
• The Moonwalk
• Single sequined white glove
• He always wore white socks with black shoes
• Often wore a black hat and a jacket with a ribbon around one sleeve
• Lyrics reflecting his social concerns and hopes for a better world
• At his peak, Jackson was reportedly worth around $1 Billion.
• He claimed to have given $300 million to charity, more than any other celebrity apart from Oprah Winfrey .
• His 1982 album "Thriller" is the biggest selling album of all time, with confirmed sales of over 51 million, and claimed sales of over 100 million copies worldwide. His 1987 album "BAD" is one of the biggest selling albums of all time, with over 20 million copies sold worldwide. His 1991 album "Dangerous" is one of the biggest selling albums of all time, with over 20 million copies sold worldwide.
• He was the first artist to generate seven top ten hits (USA) on one album with "Thriller".
• Following the week of his death, his album sales collectively spiked over 2000%.
• I can't think of a better way to spread the message of world peace than by working with the NFL and being part of Super Bowl XXVII.
• I don't like pop music.
• I'll always be Peter Pan in my heart.
• People think they know me, but they don't. Not really. Actually, I am one of the loneliest people on this earth. I cry sometimes, because it hurts. It does. To be honest, I guess you could say that it hurts to be me.
• "Just because you read it in a magazine or see it on a TV screen doesn't make it factual. To buy it is to feed it." - about tabloid magazines.

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Michael Jackson Biography

Despite achieving his goal to be a music performer, Michael’s childhood was far from happy. He was regularly beaten and threatened by his authoritarian father. This legacy of abuse left Michael scarred throughout his adult life.

Solo Career Michael Jackson

His second solo album, Thriller , launched Michael Jackson into a position as the most famous pop singer in the world. With little commercial advertising and promotion, Thriller rose to number one on album sales and remained at the number one spot for a total of 37 weeks. It gained one of many Guinness World Records for Michael Jackson, attaining 110 million global sales and 29 million sales in the US. Thriller included number one hits such as Beat It, Billie Jean .

Michael Jackson with the Reagans

In March 1983, Michael Jackson performed live on Motown 25, ‘Yesterday, today, forever’, – a TV special. He performed his distinctive and memorable dance move – the Moonwalk. In the dance routine, he effortlessly moves backwards with seemingly keeping one leg perfectly straight. His performance made him a global icon of not just music, but dance. Michael Jackson pioneered the importance of music video in promoting a pop artist. This iconic performance has been compared to the famous Beatles’ appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.

By the late 80s, there was an increasing number of stories speculating on Jackson’s personal life, health and physical appearance. Michael Jackson underwent numerous operations of plastic surgery to fix his nose and add a dimple in his chin. During the 1980s, his skin started to lighten; this was due to a rare skin pigment disease, but it didn’t stop a wave of speculative press stories that he was bleaching his skin colour. The press covered a range of speculative stories about Michael Jackson, including imaginary stories Michael had invented himself (such as sleeping in an oxygen tent to avoid the ageing process)

“I’ve been in the entertainment industry since I was six-years-old, and as Charles Dickens would say, “It’s been the best of times, the worst of times.” But I would not change my career… While some have made deliberate attempts to hurt me, I take it in stride because I have a loving family, a strong faith and wonderful friends and fans who have, and continue, to support me.”

—Michael Jackson

The press attention made Michael increasingly reclusive, spending much of his time in his ‘Never Land’ ranch.

Speaking on the Oprah Winfrey show, Jackson addressed the issue of skin colour change:

“OK, number one. There, as I know of, there is no such thing as skin bleaching…I have a skin disorder that destroys the pigmentation of the skin, it’s something that I cannot help, OK? But, when people make up stories that I don’t want to be who I am, it hurts me…it’s a problem for me, I can’t control it.”

He married Lisa Marie Presley in 1994; it lasted two years though they remained friendly after the divorce. In 1996, he married Deborah Rowe in Sydney. Together they had two children. They divorced in 1999 and Rowe gave full custody of children to Jackson.

Allegations of child abuse were first raised in the 1980s and re-appeared in the 1990s. This led to the trial of The People v Jackson on 31 Jan 2005, in Sante Maria, California. After five months of high publicity, Jackson was acquitted. Though the experience left him physically weak and emotionally stressed. He departed America for the Persian Gulf Island of Bahrain.

“The minute I started breaking the all-time record in record sales—I broke Elvis’s records, I broke Beatles records—the minute it became the all-time best-selling album in the history of the Guinness Book of World Records, overnight they called me a freak. They called me a homosexual. They called me a child molester. They said I bleached my skin. They made everything to turn the public against me.”

– Remarks at National Action Network headquarters (9 July 2002)

Towards the end of his life, he was increasingly plagued by money troubles and ill health. He increasingly became dependent on a variety of drugs, which was said to have contributed to his ill health and premature death. Despite concerns over finance, he is said to have made career earnings of $500m and had assets in Sony/ATV Music Publishing catalogue worth over $300m alone.

“In a world filled with hate, we must still dare to hope. In a world filled with anger, we must still dare to comfort. In a world filled with despair, we must still dare to dream. And in a world filled with distrust, we must still dare to believe”

– M. Jackson Quoted by CNN June 2009.

Michael Jackson died on 25 June 2009, at a rented mansion in the district of Los Angeles.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “Biography of Michael Jackson”, Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net , 28th Jul 2010. Updated 11th February 2018.

Charity Work of Michael Jackson

• Michael Jackson supported many charities. This included a burns charity in Culver City, California. This followed an incident where Michael Jackson was burnt in filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984.
• He also supported HIV / AIDS charities at a time when it was still unfashionable.
• In 1984, he received an award from President Ronald Reagan for his support of charities which help overcome alcohol and drug abuse.
• From his 1984, Victory Tour he donated all funds (around $8million to charity)
• In 1985, he also co-wrote the charity single “We are the World” with Lionel Richie. It sold over 30 million copies, and the proceeds were sent to the poor in the US and Africa.
• He continued his charity work to the end of his life supporting charity concerts such as Aid for victims of Kosovo war.

The Essential Michael Jackson

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The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson

The Creative Life and Work of Michael Jackson at Amazon

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Michael Jackson

• Occupation: Singer
• Born: August 29, 1958 in Gary, Indiana
• Died: June 25, 2009 in Los Angeles, California
• Best known for: Thriller , the best-selling album in history
• Nickname: King of Pop

• He was the best selling artist in the United States for 2009, the year of his death. Around 35 million of his albums were sold worldwide in the 12 months after he died.
• He had two pet llamas on his ranch called Lola and Louis.
• The album Thriller was number one on the Billboard Chart for 37 weeks.
• He purchased the rights to the Beetles catalogue in 1985 for $47 million.
• His skin doctor said that his skin tone changed because he had a disease called vitiligo.
• He was burned when his hair caught fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial.
• Listen to a recorded reading of this page:

Michael Jackson Biography and Profile

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The Jackson 5 and Early Career

Michael Jackson is one of the most successful and influential pop recording artists of all time. Born in 1958, he began his career as a member of the Jackson 5 recording for Motown with four of his brothers. They hit #1 on the pop singles chart with "I Want You Back" in 1969. It was followed by three more consecutive #1 hits. They were the first recording artists to hit #1 on the pop singles chart with their first four chart hits. The group's popularity faded in the mid 1970's, but, after moving to the CBS record label and calling themselves simply the Jacksons, they consistently hit the charts in the late 1970's and early 1980's. Among their hits in that era were "Shake Your Body (Down To the Ground)" and "Can You Feel It."

Michael Jackson Becomes an Adult Artist With Off the Wall

Michael Jackson hit #1 on the pop singles chart as a solo artist in 1972 serenading a rat with the title song from the movie Ben . He hit the top five with two other early singles. 1971's "Got To Be There" went to #4 and 1972's "Rockin' Robin" hit #2. Michael Jackson didn't near the top of the charts again until seven years later with the release of the album Off the Wall in 1979 produced by Quincy Jones. It was simultaneously a last gasp of disco and an R&B classic that ushered in the 80's. The album peaked at #3 on the album chart, sold over seven million copies and included four top 10 pop singles. The singles "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" and "Rock With You" went all the way to #1 on the pop singles chart. "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" won a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal.

In 1982, three years after Off the Wall , Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson collaborated once again and created Thriller , the bestselling album of all time. It was preceded by the single "The Girl Is Mine," a collaboration with Paul McCartney , which reached #2 on the pop singles chart. A month after the album hit stores, the second single "Billie Jean" was unleashed, and the masterpiece that is Thriller began to unfold. Ultimately, 28 million copies sold in the US and Thriller became the first album to launch seven singles into the pop top 10. "Bille Jean" and "Beat It" both hit #1 and the music video for "Beat It" tore down barriers for African-American artists at MTV. 

The music from Thriller generated a phenomenal eleven Grammy Award nominations. The album took home the award for Album of the Year and "Beat It" won Record of the Year. "Billie Jean" was named Best R&B Song.

It was almost five years after the release of Thriller before Michael Jackson's next album appeared in 1987. Bad was Michael Jackson's third album co-produced by Quincy Jones. The single "I Just Can't Stop Loving You" preceded the album and hit the top of the pop singles chart. Ultimately, Bad became the first album to include five #1 pop singles. That record stood until Katy Perry matched it with her Teenage Dream album in 2010-2011. Bad sold over eight million copies in the US. The #1 charting singles were "I Just Can't Stop Loving You," "Bad," "The Way You Make Me Feel," "Man In the Mirror," and "Dirty Diana." Music from Bad earned five Grammy Award nominations. The album was nominated for Album of the Year, and "Man In the Mirror" earned a Record of the Year nomination, but Bad won no awards.

By 1991, four years after the release of Bad , some critics wondered whether Michael Jackson was still relevant in the pop world. He signed a 15-year six album deal with Sony Music, and recorded Dangerous with new jack swing pioneer Teddy Riley and Bill Botrell as producers. The album was another major success selling seven million copies, topping the album chart, generating four top 10 singles and spending over two years on the album chart.

The release of the debut single "Black or White" was a worldwide television event. An estimated 500 million viewers watched the John Landis directed clip. The song was released to radio stations two days in advance and was added to playlists on 96% of Billboard's reporting pop radio stations on the first day of release. The music video for "Remember the Time" was a massive production as well directed by celebrated film director John Singleton. It included guest appearances from Eddie Murphy, Magic Johnson, and Iman among others. "Black Or White" earned a Grammy Award nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal.

Michael Jackson's Controversies

Michael Jackson's career and life had their fair share of controversies. In the mid 1980s he was the subject of widespread tabloid stories including tales of sleeping in an oxygen chamber to slow aging, bleaching his skin, and undergoing multiple rounds of plastic surgery. In the early 1990s Michael Jackson was accused of sexually abusing a child in a case ultimately closed for lack of evidence. In 2005 Jackson was put on trial for allegations of sexual molestation. He was acquitted on all counts.

Commercial Decline

In 1995 Michael Jackson released his first compilation album HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book 1 . It was a two-disc set and sold over three million copies in the US as well as earning a Grammy Award for Album of the Year. However, an all-new studio album did not appear until 2001. Invincible became the first significant commercial disappointment for Michael Jackson since the 1970s. It sold only two million copies and did not include any #1 hit singles. Only "You Rock My World" hit the top 10.

Top Michael Jackson Hits

• 1979 - "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" (One week at #1)
• 1979 - "Rock With You" (Four weeks at #1)
• 1983 - "Billie Jean" (Seven weeks at #1)
• 1983 - "Beat It!" (Three weeks at #1)
• 1983 - "Say Say Say" with Paul McCartney (Six weeks at #1)
• 1987 - "Bad" (Two weeks at #1)
• 1987 - "The Way You Make Me Feel" (One week at #1)
• 1988 - "Man In the Mirror" (Two weeks at #1)
• 1991 - "Black Or White" (Seven weeks at #1)
• 1995 - "You Are Not Alone" (One week at #1)

More details about each song in Top 20 Michael Jackson Songs .

Top Michael Jackson Videos

• 1979 - "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough"
• 1983 - "Beat It!"
• 1983 - "Billie Jean"
• 1984 - "Thriller"
• 1987 - "Bad"
• 1991 - "Black Or White"
• 1992 - "Remember the Time"
• 1995 - "Scream" with Janet Jackson
• 1995 - "You Are Not Alone"
• 1996 - "They Don't Care About Us"

More details about the videos, and a complete listing, in the Guide to Michael Jackson Videos .

Michael Jackson's Comeback Efforts

In 2008 Michael Jackson released Thriller 25, a 25th anniversary re-issue of his bestselling album Thriller that included re-recordings of some of the tracks by top contemporary pop stars including Fergie and Kanye West . It also included one new song "For All Time." Remixes of "The Girl Is Mine" and "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" were released as singles. The latter climbed to #2 on the dance chart.

In March 2009 Michael Jackson announced that he would perform a series of concerts in London at the O2 arena over the summer. What was originally announced as 10 shows was later extended to 50 that were planned into the year 2010. Rehearsals commenced under the direction of choreographer Kenny Ortega.

Michael Jackson died unexpectedly June 25, 2009 at the age of 50 less than three weeks before the first London concert was scheduled to take place. A public memorial service included performances of his songs by a wide range of top recording artists. A feature film built around rehearsal footage from the planned concert tour titled Michael Jackson's This Is It was released in October 2009. A posthumous studio album titled was released in December 2010. Michael Jackson earned a posthumous Grammy Award nomination for Best Male Pop Vocal for the song "This Is It." In 2014 a second posthumous album with previous unreleased material titled Xscape appeared under the direction of L.A. Reid. It included the top 10 pop hit "Love Never Felt So Good." 

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Michael Jackson Biography

Birthday: August 29 , 1958 ( Virgo )

Born In: Gary, Indiana, United States

“When they say the sky is the limit, to me that's really true”, these lines by Michael Jackson beautifully suffice his life and his love for music. A music aficionado and enthusiast, Jackson changed the way people looked at music and created a never-ending craze with his chartbusters and best-sellers. He gave pop and rock their life and blood and wrote chapters in the history of music that would long live for centuries to come. A music propeller in the truest sense, it was his outstanding gift and prodigious talent that made him a sensation globally. His countless awards and honorific titles, such as ‘King of Pop’ and ‘Artist of the Decade, Generation, Century and Millennium’ are a glaring testimony to his enthralling musical career. His supremely endowed music won the hearts of millions worldwide, making him a global figure in popular culture for almost four decades. While his distinctive sound and style have been of great influence to numerous hip-hop, post-disco, contemporary R&B, pop, and rock artists, it was his angelic dance style that continues to be one of the popular styles of dance. He was the man behind today’s popular dance styles, moonwalk, and Robot, both of which bear the name MJ style. It was for his relentless contribution to music, dance, and fashion that he was named ‘the most successful entertainer of all time’.

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Nick Name: Wacko Jacko, The Gloved One

Also Known As: Michael Joseph Jackson

Died At Age: 50

Spouse/Ex-: Debbie Rowe (m. 1996; div. 1999), Lisa Marie Presley (m. 1994; div. 1996)

father: Joseph Jackson

mother: Katherine Jackson

siblings: Brandon Jackson, Jackie Jackson, Janet Jackson , Jermaine Jackson, La Toya Jackson, Marlon Jackson, Randy Jackson , Rebbie Jackson , Tito Jackson

children: Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., Paris Jackson , Prince Michael Jackson II

Born Country: United States

African American Singers Pop Singers

Height: 5'9" (175 cm ), 5'9" Males

Died on: June 25 , 2009

place of death: Los Angeles, California, United States

Personality: ISFP

Cause of Death: Drug Overdose

City: Gary, Indiana

U.S. State: Indiana

Founder/Co-Founder: Heal the World Foundation

You wanted to know

What was michael jackson's most iconic dance move.

The moonwalk, which he popularized during a performance of "Billie Jean" on the TV special "Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever" in 1983.

What was the significance of Michael Jackson's album "Thriller?"

"Thriller" is the best-selling album of all time, with over 66 million copies sold worldwide, and it revolutionized the music industry with its groundbreaking music videos.

What was Michael Jackson's impact on pop culture?

Michael Jackson was known for breaking racial barriers in the music industry, influencing countless artists with his innovative music videos and dance moves, and setting the standard for pop music excellence.

What was Michael Jackson's involvement in humanitarian work?

Michael Jackson was a prominent philanthropist who supported numerous charitable causes, including children's charities, HIV/AIDS research, and disaster relief efforts around the world.

What challenges did Michael Jackson face during his career?

Michael Jackson faced intense media scrutiny, allegations of child molestation, health issues, and financial troubles, which often overshadowed his musical accomplishments.

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Born in an African-American working-class family, he was eighth of the ten children of the couple Joseph Walter "Joe" Jackson and Katherine Esther Scruse. While his father worked as a steel mill worker, his mother was a sincere Jehovah's Witness.

From a very young age, he was a music lover. Initially starting as a backup musician, he soon found his way as a lead singer in the family band, the Jackson 5.

The Jackson 5 started touring the Midwest, extensively performing at black clubs. In 1967, they released their first single, ‘Big Boy’ with a Steeltown record label but the same failed to interest the audience.

In 1968, they signed a contract with Motown Records, which required them to relocate to Los Angeles. The following year, they came up with their first album, ‘Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5’. Their first single, ‘I Want You Back’ was a chartbuster and was followed by bestsellers ‘ABC’, ‘The Love You Save’, and ‘I'll Be There’, each of which peaked at No 1 on Billboard Hot 100.

In addition to the band, he launched his solo career as well - his first-ever solo single being ‘Got to Be There’. The song met with runaway success and established his reputation as a solo artist.

The Jackson 5 band withdrew its association with Motown Records in 1975. The same year, they tied up with Epic Records under a new name ‘the Jacksons’.

From 1976 to 1984, the band toured internationally and released six new albums. He became a leading songwriter for the group, writing numerous hits one after the other.

Meanwhile, he launched his solo album in association with Quincy Jones, ‘Off the Wall’ in 1979. The album was a tremendous hit and the first ever to generate four U.S. top 10 hits. It peaked at number three on the Billboard 200 and eventually sold over 20 million copies worldwide.

The desire to make a bigger impact than what ‘Off the Wall’ made, led to the 1982 release of the album ‘Thriller’. A grand blockbuster, the album broke all records to become the best-selling album of all time worldwide. It topped the Billboard 200 chart for 37 weeks and was in the top 10 of 200 for 80 weeks at a stretch. The album sold 65 million copies and achieved Double Diamond status in the US.

In 1983, he reunited with his brothers for a live performance. It was there that he showed his signature dance style, the moonwalk, which became an epic. Magic was created on stage as he sang the chartbuster ‘Billie Jean’ whilst performing the moonwalk.

In 1985, along with Lionel Riche, he co-wrote ‘We Are the World’, originally a charity single which became the best-selling single of all time, selling about 30 million copies.

A follow-up to ‘Thriller’ came in 1987 when he released the album, ‘Bad’. Though the album was unable to replicate the runaway success of ‘Thriller’, it nevertheless was a convincing chartbuster. Seven of its singles peaked at No. 1 position on the Billboard Hot 100. The album sold about 45 million copies worldwide.

In 1988, the exemplary pop star released his autobiography titled Moonwalk. The book duplicated the success of his music albums by selling about 200,000 copies and making it to the New York Times best-seller list.

By now, he had achieved an iconic status. Right from his music albums to his autobiography to his cosmetic surgeries, everything made big news. One such news was his buying a 2,700-acre property, which he named Neverland, near Santa Ynez California.

The year 1991 witnessed the release of his eighth album, ‘Dangerous’. Much like its predecessors, ‘Dangerous’ became the best-selling album of the year worldwide, with its singles, ‘Black or White’, ‘Remember the Time’ and ‘Heal the World’ topping the charts.

He founded the ‘Heal the World’ foundation in 1992, and the same year, he released his second literary offering, ‘Dancing the Dream’, which gained commercial success but lacked critical acclaim.

In 1993, he performed at several significant events, including Super Bowl XXVII. The same year, he was charged with molestation but since there was no proof to support the allegation, the charges were withdrawn.

He came up with the album, HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I in 1995. Barring the single, ‘Scream’, which he sang with his sister, Janet Jackson, the album received a lukewarm response.

In October 2001, he released the album, Invincible. This was his last full-length album. Though the album gained decent success, it was his eccentric and disoriented behavior that caught the headlines.

His eight albums have made whooping sales of 1 billion units worldwide and earned him $750 million in his lifetime, with five of his albums gaining the world’s best-selling records. ‘Thriller’ has been the biggest-selling album with reported sales of 65 million units.

He received numerous awards including 31 Guinness World Records, 13 Grammy Awards, Grammy Legend Award and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, 26 American Music Awards, and 18 World Music Awards.

He was inducted into the Hollywood Hall of Fame, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Songwriters Hall of Fame, and Dance Hall of Fame.

He married twice in his lifetime. His first marriage was with Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis Presley, in 1994, but this union did not last long and the two divorced in 1996.

He married his long-time friend Deborah Jeanne Rowe, a dermatology nurse, in 1997. The couple was blessed with two children, Michael Joseph Jackson Jr and Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson. The two separated in 1999. He had a third child, Prince Michael Jackson II, from a surrogate mother through artificial insemination.

The King of Pop passed away unexpectedly following a cardiac arrest due to a propofol and benzodiazepine overdose on June 25, 2009. The medicines were given to him by his personal physician, Conrad Murray, to help him sleep better. Murray was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2011 and was sentenced to 4 years in prison. However, he was released in October 2013 after serving close to 2 years behind bars.

A televised memorial was held on July 7, 2009, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. While 17,500 free tickets were issued to fans via lottery, an estimated 1 billion viewers watched the memorial on TV or online.

Memorials were constructed and statues were unveiled all over the globe in the aftermath of his death. The Lunar Republic Society renamed a crater on the moon, Michael Joseph Jackson, in his honor.

Michael Jackson owned a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles, who would often accompany him on tour and even appear in music videos.

He once tried to buy the bones of the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, but was ultimately outbid by someone else.

Michael Jackson patented a special shoe to help him perform his signature dance move, the anti-gravity lean.

He held a record-breaking seven Guinness World Records, including Most Successful Entertainer of All Time.

See the events in life of Michael Jackson in Chronological Order

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Michael Jackson Biography

Born: August 29, 1958 Gary, Indiana African American entertainer, singer, and songwriter

Aperformer since the age of five, Michael Jackson is one of the most popular singers in history. His 1983 album, Thriller, sold forty million copies, making it the biggest seller of all time. Through his record albums and music videos he created an image imitated by his millions of fans.

Career planned in advance

Michael Joe Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana, on August 29, 1958, the fifth of Joe and Katherine Jackson's nine children. The house was always filled with music. Jackson's mother taught the children folk and religious songs, to which they sang along. Jackson's father, who worked at a steel plant, had always dreamed of becoming a successful musician. When this failed to happen, he decided to do whatever it took to make successes of his children. He tried to control his children's careers even after they were adults. The struggle for the control of the musical fortunes of the Jackson family was a constant source of conflict.

The Jackson boys soon formed a family band that became a success at amateur shows and talent contests throughout the Midwest. From the age of five Michael's amazing talent showed itself. His dancing and stage presence caused him to become the focus of the group. His older brother, Jackie, told Gerri Hershey in Rolling Stone, "It was sort of frightening. He was so young. I don't know where he got it. He just knew. "

Discovered by Motown

The Jacksons' fame and popularity soon began to spread. While performing at the Apollo Theater in New York City's Harlem neighborhood in 1968, Motown recording artist Gladys Knight (1944–) and pianist Billy Taylor discovered them. Later that year singer Diana Ross (1944–) became associated with the boys during a "Soul Weekend" in Gary. With Ross's support, the Jacksons signed a contract with Motown Records. Berry Gordy (1929–), the famous head of Motown, took control of the Jacksons' careers.

By 1970 the group, known as the Jackson Five, was topping the charts and riding a wave of popularity with such hits as "ABC," "The Love You Save," and "I'll Be There," each of which sold over one million copies. The group also appeared on several televised specials, and a Jackson Five cartoon series was created. Gordy quickly recognized Michael's appeal and released albums featuring him alone. These solo albums sold as well as those of the Jackson Five. The group managed to survive Michael's voice change and a bitter break with Motown Records in 1976, but as the Jackson family they continued to fight with each other and with their own father.

Unbelievable success

While working on The Wiz, Jackson met producer Quincy Jones (1933–). They worked together on Jackson's 1979 album Off the Wall, which sold ten million copies and earned critical praise. In 1982 Jackson and Jones again joined forces on the Thriller album. Thriller fully established Jackson as a solo performer, and his hit songs from the album—"Beat It," "Billie Jean," and "Thriller"—made him the major pop star of the early 1980s. The success of Thriller (with forty million copies sold, it remains one of the best-selling albums of all time) and the videos of its songs also helped Jackson break the color barrier imposed by radio stations and the powerful music video channel MTV. By 1983 Jackson was the single most popular entertainer in America.

In 1985 Jackson reunited with Quincy Jones for USA for Africa's "We Are the World," which raised funds for the poor in Africa. Jackson's next two albums, Bad (1987) and Dangerous (1991), were not as hugely successful as Thriller, but Jackson remained in the spotlight throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. In 1992 he founded "Heal the World" to aid children and the environment. In 1993 he was presented with the "Living Legend Award" at the Grammy Awards ceremony and with the Humanitarian (one who promotes human welfare) of the Year trophy at the Soul Train awards.

Rocked by scandal

Despite Jackson's popularity and good works, he became the subject of a major scandal (action that damages one's reputation). In 1993 a thirteen-year-old boy accused Jackson of sexually abusing him at the star's home. Jackson settled the case out of court while insisting he was innocent. The scandal cost Jackson his endorsement (paid public support of a company's products) contract with Pepsi and a film deal. His sexual preference was called into question, and his public image was severely damaged.

In 1995 Jackson was criticized following the release of his new album HIStory: Past, Present, and Future, Book I. One of the songs on the album, "They Don't Care About Us," seemed to contain anti-Semitic (showing hatred toward Jewish people) lyrics (words). To avoid further criticism, Jackson changed the lyrics. He also wrote a letter of apology to Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies, who had protested the lyrics.

Marriage and fatherhood

In 1994 Jackson shocked the world when he married Lisa Marie Presley, daughter of the late (deceased) rock legend Elvis Presley (1935–1977). Many felt that the marriage was an attempt to improve his public image. In August 1996 Jackson and Presley divorced. In November 1996 Jackson announced that he was to be a father. The child's mother was Debbie Rowe, a long-time friend of Jackson. They married later that month in Sydney, Australia. On February 13, 1997, their son, Prince Michael Jackson, Jr., was born in Los Angeles, California. The couple's second child, daughter Paris Michael Katherine Jackson, was born in 1998. Rowe filed for divorce from Jackson in October 1999.

Jackson and his brothers were elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1997. Later that year another album, Blood on the Dance Floor: HIStory in the Mix, containing new versions of songs from HIStory along with five new songs, was released. The album received good reviews, and the world continued to be fascinated by the talent and career of Michael Jackson.

In 2000 Jackson's promoter sued him for $21.2 million for backing out of two planned concerts the previous New Year's Eve. In 2001 Jackson, while delivering a lecture at Oxford University in England to promote his Heal the Kids charity, described his unhappy childhood and proposed a "bill of rights" for children that would provide for the right to an education "without having to dodge bullets." Later that year Jackson was again elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, this time as a solo performer. Jackson also released a new album, Invincible, in October 2001.

For More Information

Grant, Adrian. Michael Jackson: The Visual Documentary. New York: Omnibus Press, 1994.

Graves, Karen Marie. Michael Jackson. San Diego, CA: Lucent Books, 2001.

Jackson, Michael. Moonwalk. New York: Doubleday, 1988.

Marsh, Dave. Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream. New York: Bantam, 1985.

Nicholson, Lois. Michael Jackson. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.

Wallner, Rosemary. Michael Jackson: Music's Living Legend. Edina, MN: Abdo & Daughters, 1991.

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History of Michael Jackson for Kids

You’ve probably heard of the King of England and maybe even the King of Hearts. But did you know that there was also a King of Pop Music? His name was Michael Jackson, and he was nicknamed the King of Pop by his adoring fans and the entire music industry because of his effortless ability to sing, perform, and entertain crowds from all over the world. 

To be called the king of something, you have to be really good at it. You have to spend a lot of time and effort trying to be the best at it. Michael Jackson did exactly that.

He did have a little bit of a head start on other musicians. Before he was the King of Pop, he grew up performing with his talented family. Michael was born in Indiana in 1958 to a large musical family. Altogether, he had eight brothers and sisters! This helped give him a lot of practice learning how to compete for the spotlight. 

Michael was only six years old when he and four of his older brothers started singing in a band. They called themselves the Jackson 5. The Jackson 5 signed with a popular record label in 1968. For almost twenty years, Michael took the stage with his brothers. Even though he was the youngest, he was the lead singer. If you’ve never heard the Jackson 5 before, check out two of their most famous songs:  ‘I Want You Back’ and ‘ABC.’ 

A B C, It’s easy as

1 2 3, as simple as

Do re mi, A B C, 1 2 3

Ok, you don’t want to hear me sing, but maybe it will ring a bell now!

While all of the brothers in the Jackson 5 were talented and successful, it was their young lead singer who quickly stole the spotlight. His future as the King of Pop was just beginning. 

Michael was still young when the Jackson 5 was topping the charts and releasing hit albums. His parents had to pull him out of school because he would get mobbed by fans during classes. Can you imagine having to sneak into math class to avoid giving autographs? With this type of fame, it was only a matter of time before young Michael was ready to break out and become a star on his own. 

In 1971, Michael was finally ready to step into his own spotlight. He released his first-ever solo album called Got to Be There . He was only 13 years old! Like many teenagers, he wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to be when he grew up. For the next few years, he tried a little bit of everything in the entertainment industry. He still sang with his brothers in the Jackson 5. He released five of his own albums. He even did some acting in movies! Michael was good, maybe even great at some of these things. But he still had a long way to go before anybody honored him enough to call him king. 

Working with different people in music and movies helped Michael make connections in the industry. Eventually, he found the type of performer he wanted to be. In the 1980s, he went on his last tour with his brothers. Quitting the band would let him focus more on his solo career. 

It’s a good thing for us that he did. In 1982, Michael Jackson wrote, recorded, and released the best-selling album of all time. Seriously the best album ever! This album, his sixth, was titled Thriller. Thriller is still in the Guinness Book of World Records, even today! This album topped charts, earned many Grammy awards, and even led to a 13-minute long mini-movie for the music video of the song ‘Thriller.’ And, of course, Michael starred in it. It’s one of our family favorites to watch this every Halloween. 

It’s fair to say that by this point, Michael Jackson was on his way to earning the title of King of Pop Music. His beautiful voice and his upbeat songs were wowing fans. But how was Michael going to reign over all other pop singers? He was not just a singer, he was an entire personality. He had moves, music videos, and outfits that were fun to watch! 

Fans all over the world loved his dance moves and his bold clothing choices. He often showed off both in his popular music videos. Maybe you’ve heard of the moonwalk? If not, you should look it up. It’s this famous move where Michael looks like he’s walking forward while he’s really gliding backwards. Cool, right? He was known for doing the moonwalk onstage, often wearing a single sequined glove and cropped pants to show off his white socks. Michael stood out with his sparkling gloves, bright-colored shirts, and jackets and pants made entirely of leather. 

One of Michael’s most iconic looks was his red leather pants and matching jacket that he wore in the music video for Thriller. Before Thriller, music videos usually featured musicians singing their songs. But Michael wanted to tell a story. He popularized the entertaining, movie-like videos that music artists are still making today.  

With this kind of success though comes pressure. Could the King of Pop make another album just as good and just as flashy as Thriller? Michael Jackson answered that question five years later with the album Bad. This album added another five number-one hits to his growing list of achievements. This time, he made a music video with an award-winning movie director named Martin Scorsese. 

At the time, Michael was considered the biggest musician in the world. He had money and fame that most people could only dream of. He had famous friends and a huge mansion. But this rockstar lifestyle came with challenges. 

People wanted to know everything about Michael’s life. From the way he designed his home to the shape of his nose – every part of Michael Jackson was questioned by the public. That can be a lot of stress for one guy, even for a king.

Michael was in the spotlight for more than 40 years. His fame meant that his name frequently appeared in newspapers, magazines, and television stories. Some of his actions caused the public to question him as a role model. Some people stopped supporting him, but others continued to appreciate and love his music.

Still, Michael continued to make music. While none of his new albums were as big as Thriller, they were still popular. Michael stayed busy making music that people loved and entertaining crowds, and he took the time to help others. He was often considered a philanthropist. A philanthropist is someone who donates a lot of their money to help other people. 

In the 1980s, Michael worked with another musician named Lionel Richie. Together, the two wrote the song ‘We Are the World.’ The song was recorded by many famous musicians like Stevie Wonder and Tina Turner. It raised over $60 million to help fight poverty and hunger in Africa. Michael became well-known for his generosity and gave away lots of the money he earned to different charities. 

He also used his music to discuss things that he thought were important. The lyrics from his 1991 hit ‘Heal the World’ ask listeners to be kind to each other and take care of the planet. In his song ‘Black or White’ from the same year, Michael speaks against the hate that he faced because of his appearance and the color of his skin. These songs promoted racial tolerance and acceptance, something that was personal to him. 

In June 2009, Michael Jackson unexpectedly died in Los Angeles. He was only 50 years old. Much of the world mourned. He left behind a legacy of accomplishments and accolades. But mostly, he left the world his incredible music.

In his lifetime, Michael was nominated for 38 Grammy Awards and ended up winning 13 of them. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice – once with the Jackson 5 and once as a solo artist. He also has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He still holds the title for having the best-selling album of all time with Thriller. 

It’s pretty easy to see why Michael Jackson became the King of Pop. He did so much for the world of music. Like all kings, he wasn’t perfect. He made mistakes. He was criticized. Still, his music is sure to be enjoyed and rediscovered by new fans for years to come. Long live the extraordinary music from the King of Pop.

https://www.biography.com/musicians/michael-jackson

https://kids.britannica.com/kids/article/Michael-Jackson/487595

https://www.ducksters.com/biography/entertainers/michael_jackson.php

https://kids.kiddle.co/Michael_Jackson#1986-1990

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Michael-Jackson

https://www.grammy.com/news/michael-jackson-10-achievements-that-made-him-the-king-of-pop

https://www.michaeljacksonslegacy.org/michael/about-michael/

https://www.grammy.com/artists/michael-jackson/13202

https://www.vogue.co.uk/article/michael-jackson-60th-birthday

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The boy who never grew up: Michael Jackson, 1958-2009

If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why, oh, why can't I? (Nipsey Russell, Michael Jackson, Diana Ross and Ted Ross, on the set of "The Wiz" in 1978)

by Roger Ebert

Michael Jackson was so gifted, so lonely, so confused, so sad. He lost happiness somewhere in his childhood, and spent his life trying to go back there and find it. When he played the Scarecrow in “ The Wiz ” (1978), I think that is how he felt, and Oz was where he wanted to live. It was his most truly autobiographical role. He could understand a character who felt stuffed with straw, but could wonderfully sing and dance, and could cheer up the little girl Dorothy.

We have all spent years in the morbid psychoanalysis of this strange man-child. Now that he has died we will hear it all repeated again: The great fame from an early age, the gold records, the world tours, the needy friendships, the painful childhood, Neverland, the eccentric behavior, plastic surgery, charges of child molestation, the fortunes won and lost, the generosity, the secrecy, the inexplicable marriage to Elvis’s daughter, the disguises, the puzzling sexuality, the jokes, and on and on.

I never met him. My wife Chaz did, a long time ago when she was part of a dance troupe that opened some shows for the Jackson Five. What she remembers is that he was — a kid. Talented, hard-working, but not like other kids. That’s what he was, and that’s what he remained. His father Joseph was known even then as a hard-driving taskmaster, and was later described by family members as physically and mentally abusive, beating the child, once holding him by a leg and banging his head on the floor. Michael confided to Oprah that sometimes he would vomit at the sight of the man.

Families are important to everyone, and to African-Americans they are the center of the universe. A census is maintained that radiates out to great-nieces and nephews, distant cousins, former spouses, honorary relatives, all the generations. Communication is maintained, birthdays remembered, occasions celebrated. Important above all are parents and grandparents. Family was a support system from a time when slave-owning America refused to recognize black families. Family was the rock.

Michael Jackson doesn’t seem to have had that rock. His father seems to have driven him to create an alternate universe for himself, in which somewhere, over the rainbow, he could have another childhood. He named his ranch Neverland, after the magical land where Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up, enacted his fantasies with the Lost Boys. I wonder if we ever really understood how central that vision was to Jackson, or how literally he tried to create it.

I have no idea whether Michael abused the children he “adopted.” It is possible those relationships were without sex; he seemed frozen at a time before puberty. Whether he touched them criminally or not, it is easy to see what he sought: To create, with and for these Lost Boys, a Neverland where they could imagine together the childhood he never had.

Mixed with that was perhaps a lifelong feeling of inadequacy, burned in by the cruelty of his father. That might help explain the compulsive plastic surgery, the relentless rehearsal, the exhausting tours, the purchase of expensive toys, the giving of gifts.

The scene everyone remembers from “The Wiz” is Dorothy and the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion dancing and singing down the Yellow Brick Road. They were off to see the Wizard, and a wonderful Wizard he was, because of the wonderful things he does.

In the story, the Wizard is a lonely little man hiding behind a curtain, using his power to create a wonderland. Now Michael Jackson will never be able to tell us what he was hiding behind his curtain. But because of his music, we danced and sang.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Michael jackson.

4to40.com March 26, 2015 Biographies for Kids 3,440 Views

In the early 1980s, Jackson became a dominant figure in popular music. The music videos for his songs, including those of “Beat It”, “Billie Jean”, and “Thriller”, were credited with transforming the medium into an art form and a promotional tool, and the popularity of these videos helped to bring the relatively new television channel MTV to fame. Videos such as “Black or White” and “Scream” made him a staple on MTV in the 1990s. Through stage performances and music videos, Jackson popularized a number of complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk, to which he gave the name. His distinctive musical sound and vocal style have influenced numerous hip hop, post-disco, contemporary R&B, pop and rock artists

Jackson’s 1982 album Thriller is the best-selling album of all time. His other records, including Off the Wall (1979), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991), and HIStory (1995), also rank among the world’s best-selling. Jackson is one of the few artists to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice. He was also inducted into the Dance Hall of Fame as the first (and currently only) dancer from the world of pop and rock ‘n’ roll. Some of his other achievements include multiple Guinness World Records; 13 Grammy Awards (as well as the Grammy Legend Award and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award); 26 American Music Awards (more than any other artist, including the “Artist of the Century”); 13 number-one singles in the United States in his solo career (more than any other male artist in the Hot 100 era); and the estimated sale of over 750 million records worldwide. Jackson won hundreds of awards, which have made him the most-awarded recording artist in the history of popular music.

Aspects of Jackson’s personal life, including his changing appearance, personal relationships, and behavior, have generated controversy. In 1993, he was accused of child sexual abuse, but the case was settled out of court and no formal charges were brought. In 2005, he was tried and acquitted of further child sexual abuse allegations and several other charges after the jury found him not guilty on all counts. While preparing for his concert series titled This Is It, Jackson died of acute propofol and benzodiazepine intoxication on June 25, 2009, after suffering from cardiac arrest. The Los Angeles County Coroner ruled his death a homicide, and his personal physician was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Jackson’s death triggered a global outpouring of grief, and as many as one billion people around the world reportedly watched his public memorial service on live television. In March 2010, Sony Music Entertainment signed a $250 million deal with Jackson’s estate to retain distribution rights to his recordings until 2017, and to release seven posthumous albums over the decade following his death.

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Michael Jackson

Introduction, a humble beginning, the other side of papa joe, a loving mother, ‘the jackson brothers’ rise to fame, a lost childhood, education in music, the first big break, a changed life, sibling rivalries, the thriller phenomenon, moonwalking to fame, mj – the fashion icon, a near death experience, mj’s magic continues, a break from music, bad – mj’s return to the music scene, a childhood re-lived, a philanthropist and humanitarian, moonwalk – mj’s autobiography, back with dangerous, wacko jacko, under the knife, surrounded by allegations, mj’s first marriage, mj remarries, mj becomes a father, michael and his children, his special friends, reviving his career, the curtain falls, farewell to a star, michael’s wealth and woes, custody of michael’s children, the jackson family.

• MJ – The Greatest Musical Legend

“If you enter this world knowing you are loved and you leave this world knowing the same, then everything that happens in between can be dealt with.” – Michael Jackson

It is said, that when someone dies he becomes a star, but there was one who was born a star. Regarded as a musical genius, King of Pop, and a fashion icon, he was not just a man but rather a global phenomenon who redefined stardom, fanhood and euphoria. He was Michael Joseph Jackson or simply “MJ” as called by millions of his worshippers from every nook and corner of the world. A musician, singer, arranger, composer, songwriter, dancer and performer – MJ wasabove all the biggest entertainer this world will ever see. But stardom came at a huge cost for this little boy from a small town in Indiana. Michael never had a childhood as he began working at the tender age of five which meant gruesome rehearsals, no Christmas or birthday celebrations, no childhood friendships and a troubled relationship with his father.

In the later years of MJ’s life, his controversies made more news than his music, and he was often misunderstood by his fans and mostly maligned by the media. Just like his song “ Black or White”, his was a chequered life that is full of inspiration and intrigue.

Michael Jackson was born in a modest African-American family on the 29th of August, 1958, in the suburbs of Gary, Indiana in the United States of America. He was Katherine Esther Scruse and Joseph Walter Joe Jac kson’s seventh child, born after the premature death of his infant brother Brandon. Michael had eight siblings comprising of three sisters – Maureen ‘Rebbie’, La Toya and Janet and five brothers namely Toriano ‘Tito’, Sigmund ‘Jackie’, Marlon, Steven ‘Randy’ and Jermaine.

MJ’s father, Joe was the first of the Jacksons to dream big. He spent a good part of his life wanting to become a professional boxer; a desire he could not fulfill due to lack of talent and injuries. He then began pursuing a musical career and formed ‘The Falcons’ , a Rhythm and Blue Band (R&B) in which he played the guitar. His brother ‘Luther’ also joined the group as a saxophonist. However, Joe was unable to realize his dream of becoming a famous musician either, as The Falcons failed to land a single record deal even after two long years of struggle.

Michael’s mother, Katherine, too aspired to be a country singer. In high school, Katherine joined the local high school band where she played the piano, clarinet and the guitar. But back in the 1940s, there were no takers for a limping black female singer and her dreams soon folded. Yes, Katherine had contracted polio at the age of two and although she survived the disease, it left her with a noticeable permanent limp. However, she never gave up music and played an important role in inspiring the Jackson siblings to take up music right from the very beginning.

Joe met Katherine in 1947 and after a year long courtship, they got married in November 1949. The following year in January 1950, they purchased a two-bedroom house in Gary that would eight years later become the birthplace of the world’s greatest entertainer. During the couple’s early years, they sang together, with Joe playing the guitar. Joe would also hold his band’s jam sessions in the living room. This served as the perfect learning grounds for the Jackson kids.

The Falcons could never really make it big and other than a few odd gigs in Indiana & Chicago, they made little money. Maureen, Jackie and Tito were born the following years and with three children to feed, Joe began working as a crane operator at Gary’s U.S. Steel company. The family’s growing brood caused him to work overtime to make ends meet and even forced Katherine to work as a store clerk in a local Sears store but she later gave up the job to look after the growing family.

Both Joe and Katherine found their escape in music and encouraged their children to sing and dance whenever they found time. Katherine would teach them folk and religious songs while Joe began giving Michael’s older brothers Tito, Jackie and Jermaine guitar lessons. Little Michael, too small to join, would watch his elder brothers and sisters practice with their father. He absorbed a great deal just by watching his siblings perform in their little house.

Katherine was the first person to notice Michael’s talent at the age of five, when she saw him dancing and singing along with the radio. She pointed this to Joe who took Michael under his wing along with older brother Marlon.

Joe soon realized that his kids had serious talent and started spending more time with them. He was a great trainer who believed that great talent required great cultivation and spent a lot of money and time working with his children. He bought a gleaming red guitar for Tito out of his modest savings. There was little money for such luxuries but this did not stop Joe from bringing in more musical equipments for each of his kids. He went on to buy a bass, amplifier and microphones, and soon the Jacksons’ house began to look like a music store.

Joe Jackson was a complex man to say the least. On one hand, he was this devoted father who worked tirelessly to nurture his kids’ talent and on the other hand he was known to physically and mentally abuse them. He was a strict disciplinarian, ready to whip his children during rehearsals if they made mistakes. One day, he allegedly ordered each of them to call him “Joseph” and not papa or dad.

Michael too bore the brunt of Joe’s abusive nature. A mere appearance of Joe would make five year old Michael shiver and sometimes even puke in fear as his father would beat him up with a belt. Joe was also extremely critical of Michael’s physical appearance and would often taunt him about the size of his nose. That, coupled with the regular beatings he endured at the hands of his father, resulted in a submissive and quiet personality.

Once, Joe held young Michael upside down by one leg and pummeled him over and over again with his hand, hitting him on his back and buttocks. In another instance, one night while MJ was asleep, Joseph climbed into his room through the bedroom window. Wearing a fright mask, he entered the room screaming and shouting, scaring the daylights out of the young kids. Joe said he wanted to teach his children not to leave the window open when they went to sleep.

For a number of years afterward, MJ suffered nightmares about being kidnapped from his bedroom. Although his father’s strict discipline helped Michael become sincere in music, but at the same time, he developed various fears and complexes because of it. The biggest complex being his constant dissatisfaction with the way he looked.

Katherine was the peaceful respite for the Jackson kids and she balanced out the aggressive nature of their father. She was warm, gentle and attentive to all the nine children. She believed that her polio was not a curse but a test that God gave her to triumph over, and she instilled such faith in the minds of the little Jacksons. She always told Michael that his talent for singing and dancing was as much God’s work as a beautiful sunset or a storm that left snow for children to play in.

She worried about the stress that the kids were under, thanks to the strict disciplinarian methods of her husband. She somewhat reduced their pain with her love and support. “It’s hard to imagine that we would have gotten where we did without her love and good humour,” Michael mentioned years later.

Thus as a kid, Michael saw two extremes at home in the form of a domineering father and a caring mother. This had a dual impact on his personality. On one hand he developed a strong spiritual side that was full of goodness and love for all; but on the other hand, he developed various phobias that haunted him throughout his adult life.

Under the strict watch of Joe, the Jackson kids formed a band in 1962 comprising of the three eldest boys Tito, Jermaine and Jackie. The band began to perform at talent shows and local clubs. In 1964, Michael and Marlon joined the group. Michael, who was six, played the congas while Marlon, who was seven, played the tambourine.

With Michael’s immense singing talent, he soon became the side vocalist and later the lead singer and star performer of the group. Their lineup was set; Michael was second from left, facing the audience, Jermaine in the wing next to Michael and Jackie on the right. Tito and his guitar took stage right, with Marlon next to him. Simply called ‘The Jackson Brothers’ , they created their own unique sound – a blend of pop and folk music using unconventional instruments like congas and tambourine. Gaining in popularity, they started making regular appearances at music contests across the Midwest, which they won, thanks to Michael’s amazing voice and dance moves.

The Jackson Brothers were renamed ‘Jackson 5’ andtheir fame began to spread to nearby Chicago, an area that offered steady work and the best word of mouth for miles. Joe gave up his job at the steel mill and started managing the Jackson 5 full-time. To make ends meet, he got them a regular act at Mr. Lucky, a nightspot in Gary. Michael and his brothers played five nights a week at the striptease club and spent their weekends in Chicago or other places trying to win as many amateur contests as possible. Michael was only nine at that time and mother Katherine would often worry about the kids working so hard and in places not suitable for their tender age. But Joe wanted to wield his kids in front of live audiences in order to prepare them for the big challenges that lay ahead. All the shows turned to be a great learning experience for The Jackson Brothers as they mastered their skills with each performance. Michael sometimes did not even understand the words that he was singing, but when he sung, everyone listened and when he moved, everyone was left mesmerized.

In 1967, with the help of Tito’s school orchestra teacher Shirley Cartman, the Jackson 5 cut their first record deal with a local label company, Steeltown owned by Gordon Keith. Their first single , ‘Big Boy’, was released in January 1968 and became a regional hit. This was followed by a second single, “ We Don’t Have to Be Over 21” (To Fall in Love).

Michael became the blue-eyed boy of the Jackson 5 and got the maximum female attention, which he thoroughly enjoyed. He was a supremely gifted artist; even his brothers used to wonder that without learning he knew so much, which was almost unbelievable. But this gift also meant that Michael was deprived of many of the basic aspects of a regular childhood.

Michael’s childhood was far from being normal with long, exhaustive hours of rehearsals that left little time for fun and games. While other kids of his age enjoyed a carefree life, Michael would be slogging hard after school, sometimes without snacks and with little time to sleep. However, Michael never considered this work since he loved singing and dancing and even at such a young age, he constantly worked to improve himself.

Besides music, Michael loved going to school and attended Garrett Elementary School in Gary. His kindergarten school teacher, Felecia Childress, recalls, “Michael was so happy and he was almost bouncing around the room…and I remember Michael was the center of a lot of attention.” He loved mingling with the other kids and was a favourite of many of his teachers. Michael loved his teachers so much; he would steal his mother’s jewellery and give it to them as presents.

As far as studies were concerned, Michael managed to score above average grades in spite of hectic work schedule. But his rising fame and frequent tours meant he had to give up school when he was just 11. Thereafter, he was coached by a private tutor three hours a day who also travelled with Michael on his various tours.

Michael often satisfied his childlike desires by playing pranks on his sisters. He would tease his sister LaToya by putting spiders in her bed and would threaten to spoil her bed as she was a cleanliness freak. He was very close to his youngest sister Janet but did not spare her either; he nicknamed her “Dunk” as he felt she was too big and looked like a donkey.

Being a part of the band also meant that Michael was exposed to sexuality too early in life. For instance, at the beginning of their careers, The Jackson Brothers would do the rounds of what was called the ‘Chitlin’ circuit’ – a string of black clubs and venues. It involved performing at adult black clubs where striptease acts were the norm. A vulnerable Michael was also made to share a room with his brothers while they had sex with various women on music tours.

After winning numerous talent shows and becoming a household name in Gary and Chicago, Joe decided that it was time to head to New York –a land of bigger opportunities. The Jackson 5 secured a spot in the famous Amateur Night competition at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York. And it turned out to be more than a competition for little Michael.

The Apollo Theater was a Mecca of talent with marquee names in the music industry like James Brown, Jackie Wilson, Sam & Dave having performed there in the past. Little Michael was awestruck to be at the theater where he saw pictures of big stars strung to the walls. Michael would sneak backstage, crouching low, holding on to the stage curtain and watch other performers at the Apollo Theater. He would observe every step, every little detail. He called this his education and recreation. “The greatest education in the world is watching the masters at work”, Michael believed.

On August 13, 1967, the Jackson 5 won the competition during the Amateur Night showdown, and caught the attention of Motown Records artist Gladys Knight who recommended the group to Motown chief Berry Gordy. Motown Records was a major force in the music industry back then and an audition with them could be the game changer for the Jackson 5. But the audition call did not come that easy, as Gordy who already had teenager Stevie Wonder on his rooster, was hesitant to take on another child act because of the restrictive child labour laws.

After a year long wait, the Jackson 5 finally had their Motown audition on July 23, 1968, for which they performed James Brown’s then current hit “ I Got the Feelin.” When it ended, there was no applause and no word said by anyone. The Jackson 5 along with their father-manager Joe Jackson returned home, subdued and disappointed.

A few days later, Joe received a call from Motown that his kids had passed the audition and had been signed for a record deal. This was the biggest turning point in the career of the Jackson 5, as the small band from Indiana had finally entered the mainstream music industry. And they sure did it with a bang. Their first four singles for Motown, “I Want You Back”, “ABC”, “The Love You Save ” and “ I’ll Be There”, hit number one spot, a first in pop history. They sold more than two million copies each and caught the fancy of the entire nation.

The Jackson 5 moved to California and stayed with Motown chief, Gordy and another Motown star Diana Ross, who looked after the kids like a mother. Michael, who was just 11, was thrilled with his new life and knew that performing at cheap clubs was now a thing of the past.

It was a great time for Michael and his brothers as they visited Disneyland, swam together at the Sunset Strip beach, played games and rehearsed with Motown artists. Motown’s PR team ensured that Michael and his brothers were heavily merchandised on everything from stickers and jacket patches to posters, lunch boxes, colouring books and a Saturday morning cartoon on ABC that ran for two seasons, beginning in 1971. And with every success, MJ blossomed and started getting more and more limelight. A clever Gordy tapped into Michael’s potential and recorded four solo albums with him. They were as successful as the group albums, hinting at the international phenomenon which Michael was on the verge of becoming.

In 1971, when Michael was just 13, his first single “ Got to Be There ” made it to the Top Five. Following this achievement, his cover version of R&B (Rhythm and blues) singer Bobby Day’s “ Rockin’ Robin” repeated the same feat. In 1972, “ Ben,” a song he sang for a children’s movie about rats became his first solo single to reach the number one spot. It was also nominated for an Academy Award.

A prequel to the moonwalk, Michael started enthralling audiences with unique robot steps in the single The Dancing Machine. The Times praised the 14-year-old’s performance at the Liverpool Empire in the United Kingdom saying, “he has an astonishing command of gesture and his twinkling feet scarcely seemed to touch the stage.”

Where a legendary life story was in the making, romance was blooming in the air for Michael. The young entertainer had his first real date with the child actress Tatum O’Neal, when he was 17, and he called her, his first love . She was a popular actress, who at the age of 12, became the youngest person ever to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in Paper Moon. M ichael and Tatum dated till the early 80’s until the pair eventually cooled off as both were too busy with their respective careers.

It seemed like a joyous time for the Jackson family professionally as they started enjoying the fruits of their years of toil. However, a seamier side of their speedy rise to glamour and wealth emerged as their personal relationships hit troubled waters. As Michael began to hog the limelight, differences started to arise between the children. Ego clashes became common and they began taking shots at each other, sometimes even in public.

Their music career as a band also derailed during this period. After 1972, The Jackson 5′s releases with Motown were not as successful. Just like Michael, elder brothers Jackie and Jermaine came out with their own solo albums but that too found little success. The brothers and father began to believe that Motown was not giving them enough artistic freedom and began shopping for a new record deal.

In 1975, Joe negotiated a recording contract with CBS Records (formerly known as Infinity Broadcasting Corporation), who offered a royalty rate of 20% per record, compared to Motown’s standard 2.8%; and would allow The Jackson Brothers to write and produce their own records and play their own instruments. They were however forced to change their name to The Jacksons , as Motown retained the ‘ Jackson 5’ trademark. Randy replaced Jermaine in the group as the latter married Gordy’s daughter Hazel and decided to stay with Motown, pursuing his solo career. This further strained the relations between the Jackson siblings.

While managing his boys, Joe was alleged to have engaged in several extramarital affairs; which contributed to several siblings being estranged from their domineering father. Subsequently, the Jackson Band disintegrated officially but collaborated multiple times in the future, although for brief periods only.

Michael’s greatness lies in the fact that he did not allow his personal anguish to hamper his blossoming musical career. Instead, he used music as a weapon to gain independence from his troubled personal life and touched the hearts of millions around the world.

In 1978, Michael made his first foray into cinema in a modern adaptation of ‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ called ‘ The Wiz’ co-starring Diana Ross and others in an all-black production. Based on a Broadway musical of the same name, the film tanked at the box office and was panned by critics, despite four Oscar nominations.

Working in The Wiz was nevertheless a life-changing experience for Michael. It was here that he met legendary producer and composer Quincy Jones with whom he forged a bond that lasted a lifetime. Michael’s relationship with his father-manager Joe had always been turbulent and when Jones entered his life, Michael relinquished Joe of his managerial duties. Jones became a father figure and role model for Michael and he quickly latched onto him to fill the void in his life. Jones took Michael under his wing and helped him bring out his next album titled “ Off the Wall” . The recordings took place across Los Angeles and Michael got the opportunity to work with music industry stalwarts like musician Rod Temperton as well as singers Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder.

Michael’s education paid off as the album won both critical and public acclaim. The hit single “ Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” that he wrote, went platinum on the charts. The multi-platinum certified Off the Wall broke records with songs like “ Rock with You” and sold over 20 million copies worldwide. A perfect blend of multiple music genres like pop, disco, funk, soul, jazz and soft rock, it also earned Michael his first Grammy Award.

While the ‘Jacksons’ faded as a band in the early 80s, Michael was getting tremendous recognition as an individual artist. In an era where only Hollywood actors were seeing stardom, MJ revived the pop star culture which existed at the time of Elvis Presley, the King of Rock & Roll.

His next solo album ‘Thriller’ released in 1982 to an astounding response which till date, remains the undisputed champion as the best-selling album of all time. Produced by Quincy Jones, it took the music of Off the Wall to the next level. The surprise package of maestros like Vincent Price who did a terrifying voice-over, Eddie Van Halen rocking the guitar for “ Beat It” and Michael’s duet with the most-loved Beatle, Paul McCartney for “ The Girl Is Mine”, only added to the album’s spellbinding magic.

Michael created an over-10 minute-long ‘Thriller’ video that was played over an over again on MTV, an upcoming music channel at that time. A compact horror film with revolutionary effects and make-up, it set the standard for the music video format of today. Michael explored his dark side and the duality of his personality in the video, playing the role of a cute teenager who changes into a zombie at night. The zombie dance sequence where Michael joins other monsters was a brilliant and memorable piece of choreography. The video is still considered by many as the best music video of all time.

MTV owed its initial popularity to the path-breaking ‘Thriller’, and the other video by MJ including ‘Beat It’ , all of which told stories to draw the viewer in.

‘Thriller’ continued to break records and spawn singles, each more successful than the next. Industry analysts were befuddled by the seemingly endless hit singles that kept coming from the album, seven of which reached the Top Ten singles position. “ Thriller” was number one for a mind boggling 37 weeks and refused to give up its place on the charts for an unmatched period of two years.

‘Thriller’ brought Michael national and international fame, selling 29 million copies in the US and 20 million abroad. He became a household name around the globe and won eight Grammy Awards. It also made him richer by $125 million. Pepsi made him its brand ambassador and Michael landed the biggest endorsement deal of that time, of reportedly $50 million. He also won a sponsorship deal with the American shoe company LA Gear.

In 1981, Michael met 15 year old model actress Brooke Shields and fell in love with her. They had a close relationship that lasted for several years. They would talk about marriage several times but never tied the knot, as their relationship was more platonic than romantic.

Apart from being a singing sensation, Michael had an almost spiritual relationship with dance and it showed on stage. “This world we live in is the dance of the creator. Dancers come and go in the twinkling of an eye but the dance lives on. On many an occasion when I am dancing, I have felt touched by something sacred. I keep on dancing then it is the eternal dance or creation…I keep on dancing…and dancing…and dancing. Until there is only…the dance,” he said.

On May 16, 1983, the original Jackson 5 reunited after nearly 7 years, to celebrate Motown’s 25th anniversary. It was during this televised performance that 24-year-old Michael did what he termed ‘moonwalk’ dance move during his rendition of “ Billie Jean .” It was a baffling gravity defying dance move in which he gave the impression of moving forward when, in fact, he was moving back. The move became an instant rage and MJ ‘moonwalked’ right into the hearts of his innumerable fans. It soon became a common sight at discos, parties and even in the movies. Ecstatic at its popularity, Michael even named his autobiography Moonwalk . Work on the book started in 1984 and it took four long years for the book to land on book shelves.

Jackson also got his solo star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1984; the Jackson 5 already had a star in 1979. He and Diana Ross are the only two people to have two stars in the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Michael Jackson’s fashion sense was as remarkable as his musical style and dance moves. Millions imitated his pegged pants and penny loafers. Interestingly, he also patented a shoe device that allowed dancers to lean forward at gravity defying angles and used the same in a lot of his performances.

He even designed the zipper-covered ‘Beat It’ jacket which was a military-inspired coat with epaulets, crests and insignias. And of course, who can forget that glittery crystal rhinestone studded glove worn by Jackson when performing the moonwalk on Motown’s 25th celebration.

“I want the fashion designers in the world, the big conglomerates; I want them to copy me. I don’t want to wear what’s out there. I want to push my individuality, and being that my music is me, my look should be me,” he would say.

In 1984, 26 year old MJ was filming a Pepsi commercial in front of a full house of fans. During the simulated concert, pyrotechnics accidentally set Jackson’s hair on fire. He suffered second-degree burns to his scalp and was immediately rushed to the hospital. Jackson underwent treatment to hide the scars on his scalp but never recovered from this injury. Although shaken by the accident, it never dented Michael’s spirit, as he always bounced back from every obstacle that came his way.

An anxious Pepsi, settled out-of-court, and Jackson donated his $1.5 million settlement to the Brotman Medical Centre in Culver City, California, where he received his treatment. The hospital now has a ‘Michael Jackson Burn Centre’ in honour of his donation.

Michael’s luck showed no signs of running out as he continued to reign on the charts. He worked magic even when he paired up with his contemporaries who benefited from his success. His collaboration with his favourite Beatles star, Paul McCartney, “ Say, Say, Say”, once again reached the number one position in 1983.

In 1984, Michael and his brothers joined hands once again for a new album called Victory . The album received tepid response but their countrywide tours earned them top dollars, largely due to Michael’s presence.

At the peak of Michael’s career, everyone wanted to work with him. In 1985, he wrote the inspiring “ We Are the World” along with singer Lionel Richie. All the big music stars of that generation lent their voices and appeared in the video of the song at Michael’s request. It broke records and became one of the fastest selling singles of all time. This was also the beginning of Michael’s involvement with social causes as the profit from sales was utilized for famine relief in Africa. The same year, TIME magazine compared Michael to superstar Elvis Presley and said he was “the hottest single phenomenon.”

Michael’s professional highs had always been accompanied by personal lows. A case in point was the year 1985. That year, ATV Music Publishing, a company that owned the publishing rights to most of the Lennon-McCartney Beatles songs, was put on sale, which meant that the acquirer would get 50% ownership of the hit songs. MJ immediately showed interest. McCartney himself bid for the rights to his own songs but dropped out when MJ agreed to shell out $47.5-million for 50% ownership. This irrevocably strained the relationship between the two friends and collaborators, as McCartney found it quite annoying to pay for playing his own songs.

Business-wise, it turned out to be an astute move by MJ. Although acquired at a lofty price, Sony later acquired 50% stake in the company for $90 million in 1992 and the company was renamed Sony/ATS Music Publishing. Today, it is the second largest publishing company in the world with earnings of $2.5 billion a year.

Post 1985, Michael decided to take a long break from music, one of many in his illustrious career. Attracted to Hollywood, he spent his time working with well-known directors Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas on the ambitious 3D film Captain Eo. Made on a budget of $30 million, the 17-minute film released in September 1986 at both, the original Disneyland and EPCOT, a theme park in Florida, and in March 1987, at Tokyo Disneyland. The movie made for great family viewing in Disney’s widescreen IMAX theaters at all the three parks. It also ran at the Paris Disneyland until 1998.

After the well-deserved break from music, Michael, 29 now, once again teamed up with Quincy Jones to accomplish the insurmountable task of recreating the magic of Thriller in a fresh new album titled “ Bad .” His fans waited with bated breath for the release of Bad in 1987. It managed to live up to people’s expectations; however, many felt that it lacked the artistic genius of Thriller.

Bad got rave reviews and predictably made it to the number one position. “ I Just Can’t Stop Loving You” sung with back-up vocalist Siedah Garrett also became a number one hit. Aping the Thriller model and spawning singles for an entire year, Bad made music history. the album became the first one ever to have five number one singles : “ The Way You Make Me Feel”, “Dirty Diana”, “Man in the Mirror”, “Bad ” and “ I Just Can’t Stop Loving You ”.

Michael explained his concept for the song and video of Bad in his autobiography Moonwalk saying, “ Bad is a song about the street. It’s about this kid from a bad neighbourhood who gets to go away to a private school. He comes back to the old neighbourhood when he’s on a break from school and the kids from the neighbourhood start giving him trouble. He sings, ‘ I’m bad, you’re bad, who’s bad, who’s the best ?’ ” He supported the album by touring the country with an extravagant show complete with ornate stage and special effects. It turned out to be the most commercially successful tour in the history of music. Critics though felt Bad fell short of Thriller, both in terms of content and sales. While Thriller reflected the evolution of Michael as an artiste, Bad lacked focus and was a mish-mash of styles and genres. It sold 8 million copies in America compared to Thriller which sold 29 million. In the overseas market too, Thriller beat Bad with 20 million copies sold compared to 16 million.

Super star Michael Jackson loved being in the company of children. “Children don’t lie to you. Children are pure and innocent and good. Being with children is like being blessed, like being with angels”, Michael would often say about them. He had a harsh childhood and perhaps this was the reason he was so fond of kids and loved to do things for them.

Michael had lived in the world of grown-ups that was filled with brutality, back-biting and fear. His childhood was lost in this treacherous world and so in 1988, when he was financially secure, he decided to relive his childhood by building a world where there was peace and kindness, where every candy imaginable was available, and where fun was the only accepted currency. He chose a 2700 acre land near Santa Ynez, California, to build this world and called it ‘ Neverland Ranch’ . It cost him $17 million and he installed ferris wheels, roller-coasters, mini train, a movie theater, private zoo and a staff of 40 to guard this wonderland.

These may have been reminders of activities he was never able to participate in as a child due to his strict and regimented upbringing. Every year, hundreds of underprivileged children would be given guided tours of MJ’s wonderland, sometimes by MJ himself.

Michaels’s philanthropic work did not end here. From 1985 to 1990, he donated $500,000 to the United Negro College Fund, and all of the profits from his single “ Man in the Mirror” also went to charity. His generosity and significant involvement in social causes were commemorated with ‘The Soul Train Heritage Award’ given to him in 1989. Michael was associated with a number of children’s charities as well and started his own ‘ Heal the World Foundation’ in 1992 through which he donated over 300 million dollars.

He holds the Guinness World Record for a pop star giving aid to the largest number of charities . As a result of his humanitarian work, Michael could count Queen Elizabeth and former US President, Ronald Reagan among his group of friends.

Following the death of American teenager Ryan Wayne White from HIV AIDS, Michael also became an unofficial spokesperson for the illness that was still considered a stigma during his time. A noteworthy achievement was his public appeal to President Bill Clinton seeking funds for AIDS-related research and charities .

In 1988, Michael Jackson released his only autobiography, Moonwalk , in which he wrote about his childhood, ‘The Jackson 5’, and the abuse he had suffered. He also wrote about his facial appearance, saying he had had two rhinoplastic surgeries and a dimple created in his chin. He attributed much of the change in the structure of his face to puberty, weight loss, a strict vegetarian diet, a change in hair style and stage lighting. Moonwalk sold 200,000 copies and reached the top position on The New York Times best sellers list.

MJ then released a film called Moonwalker , which featured live footage and short films that starred Jackson and British actor Joe Pesci. The film was originally intended to be released in theaters, but due to financial issues, the film was released direct-to-video. It saw a theatrical release in Germany, though. It debuted atop the Billboard Top Music Video Cassette chart and stayed there for 22 weeks.

After briefly disappearing from the music scene, Michael re-emerged with “ Dangerous” in 1991. He ditched mentor Quincy Jones for the more modern master of swing beat, Teddy Riley. Swing beat or jack swing was the latest dance fad to be adopted by club-hopping blacks in New York. Michael wanted a more contemporary sound and Riley gave him just that. Released in 1991, the new album made its entry at the number one position on the charts and Michael signed the biggest ever recording contract with Sony Music.

The catchy “ Black or White” was also a chart topper and gave the message of racial equality. Perhaps in an effort to give the music video an urban edge, Michael inserted a violent segment towards the end. He was shown destroying cars and then grabbing his crotch in an obscene gesture. Incongruous with the rest of the video, this portion did not go down well with his prime-time viewing audience who collectively slammed it.

Adding to Michael’s troubles was the release of alternative rock group Nirvana’s “ Nevermind” in 1992 that spelled doom for Dangerous and pop music as a whole. It replaced Dangerous on the charts and Michael never knew what hit him. His “ In the Closet” and “ Remember the Time” still managed to make it to the Top Ten positions. However, the anthem “ Heal the World” and the edgy “ Jam ,” nominated for two Grammy Awards, failed to perform in the US market. “ Heal the World” though surprised Michael with its success in Europe and the UK (where it sold 450,000 copies and reached the number two position).

“I go around the world dealing with running and hiding.. I can’t take a walk in the park… I can’t go to the store… I have to hide in the room. You feel like you’re in prison.”

As his music career hit a roadblock post 1993, Michael’s behaviour went out-of-control, seemingly into bizarre and inexplicable territory. Adding fuel to public curiosity and intense media scrutiny was Michael himself. Shy and insecure by nature, he chose to withdraw from the public eye and was reluctant to give the media interviews about his private life. As a result, wild rumours about him began doing the rounds of the press. Michael made matters worse by withdrawing further into his shell. Some of the rumours however, proved to be true. An immature and childlike Michael did prefer the company of animals to complicated human beings. He had adopted a chimpanzee called Bubbles who would accompany him during recording sessions for Bad . The media had no way of explaining these strange preferences to his fans and instead, dubbed him ‘Wacko Jacko’ , a moniker Michael hated with passion. It was then that he decided to call himself King of Pop. However, Wacko Jacko stuck and he was not able to get rid of it for the rest of his life.

People also wondered at Michael’s abnormally soft and feminine voice. They felt he underwent hormone treatments to preserve its youthful quality, a rumour Michael did not bother to refute. Some stories were weird and designed to entertain the public at the star’s expense. For example, Michael was rumoured to have bought the skeleton of Elephant Man John Merrick from London Hospital. This was later proved to be false as Michael did view the bones but never bought them.

Did he really sleep in a hyperbaric room to reverse the aging process? There is no way of knowing and it may be one of Michael’s mysteries that remain unsolved. However, he did try to explain some of the perceived eccentricities and insults. For instance, the international black community was outraged by Michael’s light skin tone. He was becoming fairer with each passing year. They alleged, that the star who sang “It don’t matter if you’re Black or White” was a racist himself and was trying to become white.

In the past, Michael had alluded to the burn injuries he sustained while trying to shoot a Pepsi commercial. During the Oprah interview in 1993, he revealed that his skin tone had changed since then due to a disorder that destroys the pigmentation of his skin . Michael was found to have a skin condition called vitiligo in which there is a loss of brown colour (pigment) from areas of skin, resulting in irregular white patches that appear like normal skin. Always battling health issues, he also had lupus, a systemic autoimmune disease, which causes skin to appear blotchy with rashes.

At the center of controversy and attracting oodles of public interest was Michael’s Neverland Ranch in California built at a staggering cost of 17 million dollars. Why did a grown man need his own amusement park and zoo? Befuddled by such questions, people made their own assumptions about Michael, ranging from him being a reclusive billionaire at best to an asexual predator and a psychopathic freak show at worst.

In many ways, Michael had always been an escapist, slowly carving out a new identity, a more pleasant reality and a better-looking face. It is difficult to comprehend, how a star adored by millions all over the globe could be insecure about his appearance and think of himself as ugly. Michael was so unhappy with his facial features that he went under the knife not just once but a number of times. Willing to risk it all to attain the perfect look, the misguided superstar underwent multiple procedures till what remained was a hollow, scarred shell.

His concerns about his facial features can be traced to his childhood when an overly critical father would frequently tell him that his nose was too large. While most children get over their adolescent obsession with appearances, Michael was unable to do so. The scars of an abusive childhood ran deep within him. His quest for perfection, which made him so successful in the music industry, extended to his looks and image. It became an almost maniac need and addiction that he could not discard for the rest of his life.

Michel’s first tryst with plastic surgery took place when he was 25. It was the year 1983, when Thriller was released. In the video, one could clearly see his more defined smaller nose and shapelier eyebrows. The black community noticed too and there was a mini uproar as Michael was said to be favouring delicate, white features over his normal facial structure. In the late eighties, Michael’s appearance began changing drastically and evolved into the bizarre. He got another nose job done to make it narrower. Michael also underwent a procedure to get permanent eyeliner around his eyes. Some say he started wearing make-up while making public appearances.

At this stage, though his face looked different from his childhood years, Michael’s overall look still bore some resemblance to his original features. But what happened next was both shocking and horrific in equal measure. In an effort to acquire high cheekbones, Michael went under the knife once again. However, this time the surgery went wrong and his face was scarred for life. Perhaps, in order to conceal his experimentation with plastic surgery from his fans, Michael did not sue the surgeon responsible for permanently destroying his face.

To rectify the irreparable damage done to his facial features and further improve them, Michael went on to get a cleft in his chin, a manlier jaw, tinier nostrils, firmer cheeks, and a prosthetic tip for his nose. Caught in an endless cycle of damage and repair, Michael would be dissatisfied with the results of each procedure and would then move on to something new. For instance, he got the cleft removed in favour of a chin implant.

In June 1992, the media had a field day as Michael’s pictures, with over 10 surgeries playing havoc with his face, were splashed all over the newspapers and the internet. Michael even sued one of them, Daily Mirror, for their front-page photograph of him tagged as ‘ hideously disfigured’.

His celebrity friends were disturbed by Michael’s experiments but could do nothing about it. One of them was spiritual guide and doctor, Deepak Chopra, who knew him for almost 20 years. “What became his compulsion with cosmetic surgery was an expression of self-mutilation, a total lack of respect for himself”, he said, trying to explain Michael’s irrational behaviour. According to some medics, he also had body dysmorphic disorder, where the patient’s self-image is completely distorted, and he would often starve to punish himself. Michael’s troubles took on a more serious note as allegations of child sexual abuse emerged, threatening to destroy his music career forever.

In the summer of 1993, Jackson was accused of child sexual abuse by a 13-year-old boy named Jordan Chandler and his father, Dr. Evan Chandler, a dentist. What followed was a storm of allegations and counter allegations that knocked Michael off his feet and almost killed his music career.

Michael first met Jordan who was a fan of his in May 1992. At that time, Jordon’s father Evan was happy and proud that his son could count a celebrity among his friends. He would milk the connection for all it’s worth and boast about it to all his friends. Tabloids like the National Enquirer started carrying stories of how Michael had become a part of the Chandler family. In a piece called “Michael’s New Adopted Family,” Evan said he was jealous of Jordan’s attachment to Michael who had stolen him from his father. Michael would invite Jordan, his stepsister and mother June, who had his custody, for weekend trips to his Neverland Ranch. Jordan and his mother also attended the World Music Awards with him. Evan wanted Michael to build him a new home and allowed him to sleep with his son and step brother in the same room during a five-day visit to his place. Always resentful of Jordan’s hero worship of Michael, who intruded into his time alone with his son, Evan did admit that he had never actually seen the two in a state of undress together nor had he ever caught them in a compromising position.

However, all this changed in June 1993. Evan questioned his former wife June about his suspicions regarding Michael’s relationship with Jordan. June denied any such incidents. It is rumoured that Evan then called Michael threatening to go public with his allegations. Michael’s lawyer, Ben Fields, stepped in to take control of the situation. Evan’s lawyer Barry Rothman got a psychiatrist to confirm reasonable suspicion of child abuse in a letter. On August 4, Evan and Jordan met Michael to reach an out-of-court financial settlement. Evan and Rothman said no to Michael’s offer of $350,000 to settle the matter. Three days later, June, who supported Michael, sued her former husband forcing him to send Jordan on the Asian part of the Dangerous World Tour.

Things took a turn for the worse as it was discovered that Michael would allow children to sleepover at Neverland. On August 18, he began to be criminally investigated by the Los Angeles police. Over 30 children, including Michael’s friends Wade Robson and Brett Barnes who had stayed with Michael in the Neverland Ranch numerous times, denied ever being molested by him though many had slept in the same bed as him. A few years later, he was once again dragged to court by 13-year-old Gavin Arizo who appeared in a documentary called ‘Living With Michael Jackson’.

While most members of Michael’s huge family stood by him through this ordeal, La Toya who had never been close to him, emerged out of the woodwork and accused him of being a paedophile . “I cannot and will not be a silent collaborator in his crimes against young children …Forget about the superstar, forget about the icon. If he was any other 35-year-old man who was sleeping with little boys, you wouldn’t like this guy”. Fortunately, Michael was acquitted of all charges and La Toya later admitted that her then husband had forced her to make these claims for monetary benefit.

A broken Michael, perhaps in an effort to restore his public image, then sought solace in the arms of the legendary Elvis Presley’s daughter, the beautiful Lisa Marie Presley.

The fairytale romance between Michael and Lisa began when Michael was just a teenager. Lisa Marie used to attend the Jackson 5 shows in Las Vegas. During the child sexual abuse ordeal, he met Lisa Marie once again through a friend and she became his support system. They would have long chats on the telephone. “I believed he didn’t do anything wrong and that he was wrongly accused and yes I started falling for him. I wanted to save him. I felt that I could do it”, she said.

Largely a long-distance relationship, Michael proposed marriage to her over the phone, in his own unique, unromantic way. “If I asked you to marry me, would you do it?” he said. Lisa Marie said yes. From the beginning, the media and public at large were sceptical of the union, calling it a marriage of convenience and going to the extent of saying it was a hoax perpetrated by Michael and his public relations department. Adding credibility to this allegation was the asexual, friendly peck that Michael gave his new wife for a file photo after their wedding in the Dominican Republic in May 26, 1994.

Again, it was left to Lisa Marie to defend their marriage. It was, in her words, “a married couple’s life… that was sexually active”. Despite their efforts, Michael and Lisa Marie had frequent arguments. Michael wanted to be a father while Lisa felt that he was too emotionally immature to be a parent and that he was the one who needed parenting. Following several more troubled months, Lisa filed for divorce citing irreconcilable differences and their marriage of two years ended in August 1996.

The divorce proved difficult for Michael, who spent several weeks lamenting his loss. Lisa was the first person with whom he had connected on such a high level. She had supported him as he faced allegations and became dependent on pain medication. At the time, Michael was afraid that there would never be another woman who could make him feel the way his ex-wife had. He eventually realized that he had to move on; he had a world tour coming up and music to work on. Jackson also knew that Lisa would never make him a father, which he longed to be.

Even before his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, Michael remained extremely close to Nurse Debbie Rowe who had been helping him with the treatment of vitiligo ever since he was diagnosed with the condition in the mid 80s. As Lisa Marie had refused to carry Jackson’s children, Rowe offered to give birth to a child for the pop singer through surrogacy. Shortly after the separation of Lisa and Michael, Rowe became pregnant with MJ’s child but suffered a miscarriage in March 1996.

Several months after his divorce with Lisa, Michael Jackson embarked on the first leg of his History World Tour on September 1996. One month into the tour, his personal life made headlines as it was revealed that Debbie Rowe was once again pregnant with his child. When the news of Rowe’s pregnancy reached Michael’s mother Katherine, the Jackson family matriarch urged her son to wed the mother of his unborn child. Katherine did not want her son to be like his father, who had produced an illegitimate child with a woman while married to Michael’s mother. The words resonated with the musician, who did not want to repeat his father’s sins. He called Rowe and asked her to meet him as soon as she could, in Australia, where he was staying. There, MJ announced his plans for them to wed the very next day. Jackson and Rowe got married on November 13, 1996, at the Sheraton on the Park Hotel in Sydney, Australia.

Just like his first marriage, media and public reaction to the marriage was once again negative and cynical. The reports alleged that the relationship was an economic one; she was in it for the money and he sought a baby which was later found to be true.

Michael and Debbie had two children, Michael Joseph “Prince” Jackson Junior (born February 13, 1997) and Paris Michael Katherine Jackson (born in April 3, 1998). The kids grew at Neverland Ranch and were cared for by a team of six nannies and six nurses. Their mother Debbie was hardly around and soon stories emerged that Debbie had abandoned her children.

“My kids don’t call me Mom because I don’t want them to. They’re Michael’s children. It’s not that they are not my children, but I had them because I wanted him to be a father… If he called me tonight and said let’s have five more (children), I’d do it in a heartbeat”, said Debbie trying to explain her relationship with Michael and their children.

Feeling uncomfortable with their arrangement, Debbie Rowe asked Michael for a divorce, which he granted without fuss on October 8, 1999. Debbie received around $10 million in a settlement, which started with an immediate payment of $1.5 million. With the divorce, Debbie gave Michael full custody rights to their children. Following the divorce, Michael went on to have a third child. Prince Michael II was born on February 21, 2002, to an unnamed surrogate mother. Michael stated that the baby was produced through artificial insemination using his own sperm cells and he was not aware of the identity of the mother.

Nicknamed “Blanket,” Michael had infamously dangled his new born son from the balcony of his hotel room in Berlin over a crowd of horrified fans. There was widespread outrage over his lack of parenting abilities. He later admitted, “it was a terrible mistake and I would never intentionally endanger the lives of my children”.

Michael was very protective about his three children and would even shield them behind masks when they went out in public. He wanted them to be highly educated and follow a noble and well-respected profession such as medicine. He had seen a tumultuous time as a child artist and did not want his children to go through the same troubles. His daughter Paris particularly showed an early interest in anatomy and so MJ arranged for his personal physician, Dr. Conrad Murray to regularly speak to Paris and Prince about what it takes to be a doctor.

MJ shared special relations with a host of A-list celebrities including Elizabeth Taylor, Princess Diana and Diana Ross. He was especially close to Princess Diana. They had first met at a Wembley gig in 1988 when he handed her black Bad tour jackets for Princes William and Harry. Just before Diana’s death in 1997, Michael was spending thousands a month on phone calls to her.

Veteran actress Elizabeth Taylor was one of Michael’s closest friends. She coined his nickname, the King of Pop, which he seized on and used in his publicity afterwards. It all began during the mid 80s when Taylor walked out from one of Jackson’s concert in Los Angeles Dodgers Stadium. Learning of her abrupt exit, Michael called Taylor almost in tears. She assured the singer that she left due to bad visibility and not a poor performance. That short phone call became a three-hour conversation, and the beginning of their very ling and odd relationship. Just like Michael, Taylor had tasted stardom at a very young age; neither had a childhood and both felt they could relate to each other. Though their relationship was mostly private, she vocally supported MJ when he was accused of child molestation in 1993 and again in 2005..

2001 saw Michael celebrating 30 years as a solo artist with two shows in New York. Joining him on stage were big names in the music industry like Shaggy, Whitney Houston, Usher and Destiny’s Child. He also reunited with his brothers in an unforgettable performance. The same year he released ‘Invincible’ whose single “You Rock My World” was a huge hit.

Differences arose with Sony Music whom Michael blamed for not promoting the album properly. Michael also alleged racial discrimination. As a result, his next single “Cry” was of shoddy quality and did not even feature him. Never the one to give up easily, in 2003, Michael released another album called ‘Number Ones’, a collection of his greatest hits, along with a new single called “One More Chance”.

Then after a hiatus of six long years, Michael retuned in 2009 when he announced a tour at the prestigious O2 arena in London. This was to be his final curtain call and the tour was aptly titled ‘This is It’. His fans reacted with excitement and over 750,000 tickets were sold within minutes of the announcement. The initial plan was for 10 concerts in London, followed by shows in Paris, New York City and Mumbai. But with the astounding response from fans, the concert count was increased to 50 dates. However, the tour was not to be.

In the weeks leading up to the tour, MJ rehearsed at the Staples Centre in Los Angeles. The concerts were supposed to commence on July 13, 2009, and finish on March 6, 2010. But less than three weeks before the first show was due to begin in London,Michael Jackson passed away, leaving the whole world in a state of shock.

On June 25, 2009 , Michael Jackson died while in his bed, at his rented mansion at 100 North Carolwood Drive in Los Angeles. Just like his life, his death too was mired in controversy. It was later found that Michael died of ‘ acute propofol intoxication ’or a fatal overdose of the propofol drug used to treat insomnia. His personal physician who was present on the scene at the time of his death, Doctor Conrad Murray, was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to four years in prison.

Throughout his life, Michael had been rumoured to be addicted to painkillers and over-the-counter drugs. At the time of his death, he was believed to be consuming the narcotic painkiller Demerol for no valid medical purpose and was also taking sleep-inducing medication intravenously. Incidentally, both Demerol and propofol were found in Neverland during the child molestation probe. According to Michael’s make-up consultant Karen Faye, “he was weak, extremely thin and seemed to be under the influence of drugs”. She revealed that Michael had told her he would be unable to physically complete the upcoming tour. Other friends and medical professionals also confirmed that Michael frequently requested them for help in getting the drugs.

Michael Jackson was remembered on his third death anniversary this year with 10,000 roses on his grave. This was an elegant and a simple tribute to a man who dedicated his life to his fans and music.

The atmosphere was different when Michael passed away on June 25, 2009. The world united in sorrow and several prominent websites crashed as traffic soared. According to AOL, an online service provider, it was a seminal moment in internet history . The same media that had written conflicting reports about Michael during his lifetime honuored him in his death. A host of celebrities paid tribute but it was activist and talk show host Reverend Al Sharpton who, perhaps, summed it best at Michael’s memorial in Los Angeles, saying to his children , “Wasn’t nothing strange about your daddy. It was strange what your daddy had to deal with”. Ironically, Michael had the comeback of his dreams after his death as he became the best-selling artist of 2009.

The stupendous success of MJ reflected in his overall earnings. In the last 25 years of Michael’s lifetime, it is estimated that he made more than $300 million from his own music royalties and another $400 million from concerts. As per reports which were published in 2007, MJ’s networth was $236.6 million comprising of $567.6 million in assets, which included Neverland Ranch and his 50% share of Sony/ATV Music Publishing catalogue, and debts of $331 million.

Michael Jackson was also reported to be one of the largest owners of property on the moon. In 2005, he bought a 1,200 acre plot in the Lake of Dreams and owned a smaller parcel in the Sea of Vapours. This was one of Michael’s several extravagant purchases that pushed the one time millionaire into a state of bankruptcy. The financial crisis started way back in 1993 when he had to settle against child molestation charges with a hefty $22 million. This was followed by several other lawsuits the following years and huge settlements.

To finance his rich lifestyle, Michael borrowed to the tune of $200 million from banks and in 2006 was spending $20 to $30 million more per year than he earned. He even had to sell his controlling stake in the Neverland Ranch and other memorabilia to raise funds for himself. Just before his death, MJ agreed to perform 50 concerts in spite of poor health conditions. The concerts were seen as his last attempts to get out of financial woes.

Following his death, all assets were transferred to the Michael Jackson Family Trust. MJ’s will stated that after his death, 20% of money made through royalties would go to various unspecified charities. Media reports suggested that settlement of Michael’s estate could last many years.

As per MJ’s will, his mother Katherine was made the permanent guardian of Prince Michael, Paris and their half-brother Prince Michael II. MJ’s ex-wife Debbie, was granted visitation rights with her two children and was also entitled to receive spousal support payment.

Besides his three children, MJ is survived by his brothers, Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon, and Randy; sisters Rebbie, La Toya, and Janet; and parents Joseph and Katherine. Joe and Katherine are estranged, though still married. Joe, whose public image was tarnished in the 80s following revelation of his abusive nature, continued to receive financial assistance from MJ until the early 90s. Joe then started managing Janet and La Toya’s career through the nineties but that arrangement did not last for long either.

In one of MJ’s tribute event following his death, the insensitive nature of Joe once again made headlines when he was found talking to the media about his new hip-hop record label company.

MJ – The Greatest Musical Legend

“MJ was not an artist who comes along once in a decade, a generation or a lifetime. He was an artist who comes along only once.” – recalls Motown chief Berry Gordy.

Truly, Michael was driven by his hunger to learn, to constantly top himself, to be the best. He was a consummate student who studied the greats and became greater. He raised the bar and then broke it several times and even shaped the musical entertainment industry for decades. He did live a dual personality to deal with the pressures of his stardom. Off-stage he was shy, soft spoken and childlike. But on-stage, MJ was a different creature altogether. When he performed, he gave his everything and he did this because he loved music and loved performing for his fans. This was reflected by the fact that he used to lose 10 pounds of body water in each of his concerts.

Undoubtedly, he made some poor decisions along the way and went through torrid periods in his life, but he also accomplished everything he dreamt of. Even at the age of nine, his passion was to be the greatest entertainer in the world and the little kid from Gary worked extremely hard to become one.

Beginning with the Jackson 5 and stretching until his death at the age of 50, Michael Jackson sold more than 750 million records worldwide. He scored eight platinum or multi-platinum albums, 13 #1 singles and 13 Grammy Awards. Thriller continues to be the biggest-selling non-compilation album of all time. Michael Jackson is also recognized as the most successful entertainer of all time by Guinness World Records.

Looking back, it is hard to believe how a little boy from Gary, Indiana, could achieve all this but he did it, with his music and dance that made him a global figure and a household name. He entertained millions around the world for over four decades and even after his death, MJ continues to have an influence on pop culture. He is the undisputed “King of Pop” and will forever remain in the hearts of music fans for years to come.

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Triumph & Tragedy: The Life of Michael Jackson

By Mikal Gilmore

Mikal Gilmore

This story was originally published in the 2009 special edition dedicated to Michael Jackson .

He was, in the end, precisely what he claimed and struggled to be: the biggest star in the world. If there had been any doubt, it ended on the afternoon of June 25th, 2009, when the news broke that Michael Jackson had died of apparent cardiac arrest in Los Angeles at age 50. The outpouring of first shock, then grief, was the largest, most instantaneous of its kind the world had ever known, short of the events of September 11th, 2001. Though the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. affected history more, and the deaths of Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Kurt Cobain signified the end of epochs, no single death has ever moved so fast around the globe, or to the forefront of all news, as swiftly as Michael Jackson’s.

In the days that followed, news channels, TV specials, feature magazines and front pages tried to understand what happened. Not so much the events of Jackson’s death – though there was confusion surrounding that – but rather the nature of his life and legacy. He was a man with a complicated personality, a man with a history that was both glorious and notorious. He was not a man that anybody felt nothing about. The most affecting statement I heard came from a young black man, Egberto Willies, whose self-chronicled video statement aired on CNN: “I grew up,” Willies said, and paused a beat, “on Michael Jackson. I loved … Michael Jackson. I hated … Michael Jackson. I admired … Michael Jackson. I was ashamed … of Michael Jackson. I was sorry … for Michael Jackson. I was proud … of Michael Jackson.”

What immediately became obvious in all the coverage is that despite the dishonor that had come upon him, despite the worst kinds of allegations against him, despite his extravagances, his idiosyncratic fears, his perceived megalomania (or narcissism) and his prolonged abandonment of his art, the world still respected Michael Jackson for the music he made for more than four decades. No single artist – indeed, no movement or force – has eclipsed what Jackson accomplished in the first years of his adult solo career. Clearly, many other artists have given us great art, great outrage, great invention and great rejuvenation – but Michael Jackson changed the balance in the pop world in a way that nobody has since. He forced rock & roll and the mainstream press to acknowledge that the biggest pop star in the world could be young and black, and in doing so he broke down more barriers than anybody. But he is also among the best proofs in living memory of poet William Carlos Williams’ famous verse: “The pure products of America/go crazy.” American music has had fewer pure products than Michael Jackson.

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There is no story in popular music as providential yet as tragic as the story of Michael Jackson. Both destinies ran throughout his life, more or less from the beginning: While still a child, he became the central source of support for a large family and an incalculable asset to one of the most important record labels in history. Jackson benefited from all of that – he won fame and money, and developed a self-image that set him apart from almost everybody. He lived vast lives within himself – it’s where he brooded and transformed his resentments and desires into both blissful and fierce art. It’s also where he found his strengths, and where he kept his frailties until they became lethal foibles. Given his upbringing, you can see why he had to make that life within.

Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, was a crane operator during the 1950s, in Gary, Indiana – a place in which, according to Dave Marsh’s Trapped: Michael Jackson and the Crossover Dream , quotas were imposed on how many black workers were allowed to advance into skilled trades in the city’s mills. Black workers were paid less than the white workers, and also suffered much higher rates of fatal industry-related illnesses – but Joe Jackson held hopes that music would lift his life. Michael’s mother, Katherine Scruse, was from Alabama but was living in East Chicago, Indiana, when she met Joe. She had grown up hearing country & western music, and although she entertained her own dreams of singing and playing music, a bout of polio had left her with a permanent limp. Joe and Katherine were a young couple, married in 1949, and began a large family immediately. Their first child, Maureen (Rebbie), was born in 1950, followed by Sigmund (Jackie) in 1951, Toriano (Tito) in 1953, Jermaine in 1954, La Toya in 1956 and Marlon in 1957. Michael was born on August 29th, 1958, and Randy was born in 1961. Janet, the last born, wouldn’t arrive until 1966.

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Michael and his siblings heard music all the time. Joe had a strong inclination toward the rowdy electric urban blues that had developed in nearby Chicago, and also for early rock & roll. Along with his brothers, Joe formed a band, the Falcons, and made some modest extra income from playing bars and college dances around Gary. “They would do some of the great early rock & roll and blues songs by Chuck Berry, Little Richard … you name it,” Michael wrote in his 1988 autobiography, Moonwalk . “All those styles were amazing and each had an influence on … us, though we were too young to know it at the time.” 

When the Falcons folded, Joe retired his guitar to a bedroom closet, and he guarded it jealously, just as he did everything in his domain. Katherine, though, sometimes led her children in country-music singalongs, during which she taught them to harmonize. Tito, like his father, had a quick affinity for playing instruments, and one day after retrieving Joe’s guitar to practice with his brothers, he broke a string. As Michael later recalled, Joe whipped Tito for the infraction – “he let him have it” – then challenged his son to show him what he could play. As it turned out, Tito impressed his father. Maybe in those moments Joe Jackson saw a future hope blossom again. He bought Tito his own guitar and taught him some Ray Charles music, then he got Jermaine a bass. Soon he was working all his sons into an ensemble. Though Joe was at heart a blues man, he appreciated that contemporary R&B – Motown and soul – was the music that attracted his sons. Joe groomed Jermaine to be lead singer, but one day, Katherine saw Michael, just four at the time, singing along to a James Brown song, and Michael – in both his voice and moves – was already eclipsing his older brother. She told Joe, “I think we have another lead singer.” Katherine would later say that sometimes Michael’s precocious abilities frightened her – she probably saw that his childhood might give way to stardom – but she also recognized that there was something undeniable about his young voice, that it could communicate longings and experiences that no child could yet know. Michael was also a natural center of attention. He loved singing and dancing, and because he was so young – such an unexpected vehicle for a rousing, dead-on soulful expression – he became an obvious point of attention when he and his brothers performed. Little Michael Jackson was cute, but little Michael Jackson was also dynamite.

There is no story in popular music as providential yet as tragic as the story of Michael Jackson. 

It’s clear that Joe Jackson was good at what he did. “He knew exactly what I had to do to become a professional,” Michael later said. “He taught me exactly how to hold a mike and make gestures to the crowd and how to handle an audience.” But by Joe’s own admission he was also unrelenting. “When I found out that my kids were interested in becoming entertainers, I really went to work with them,” he told Time in 1984. “I rehearsed them about three years before I turned them loose. That’s practically every day, for at least two or three hours. … They got a little upset about the whole thing in the beginning because the other kids were out having a good time. … Then I saw that after they became better, they enjoyed it more.” That isn’t always how Michael remembered it. “We’d perform for him, and he’d critique us,” he wrote in Moonwalk . “If you messed up, you got hit, sometimes with a belt, sometimes with a switch. … I’d get beaten for things that happened mostly outside rehearsal. Dad would make me so mad and hurt that I’d try to get back at him and get beaten all the more. I’d take a shoe and throw it at him, or I’d just fight back, swinging my fists. That’s why I got it more than all my brothers combined. I’d fight back, and my father would kill me, just tear me up.” Those moments – and probably many more – created a loss that Jackson never got over. He was essential to the family’s music making, but there was no other bond between father and son. Again, from Moonwalk : “One of the few things I regret most is never being able to have a real closeness with him. He built a shell around himself over the years, and once he stopped talking about our family business, he found it hard to relate to us. We’d all be together, and he’d just leave the room.”

Around 1964, Joe began entering the Jackson brothers in talent contests, many of which they handily won. A single they cut for the local Steeltown recording label, “Big Boy,” achieved local success. “At first I told myself they were just kids,” Joe said in 1971. “I soon realized they were very professional. There was nothing to wait for. The boys were ready for stage training, and I ran out of reasons to keep them from the school of hard knocks.” In 1966, he booked his sons into Gary’s black nightclubs, as well as some in Chicago. Many of the clubs served alcohol, and several featured strippers. “This is quite a life for a nine-year-old,” Katherine would remind her husband, but Joe was undaunted. “I used to stand in the wings of this one place in Chicago and watch a lady whose name was Mary Rose,” Michael recalled. “This girl would take off her clothes and her panties and throw them to the audience. The men would pick them up and sniff them and yell. My brothers and I would be watching all this, taking it in, and my father wouldn’t mind.” Sam Moore, of Sam and Dave, recalled Joe locking Michael – who was maybe 10 years old – in a dressing room while Joe went off on his own adventures. Michael sat alone for hours. He also later recalled having to go onstage even if he’d been sick in bed that day.

Michael and his brothers began to tour on what was still referred to as the “chitlin circuit” – a network of black venues throughout the U.S. (Joe made sure his sons kept their school studies up to date and maintained their grades at an acceptable level.) In these theaters and clubs, the Jacksons opened for numerous R&B artists, including the Temptations, Sam and Dave, Jackie Wilson, Jerry Butler, the O’Jays and Etta James, though no one was as important to Michael as James Brown. 

“I knew every step, every grunt, every spin and turn,” he recalled. “He would give a performance that would exhaust you, just wear you out emotionally. His whole physical presence, the fire coming out of his pores, would be phenomenal. You’d feel every bead of sweat on his face, and you’d know what he was going through….You couldn’t teach a person what I’ve learned just standing and watching.” 

The most famous site on these tours was the Apollo in New York, where the Jackson 5 won an Amateur Night show in 1967. Joe had invested everything he had in his sons’ success, though of course any real recognition or profit would be his success as well. While on the circuit, Joe had come to know Gladys Knight, who was enjoying a string of small successes with Motown, America’s pre-eminent black pop label. With the encouragement of both Knight and Motown R&B star Bobby Taylor, Joe took his sons to Detroit to audition for the label. In 1969, Motown moved the Jackson family to Los Angeles, set them up at the homes of Diana Ross and the label’s owner, Berry Gordy, and began grooming them. Michael remembered Gordy telling them, “I’m gonna make you the biggest thing in the world. … Your first record will be a number one, your second record will be a number one, and so will your third record. Three number-one records in a row.” 

In 1959, Gordy founded Tamla Records – which soon became known as Motown – in Detroit. By the time he signed the Jackson 5 , Motown had long enjoyed its status as the most important black-owned and -operated record label in America, spawning the successes of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Temptations, Mary Wells, the Four Tops, and Diana Ross and the Supremes, among others. In contrast to Stax and Atlantic, Motown’s soul wasn’t especially bluesy or gritty, nor was it a music that spoke explicitly to social matters or to the black struggle in the U.S. By its nature the label exemplified black achievement, but its music was calibrated for assimilation by the pop mainstream – which of course meant a white audience as much as a black one (the label’s early records bore the legend “The Sound of Young America”). At the time, rock music was increasingly becoming a medium for album-length works. By contrast, Motown maintained its identity as a factory that manufactured hit singles, despite groundbreaking albums by Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Gordy was looking for a singles-oriented group that would not only deliver hits for young people, but would also give them somebody to seize as their own, to identify with and to adore. The Jackson 5, Gordy said, would exemplify “bubblegum soul.”

The Jackson 5’s first three singles – “I Want You Back,” “ABC” and “The Love You Save” – became Number One hits as Gordy had promised, and so did a fourth, “I’ll Be There.” The group was established as the breakout sensation of 1970. Fred Rice, who would create Jackson 5 merchandise for Motown, said, “I call ’em the black Beatles. … It’s unbelievable.” And he was right. The Jackson 5 defined the transition from 1960s soul to 1970s pop as much as Sly and the Family Stone did, and at a time when many Americans were uneasy about minority aspirations to power, the Jackson 5 conveyed an agreeable ideal of black pride, one that reflected kinship and aspiration rather than opposition. They represented a realization that the civil rights movement made possible, and that couldn’t have happened even five or six years earlier. Moreover, the Jackson 5 earned critical respectability. Reviewing “I Want You Back” in Rolling Stone , Jon Landau wrote , “The arrangement, energy and simple spacing of the rhythm all contribute to the record’s spellbinding impact.” And though they functioned as a group, there was no question who the Jackson 5’s true star was, and who they depended on. Michael’s voice also worked beyond conventional notions of male-soul vocals – even worked beyond gender. Cultural critic and musician Jason King, in an outstanding essay, recently wrote, “It is not an exaggeration to say that he was the most advanced popular singer of his age in the history of recorded music. His untrained tenor was uncanny. By all rights, he shouldn’t have had as much vocal authority as he did at such a young age.”

Fred Rice, who would create Jackson 5 merchandise for Motown, said, “I call ’em the black Beatles. … It’s unbelievable.”

For at least the first few years, Michael and his brothers seemed omnipresent and enjoyed universal praise. But soon they experienced some hard limitations. The music they were making wasn’t really of invention – they didn’t write or produce it – and after Michael was relegated to recording throwback fare like “Rockin’ Robin,” in 1972, he worried that the Jackson 5 would become an “oldies act” before he left adolescence. The Jackson 5 began pushing to produce themselves and to create their own sound. Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye had demonstrated an ability to grow and change – and sell records – when given creative leeway, and with 1974’s “Dancing Machine,” the Jacksons proved they could thrive when they seized a funk groove. Motown, however, wouldn’t consider it. “They not only refused to grant our requests,” Michael said in Moonwalk , “they told us it was taboo to even mention that we wanted to do our own music.” Michael understood what this meant: Not only would Motown not let the Jackson 5 grow, they also wouldn’t let him grow. Michael bided his time, studying the producers he and his brothers worked with. “I was like a hawk preying in the night,” he said. “I’d watch everything. They didn’t get away with nothing without me seeing. I really wanted to get into it.”

In 1975, Joe Jackson negotiated a new deal for his sons – this time with Epic Records, for a 500 percent royalty-rate increase. The contract also stipulated solo albums from the Jacksons (though the arrangement did not include Jermaine, who married Gordy’s daughter Hazel and stayed with Motown, creating a rift with the family that lasted for several years). Motown tried to block the deal, and in the end stopped the brothers from using the Jackson 5 name; the group would now be known as the Jacksons. Epic initially placed them with Philadelphia producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, but it wouldn’t be until 1978’s Destiny that the Jacksons finally seized control over their own music and recast their sound – sexy and smooth in the dance-floor hits “Blame It on the Boogie” and the momentous “Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground),” and reflecting a new depth and emotional complexity in songs like “Push Me Away” and “Bless His Soul.”

Destiny , though, was merely a prelude: By the time the album was finished, Michael was ready to make crucial changes that would establish his ascendancy as a solo artist. He fired his father as his manager and in effect found himself a new father, producer Quincy Jones, whom Michael connected with while filming The Wiz (a reworking of The Wizard of Oz ). Jones was a respected jazz musician, bandleader, composer and arranger who had worked with Clifford Brown, Frank Sinatra, Lesley Gore, Count Basie, Aretha Franklin and Paul Simon, and he had written the film scores for The Pawnbroker , In Cold Blood and In the Heat of the Night . Jackson liked the arranger’s ear for mixing complex hard beats with soft overlayers. “It was the first time that I fully wrote and produced my songs,” Jackson said later, “and I was looking for somebody who would give me that freedom, plus somebody who’s unlimited musically.” Specifically, Jackson said his solo album had to sound different than the Jacksons; he wanted a cleaner and funkier sound. The pairing proved as fortuitous as any collaboration in history. Jones brought an ethereal buoyancy to Jackson’s soft erotic fever on songs like “Rock With You” and “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” and in a stunning moment like “She’s Out of My Life,” Jones had the good sense to let nothing obscure the magnificent heartbreak in the singer’s voice. The resulting album, Off the Wall – which established Jackson as a mature artistic force in his own right – has the most unified feel of any of his works. It was also a massive hit, selling more than 5 million copies in the U.S. alone by 1985. 

Michael Jackson had in effect become one of the biggest black artists America had ever produced, and he expected Off the Wall to win top honors during the 1980 Grammy Awards ceremony. Instead, it received only one honor, for Best Male R&B vocal. The Doobie Brothers’ “What a Fool Believes” won for Record of the Year, and Billy Joel’s 52nd Street won Album of the Year. Jackson was stunned and bitter. “My family thought I was going crazy because I was weeping so much about it,” he recalled. “I felt ignored and it hurt. I said to myself, ‘Wait until next time’ – they won’t be able to ignore the next album. … That experience lit a fire in my soul.” 

Jackson told Jones – and apparently others as well – that his next album wouldn’t simply be bigger than Off the Wall , it would be the biggest album ever. When Thriller was released in November 1982, it didn’t seem to have any overarching theme or even a cohesive style. Instead, it sounded like an assembly of singles – like a greatest-hits album, before the fact. But it became evident fast that this was exactly what Jackson intended Thriller to be: a brilliant collection of songs intended as hits, each one designed with mass crossover audiences in mind. Jackson put out “Billie Jean” for the dance crowd, “Beat It” for the white rockers, and then followed each crossover with crafty videos designed to enhance both his allure and his inaccessibility. Yet after hearing these songs find their natural life on radio, it was obvious that they were something more than exceptional highlights. They were a well-conceived body of passion, rhythm and structure that defined the sensibility – if not the inner life – of the artist behind them. These were instantly compelling songs about emotional and sexual claustrophobia, about hard-earned adulthood and about a newfound brand of resolution that worked as an arbiter between the artist’s fears and the inescapable fact of his fame. “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ ” had the sense of a vitalizing nightmare in its best lines (“You’re stuck in the middle/And the pain is thunder. … Still they hate you, you’re a vegetable. … They eat off you, you’re a vegetable”). “Billie Jean,” in the meantime, exposed the ways in which the interaction between the artist’s fame and the outside world might invoke soul-killing dishonor (“People always told me, be careful of what you do. … ‘Cause the lie becomes the truth,” Jackson sings, possibly thinking of a paternity charge from a while back). And “Beat It” was pure anger – a rousing depiction of violence as a male stance, as a social inheritance that might be overcome. In sum, Thriller’s parts added up to the most improbable kind of art – a work of personal revelation that was also a mass-market masterpiece. It’s an achievement that will likely never be topped.

Except, in a sense, Jackson did top it, and he did it within months after Thriller ’s release. It came during a May 16th, 1983, TV special celebrating Motown’s 25th anniversary. Jackson had just performed a medley of greatest hits with his brothers. It was exciting stuff, but for Michael it wasn’t enough. As his brothers said their goodbyes and left the stage, Michael remained. He seemed shy for a moment, trying to find words to say. “Yeah,” he almost whispered, “those were good old days. … I like those songs a lot. But especially—” and then he placed the microphone into the stand with a commanding look and said, “I like the new songs.” He swooped down, picked up a fedora, put it on his head with confidence, and vaulted into “Billie Jean.” This was one of Michael Jackson’s first public acts as a star outside and beyond the Jacksons, and it was startlingly clear that he was not only one of the most thrilling live performers in pop music, but that he was perhaps more capable of inspiring an audience’s imagination than any single pop artist since Elvis Presley. There are times when you know you are hearing or seeing something extraordinary, something that captures the hopes and dreams popular music might aspire to, and that might unite and inflame a new audience. That time came that night, on TV screens across the nation – the sight of a young man staking out his territory, and just starting to lay claim to his rightful pop legend. “Almost 50 million people saw that show,” Jackson wrote in Moonwalk . “After that, many things changed.”

He was right. That was the last truly blessed moment in Michael Jackson’s life. After that, everything became argument and recrimination. And in time, decay.

Before going into that area – where the story breaks in two – it’s probably worth asking, What kind of person was Michael Jackson at that time? What were his hopes and his problems? What did he want his music to say or accomplish? How did he relate to the audience who loved him, and how did he relate to himself? Up to this point, these questions haven’t really figured; Michael Jackson was an immensely talented young man – he seemed shy but ambitious, and he certainly seemed enigmatic. Nobody knew much about his beliefs or his sex life; he rarely gave interviews, but he also didn’t land himself in scandals. He did, however, describe himself as a lonely person – particularly around the time he made Off the Wall . Former Los Angeles Times music critic Robert Hilburn recently wrote of meeting Jackson in 1981 , when the singer was 23, that Jackson struck him as “one of the most fragile and lonely people I’ve ever met … almost abandoned. When I asked why he didn’t live on his own like his brothers, instead remaining at his parents’ house, he said, ‘Oh, no, I think I’d die on my own. I’d be so lonely. Even at home, I’m lonely. I sit in my room and sometimes cry. It is so hard to make friends, and there are some things you can’t talk to your parents or family about. I sometimes walk around the neighborhood at night, just hoping to find someone to talk to. But I just end up coming home.’ ” 

Jackson’s social uneasiness was probably formed by the wounds in his history; the children were insulated from others their age, and Jackson’s status as a lifelong star may have left him feeling not just cut off from most people, but also alien from them – as if his experience or his vocation made him extraordinary. “I hate to admit it,” he once said, “but I feel strange around everyday people.” Not exactly an unusual sentiment for some cloistered celebrities, especially former child stars. At the same time, it’s a statement full of signals: Jackson didn’t enjoy the sort of company that might guide him in positive ways. He probably never did, throughout his life. Maybe the most troubling passage in Moonwalk is when he talks about children in the entertainment world who eventually fell prey to drugs: “I can understand … considering the enormous stresses put upon them at a young age. It’s a difficult life.”

In any event, Michael Jackson seemed clearly reputable – eminent though not heroic, not yet messianic, and certainly not contemptible. Thriller placed seven singles in Billboard’s Top 10 and also became the biggest-selling album in history (presently around 50 million copies or more), and at the 1984 Grammy Awards, Jackson finally claimed his due, capturing eight awards, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year. Then, months later, it was announced that Michael would be setting out on a nationwide tour with the Jacksons. He hadn’t wanted to undertake the venture but felt obliged (“Those were slim shoulders on which to place such burdens,” he wrote of his lifelong family pressures). Clearly, his talents and aspirations went beyond the limitations that his family act imposed on him. By all rights, he should have been taking the stage alone at that point in his career.

Jackson’s aversion to the Victory Tour was apparent when he sat looking miserable at press conferences or when he had to denounce statements by his father that he interpreted as casting aspersions on the Jacksons’ management team of Ron Weisner and Freddy DeMann. “There was a time,” Joe said, “when I felt I needed white help in dealing with the corporate power structure at CBS. … And I thought [Weisner-DeMann] would be able to help.” Michael fired back furiously in a written comment to Billboard : “To hear him talk like that turns my stomach. I don’t know where he gets that from. I happen to be colorblind. I don’t hire color; I hire competence. … I am president of my organization and I have the final word on every decision. Racism is not my motto.” It was the end of any lingering business relationship between Michael and his father.

It was during this period that a backlash first set in against Jackson, though from the press more than from the public. Actually, it began before the tour, as it became apparent that Thriller was headed for unprecedented sales at a blinding rate. The mid-1980s was a time when many in the music press had misgivings about mass popularity – especially if it seemed to represent a homogenized or acquiescent culture. Michael Jackson, after all, wasn’t an artist with a message of sociopolitical revolution, nor did his lyrics reflect literary aspirations. To some then – and to some now – he represented little more than an ambition for personal fame. He wasn’t, it seemed, an artist who would accomplish for his audience what Elvis Presley and the Beatles accomplished for theirs: the sort of event or disruption that changed both youth culture and the world. In my mind, Michael Jackson, Presley and the Beatles all shared one virtue: They bound together millions of otherwise dissimilar people in not just a quirk of shared taste, but also a forceful, heartfelt consensus that spoke to common dreams and values.

But there was a trickier concern at play. The racial dimensions of Jackson’s image proved complex beyond any easy answers at that time, or even since. Some of that was attributable to charges that Jackson seemed willing to trade his former black constituency for an overwhelmingly white audience – otherwise how could he have achieved such staggering sales figures in the U.S.? But what probably inspired these race-related arguments most – the terrain where they all seemed to play out – was the topography of Jackson’s face. With the exception of later accusations about his sexual behavior, nothing inspired more argument or ridicule about Michael Jackson than that face.

In his childhood, Jackson had a sweet, dark-skinned countenance; many early Jackson 5 fans regarded him as the cutest of the brothers. J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness , has written, “[Michael] believed his skin…‘messed up my whole personality.’ He no longer looked at people as he talked to them. His playful personality changed and he became quieter and more serious. He thought he was ugly – his skin was too dark, he decided, and his nose too wide. It was no help that his insensitive father and brothers called him ‘Big Nose.’” Also, as Jackson became an adolescent, he was horribly self-conscious about acne. Hilburn recalled going through a stack of photos with Jackson one night and coming across a picture of him as a teenager: “‘Ohh, that’s horrible,’ [Jackson] said, recoiling from the picture.”

The face Jackson displayed on the cover of Thriller had changed; the skin tone seemed lighter and his nose thinner and straighter. In Moonwalk , Jackson claimed that much of the apparent renovation was due to a change in his diet; he admitted to altering his nose and his chin, but he denied he’d done anything to his skin. Still, the changes didn’t end there. Over the years, Jackson’s skin grew lighter and lighter, his nose tapered more and more and his cheekbones seemed to gain prominence. To some, this all became fair game for derision; to others, it seemed a grotesque mutilation – not just because it might have been an act of conceit, aimed to keep his face forever child-like, but more troublingly because some believed Jackson wanted to transform himself into a white person. Or an androgyne – somebody with both male and female traits. The film Three Kings has a famous scene where an Iraqi interrogator asks a captured American soldier, “What is the problem with Michael Jackson? Your country make him chop up his face. … Michael Jackson is pop king of sick fucking country.” The soldier replies, “It’s bullshit – he did it to himself,” and the Iraqi smacks him on the head with a clipboard. “It is so obvious. A black man make the skin white and the hair straight, and you know why? … Your sick fucking country make the black man hate hisself.” 

In 1985, James Baldwin wrote in an essay for Playboy , “The Michael Jackson cacophony is fascinating in that it is not about Jackson at all. I hope he has the good sense to know it and the good fortune to snatch his life out of the jaws of a carnivorous success. He will not swiftly be forgiven for having turned so many tables, for he damn sure grabbed the brass ring, and the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo has nothing on Michael. All that noise is about America, as the dishonest custodian of black life and wealth; and blacks, especially males, in America, and the burning, buried American guilt; and sex and sexual roles and sexual panic; money, success and despair… ”

Baldwin’s paragraph was sympathetic and unflinching, but it was also prescient. Michael Jackson certainly wanted to seize the ring twice: He wanted his next album to be bigger than Thriller , which was of course too much to ask. An associate of his told me in 1988, “Michael still wants the world to acknowledge him.” Maybe just as important, Jackson was also seeking vindication. He felt misjudged and maligned by much of the criticism heaped on him after the 1984 Victory Tour. He had long been taught, by both his father and Motown, that the press was a vindictive force when it came to entertainers, that it reveled in the rhythm of building a celebrity’s image, only to turn around and undermine that same person. In his case, Jackson wasn’t half wrong. Some of the scrutiny he received about his “freakishness” – his devotion to his animals as if they were his friends, his ongoing facial reconstruction, scornful charges that he slept in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber to maintain his youthfulness – was judgmental, even moralistic. Worse, too much of it came from reporters and gossip columnists, even political commentators, who displayed little if any real appreciation for Jackson’s music and little respect for the sheer genius of his work.

At that time, Jackson’s art was still his best way of making a case for himself. In 1987, he released Bad , his much-anticipated successor to Thriller . If not as eventful and ingenious as Off the Wall and Thriller , Bad was as good as any album he ever made. It was taut and funky, it had snap and fever, it radiated rage and self-pity but also yearning for grace and transcendence – particularly in “Man in the Mirror,” a song about accepting social and political responsibility, and about the artist negotiating his way back into the world. Bad sold millions and launched five Number One singles, three more than Thriller , but because it couldn’t match the accomplishments of Thriller , it was viewed as a flop.

Jackson then staged his first solo tour later that year. On several nights, I saw him turn in inspiring performances that also served as timely reminders of a sometimes overlooked truth about him: Namely that whatever his eccentricities, Michael Jackson acquired his fame primarily because of his remarkably intuitive talents as a singer and dancer – talents that were genuine and matchless and not the constructions of mere ambition or hype. Though he had the lithe frame of Fred Astaire, the mad inventiveness of Gene Kelly, the sexy agony of Jackie Wilson, the rhythmic mastery of James Brown – or of Sammy Davis Jr., for that matter – nobody else moved like Michael Jackson. Certainly nobody else broke open their moment in one daring physical display like Jackson. He didn’t invent the moonwalk – that famous and impossible backward gliding movement from his Motown 25 performance of “Billie Jean” – but it didn’t matter. He had defined himself in that moment and dared anybody else to match it, and nobody ever did. During the Bad tour his moves were breathtaking, sometimes unexpected. In the opening parts of songs like “Bad” and “The Way You Make Me Feel,” he seemed self-conscious and strained pulling off the songs’ cartoonish notion of streetwise sexuality, and his overstated hip pops and crotch snatching came off as more forced than felt. And yet when the music revved up, all the artifice was instantly dispelled. Jackson became suddenly confident and pulled off startling, robotic hip-and-torso thrusts alongside slow-motion, sliding-mime moves that left the audience gasping. Watching those quirky moves, you realized that all that came from somewhere within. You realized Jackson’s exceptional talent could not be completely separable from his eccentricity.

In 1988, he was again nominated for key Grammy Awards including Album of the Year, but he was up against hard competition. Artists like U2 and Prince had fashioned the most ambitious and visionary music of their careers – music that reflected the state of pop and the world in enlivening ways. More to the point, in 1988 there was suspicion among many observers that Jackson’s season as pop’s favorite son had passed. He would win no Grammys that year. In the Rolling Stone Readers’ poll, Jackson placed first in six of the readers’ “worst of the year” categories (including “worst male singer”); in addition, The Village Voice Critics’ Poll failed to mention Jackson’s Bad in its selection of 1987’s 40 best albums. This was a startling turnaround from four years before, when Jackson and his work topped the same polls in both publications. 

Michael jackson never really regained momentum or ambition after the negative reaction to Bad . He had finally left the family home in Encino and built his own fortress estate known as Neverland, about 100 miles north of L.A., with an amusement park and train rides redolent of Disneyland. It became a place where he brought the world to him, or at least that part of the world he seemed to care about, which mainly included children – the people, he said, he felt most at home with, since part of him wanted to experience and share the childhood he felt his father and entertainment career had deprived him of. But it was also Michael’s appetite for the company of children that would create the most lamentable troubles in his life. In 1993, a story broke that Jackson was accused of molesting a 13-year-old boy with whom he had kept frequent company. It was a terribly serious accusation, and given his fondness for the company of children, the charges seemed all too credible to some observers. The story played big in not just tabloid newspapers but in some mainstream media as well. No criminal charges were filed, but in 1994 Jackson settled the matter out of court (reportedly for something in the vicinity of $20 million), which struck many as a tacit admission to the allegations. Jackson, though, categorically denied the claim. He later told British journalist Martin Bashir that he simply wanted to put the issue behind him.

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The episode did enormous damage to Jackson’s image, and perhaps to his psychology as well. It was during that time that, according to some, he developed a dependency on medications that stayed with him through the rest of his life. (Jackson’s need for drugs may also have stemmed from pains attributable to various surgeries.) That same year he unexpectedly married Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of rock & roll’s most eminent pioneer, Elvis Presley. Some saw it as an effort to both rehabilitate and bolster his image by asserting a heterosexual authenticity, and by linking his name to even greater fame. The marriage lasted 18 months. Presley has never spoken negatively of Jackson, only affectionately, saying in the days after her ex-husband’s death that she left him only because she felt she couldn’t save him from himself. Jackson married again in 1996, this time to a nurse from his dermatologist’s office, Debbie Rowe. The couple had two children, son Prince Michael Jackson and daughter Paris Michael Katherine Jackson. Apparently, the children were the true objective of the marriage for Jackson; the couple divorced in 1999 and Rowe gave up custody of the children. (Rowe has admitted in the past that Jackson wasn’t the children’s biological father, but rather that they were conceived by artificial insemination.)

Through the course of all this, sadly, Jackson’s musical drive fell off, and the music that did emerge was only sporadically successful. His new music was often a testament of self-justification. In “Childhood,” a song from 1995’s HIStory: Past, Present and Future , he put forth his case for his otherness: “No one understands me/They view it as such strange eccentricities. … It’s been my fate to compensate/For the childhood I’ve never known/ Before you judge me, try hard to love me/ Look within your heart, then ask/Have you seen my childhood?” Two years later, still dismayed at how the media continued to judge him, Jackson lashed out in “Is It Scary,” a song from his 1997 remix album, Blood on the Dance Floor : “Am I the beast you visualized/And if you wanna see/Eccentric oddities/I’ll be grotesque before your eyes….So tell me….Am I scary for you?” His hurt and anger also began to come out more in his body over the years. Sometimes his expression looked terrified, his eyes peering over surgical masks or from behind the cover of a burqa. Other times he moved with an explosive fury, as in those moments at the end of his infamous but incredibly successful 1991 video for the song “Black or White.” Those movements seemed so different from the joyful ones of years before.

But despite good moments – and too many treacly and self-aggrandizing ones –  Michael Jackson’s 1990s music had no real presence in the ongoing current of popular culture. His final album, Invincible , from 2001, yielded a few adventurous tracks – Jackson was finally accommodating the stylistic and cultural innovations made by hip-hop and other urban music forms – but overall it wasn’t enough to live up to its title. This isn’t to say that Michael Jackson was no longer a huge star but rather that his legend had transmuted: He was now known for his excesses and bad choices. He lived in a castle; he contracted another baby, Prince Michael II (whose mother has never been identified); and he then recklessly dangled the baby over a balcony in Berlin. Sometimes you had to wonder whether Jackson had any real idea how his actions struck the world – which is perhaps OK, unless you expect the world to love you unconditionally.

Jackson’s most egregious lapse of judgment became evident in a notorious 2003 interview with Martin Bashir, in which the singer professed that he still shared his bed at Neverland with children who were not his own. During one point in the broadcast, Jackson sat holding the hand of a 13-year-old boy, a cancer survivor, and explained what he saw as the innocent and loving nature of that behavior. The public response was swift and hypercritical; many thought that despite the accusations he had faced in 1993, Jackson could still act as he wanted with impunity. The reaction was so devastating to Jackson that, according to some rumors, later that year he attempted a morphine overdose; at the very least, some observers declared Jackson had committed career suicide. The controversy became as serious as possible when the boy in the video accused Jackson of fondling him. This time, the matter went to trial. The horrible drama that Jackson had landed in was in keeping with the dominant themes of his life and art: his obsessions with stardom, mystery, hubris, fear and despoiled childhood. If the charges were true, one had to wonder what Jackson truly saw when he looked at the childhoods of others. Was he capable of disrespecting their innocence, just as his own was once ruined? But if the charges weren’t true, then one had to ask what measure of satisfaction could be won in his ruin?

The 2005 trial was the spectacle everybody expected it to be – a drama about justice and celebrity, sex and outrage, morality and race. Even though it dragged on, it was clear the prosecution didn’t have a case so much as it had umbrage. The trial was a farce – it’s dismaying the case ever made it to trial – and Jackson was acquitted on all charges. But the damage done seemed, in many ways, final. Jackson walked out of the courtroom that day a shaken, listless man. His finances were also coming undone; he had been spending ludicrous sums and he’d mismanaged his money – which took some doing, since he had made such a vast fortune. The biggest star in the world had fallen from the tallest height. He left the country and moved to Bahrain; he was only occasionally seen or heard from. Nobody knew whether he could recover his name, or even preserve his considerable music legacy, until earlier this year, when he announced an incredibly ambitious series of 50 concerts – which he described as the “final curtain call” – to take place at London’s O2 arena, beginning July 13th.

It’s hard to believe that Jackson, who was so proud of his public performances and so peerless at delivering them, would have committed himself to a project in which he might fail so tremendously. At the same time, it is not inconceivable that Michael Jackson could have been a man half-hungry and broken in the past few years. All that is certain is that on June 25th, in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson met the only sure redemption he might know, in the most famous unexpected and mysterious death in current history. That redemption didn’t come because he died, but because his death forced us to reconsider what his life added up to.

What killed Michael Jackson? His life-long pursuit of fame and vindication? No doubt, in part. He pushed too hard, wanted too much; he didn’t recognize limitations. In addition, the pain of achieving so much yet being derided and dismissed time and again had to be considerable. It’s also clear that all the hatred and judgment directed his way for his peculiarities and for his rumored sexual behavior had to debilitate his spirit, if not his body. That subject of child molestation will always, of course, be a crux concern about his life, one that, for many people, clearly – and understandably – trumps his art. We will likely never know what the truth was, which is one more awful aspect of the whole nightmare. The accusation will always stay attached to his name.

What, then, saved Michael Jackson – that is, after his death? At the least, his art and his accomplishments. When somebody makes as much great music as Jackson did, our collective pleasures are enriched and our history is made more intense and complex. In his ambitions, in his setbacks and most important, in his sounds, he embodied black music history in America. But he did more: The barriers he broke helped make the modern pop world a more inclusive scene than it once was before. That is, he staked out new territory. It is always a good thing to see somebody transforming the world of known possibilities. I remember, as a kid, watching Elvis Presley do it on the Dorsey brothers’ Stage Show and The Ed Sullivan Show. I remember, as an adolescent, watching the Beatles open up whole new artistic and historic possibilities in their first U.S. appearances, live on Ed Sullivan. I remember, in my first year as a writer on the staff of Rolling Stone, watching the Sex Pistols crack old surfaces and yield a new future – even as they sang of “no future” onstage at San Francisco’s Winterland, during their last 1970s performance.

Still, I’ll never forget that night back in early 1983, when onstage in Pasadena, California, at the Motown 25th anniversary show, Michael Jackson gave his first public performance as a mature artist staking his own claim, vaulting into that astonishingly graceful, electrifying version of “Billie Jean.” Dancing, spinning, sending out impassioned, fierce glares at the overcome audience, Jackson did a powerful job of animating and mythologizing his own blend of mystery and sexuality. I’d never seen anything quite like it before. Maybe I never will again. Michael Jackson didn’t just grab the gold ring: He hooked it to a new bar and set it even higher, and nobody has yet snatched it with quite the same flair or results. 

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Entertainism

A Short Biography of the King of Pop Michael Jackson

Polarizing, controversial, but legendary, the King of Pop Michael Jackson was one of the greatest entertainers ever, and completely redefined pop culture. This biography showcases the moments and events that truly changed his life. Read on to know more in this Entertainism post.

Did You Know?

Michael Jackson has won 15 Grammy awards, including the Legend and the Lifetime Achievement Awards, and 26 American Music Awards. He also had 13 #1 singles in the US. The first two are still-intact records, while the latter is a record for male artists. Jackson is the most awarded musician in history, with more than 200 awards. He also holds the record of having supported 39 charities, with the Guinness Book of Records recognizing his extensive humanitarian work in 2000.

A child prodigy, Jackson, or MJ, as he is more commonly known, continued his progress into adulthood, going on to become a pop culture phenomenon and one of the most iconic dancers in living history. His songs are the stuff of legends, and his various dance moves are ingrained into pop culture. He is also known for his humanitarian efforts, but is, conversely, equally infamous for the various scandals in his life.

Let’s take a deeper look into this legend’s life.

Michael Joseph Jackson was born on August 29, 1958 , in Gary, Indiana. The 8th of 10 children, Michael had his first tryst with music as a singer in the Jackson family band, Jackson 5, in 1964, at the tender age of five. Jackson 5 played at local nightclubs and also participated in competitions. Despite his young age, he soon carved a niche for himself as a singer and dancer of exceptional ability. Jackson 5 ruled the charts in the late ’60s and the early ’70s. After signing a contract with Motown, Jackson 5 had to shift their base to California. This was followed by chart busters like ‘I Want You Back,’, ‘Dancing Machine’, ‘The Love You Save’ and ‘I’ll Be There’ in 1970. Jackson 5 remained with Motown till 1975, while Jackson’s solo career started in 1972. In 1976, Jackson 5, now re-branded as the Jacksons, switched to Epic Records.

Jackson’s childhood was difficult, and had a heavy influence on his life. His father was a very strict disciplinarian, and though Michael later attributed his success to the strict singing practice conducted by his father, it also had a demoralizing effect on the budding entertainer’s mindset. He suffered from various psychological issues, including chronic and persistent sleep problems, due to his childhood.

Solo Career

Collaboration with quincy jones.

Michael first met his future producer, Quincy Jones, on the sets of The Wiz , a musical version of The WIzard of Oz starring an all-African American cast. Despite his later success as a musician, Jackson was an actor in this film; he played Scarecrow.

Jones was influential in Jackson’s most famous release, Thriller , in 1982. This record-busting album is reputed to have sold more than 60 million copies, though certified sales only indicate about 42.4 million. It is the highest-selling album in music history, and established Michael as the King of Pop, a moniker that has now very much become his own. 7 singles from the album reached the top 10 in the Billboard Top 100 chart, which is a joint record. The music video of ‘Billie Jean’ is among the most watched music videos of all time, and received regular airtime, consolidating the reputation of the nascent MTV in the process. It was also one of the very first music videos by a black artist to receive such consistent airtime, and one of the first to become equally popular across the racial divide. His success, aided by the furious efforts of CBS Music directors to get MTV to broadcast a black artist’s song, paved the way for future African American artists to receive as much airtime as white artists.

Quincy Jones first collaborated with Michael in 1979 on the album Off the Wall , a legendary production in its own right. Selling more than 20 million copies, it is also one of the best-selling albums of all time. With the success of Off the Wall , Jackson was able to secure the highest royalty rate in the music world: a whopping 37% of the album’s profits, which later equated to almost USD 2 for each copy!

Five years after Thriller , Jackson released his final album with Jones, Bad , in 1987. It was hugely popular, reputedly selling more than 30 million copies. Though it didn’t outsell Thriller , it bested it in one important aspect: five singles from Bad reached the top spot in the Billboard Top 100, which was the first time this feat had been achieved by a single album. It also became the first album to reach the top spot in 25 countries. The Bad world tour, held from September 1988-January 1989, broke multiple records of attendance in various countries; the 570,000-strong people that watched him in Japan were almost three times the previous record in the country, and his seven sellout shows in Wembley Stadium London, totaling a crowd of 504,000 people, broke a Guinness World Record. In total, he performed 123 shows on this world tour, reaching out to 4.4 million people in the process.

One of the most famous images in the world, and the one most associated with Michael Jackson, is the fantastic ‘moonwalk’. It was first performed by him in public on Motown 25: Yesterday, Today, Forever , a 1983 TV special commemorating the 25 th year of the popular music production company, Motown Records.

Michael at first declined the invitation, due to his reluctance to rejoin his brothers for a mini-reunion of the Jacksons, but was persuaded by Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown, on the condition that Michael be allotted a solo slot in addition to the group gig.

According to some, Jackson only practiced the moonwalk once at his home before brandishing it on air. The iconic movement, where the performer appears to slide backwards while apparently walking forward, was not created by Jackson, but spread like wildfire after it was popularized by one of the premier artists of the time. It was performed during the song ‘Billie Jean’, and became a staple in Jackson’s subsequent live performances. This performance rocketed Jackson onto new heights of fame. In the words of Berry Gordy himself,

From the first beat of Billie Jean, I was mesmerized, and when he did his iconic moonwalk, I was shocked, it was magic, Michael Jackson went into orbit, and never came down.

In 1985, Jackson co-wrote We Are The World with Lionel Richie, for humanitarian purposes primarily in Africa. The song became one of the bestselling singles of all time.

Jackson didn’t relent his pursuit of musical innovation and success, with his album Dangerous selling more than 20 million certified copies. The album contained one of Jackson’s most famous songs, Black or White . This album was notable as the first Jackson album to feature a rapper, as well as one of the pioneering works in the new jack swing genre.

The Dangerous world tour, starting in June 1992 and ending 17 months later in November 1993, drew 3.5 million listeners in 70 concerts. HBO bagged the broadcast rights of the world tour for USD 20 million―a still-intact record.

In January 1993, Jackson also performed at the halftime show at Super Bowl XXVII. His performance, where he sang four songs, was the first halftime show to have more viewers than the match in progress!

HIStory: Past, Present and Future , released in 1995, went straight to the number one slot in several countries. It contained a compilation of MJ’s hit singles, and also featured the lavishly made science-fiction video ‘Scream’. The second single, ‘You Are Not Alone’, surpassed the success of ‘Scream’ by becoming the first ever song to debut at the top spot in the Billboard Top 100. ‘Earth Song’, the third single released from this album, reached the top position and became MJ’s most successful single in the UK. ‘Earth Song’ gave a strong message to the viewers, as it addressed issues related to the environment and poverty. This album was reissued in 2001 as Greatest Hits: HIStory Volume I along with a second installment, HIStory Continues , and became the best-selling double album in history, with more than 20 million copies sold. The HIStory world tour, conducted between September 1996 and October 1997, included 82 concerts for a total audience of 4.5 million.

By Jackson’s astronomical standards, his only original album in the 2000s, Invincible , was not extremely popular. Having said that, it still managed to sell 13 million copies, in spite of being released at a time of a general slump in the music industry, without an accompanying world tour, and with very little promotion.

Solo Discography

Got to Be There (1972) Ben (1972) Music & Me (1973) Forever, Michael (1975) Off the Wall (1979) Thriller (1982) Bad (1987) Dangerous (1991) HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I (1995) Invincible (2001)

Controversies

Due to his fame, Michael Jackson’s life was always under the microscope. His complicated personality and various long-standing psychological issues meant that he was never far from a controversy. He faced multiple child sexual abuse allegations, as well as general rumors about his mental health. His close association with his pet chimpanzee, Bubbles, in particular, spawned worldwide mocking and parody.

Despite his success and influential role as a black musician, Jackson faced widespread rumors that he had repeatedly bleached his skin in order to achieve a lighter complexion―an action that was criticized roundly. He stated that he had vitiligo, an idiopathic condition that brings about a lighter skin, but can also be caused due to chemical bleaching of the skin.

He also underwent two rhinoplasty operations in order to make his nose successively thinner. One of the procedures did not pan out as hoped, and he suffered from breathing issues as a result.

Around the time of the release of Thriller , Jackson suffered from anorexia nervosa, and lost a considerable amount of weight in order to gain a “dancer’s body”.

Child Sexual Abuse Allegations

Michael faced allegations of child sexual abuse twice in his life. The first time was in 1993, when 13-year-old Jordan Chandler accused him of sexual abuse at Michael’s estate, Neverland. Despite conflicting evidence and doubts over Jordan’s father’s intentions in pursuing the case (there was some evidence which hinted that the boy’s father was primarily interested in blackmailing Jackson, rather than fighting for justice for his son), the case was settled out of court by Michael’s insurance company, without having notified him.

Following the depiction of certain encounters in Martin Bashir’s controversial documentary Living with Michael Jackson , Jackson was arrested on charges of child molestation. He was acquitted on all counts on June 13, 2005, and subsequently relocated to Bahrain as a guest of Sheikh Abdulla, son of the King of Bahrain. Jackson, asserting his innocence, later claimed that Bashir had deliberately portrayed him in a negative light.

Despite the absence of a conviction in either of the cases, Jackson’s reputation has been considerably tarnished by these allegations.

Marriages and Children

Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of ‘The King’ Elvis Presley, in 1994. Their acquaintance went back to 1975, but they got close after the renewal of their friendship due to Michael’s ongoing struggles with the child abuse allegations. Presley, who believed steadfastly in Michael’s innocence, married him secretly in 1994.

The marriage, claimed by tabloids to have been a publicity stunt (in spite of the initial secrecy about it) to help Michael’s image as a good-natured family man, lasted less than two years, though Presley later stated that they had reconnected and broken up several times in the next few years.

Jackson married Deborah Rowe, his dermatologist’s nurse, in 1996, during the early stages of the HIStory world tour. She was about six months pregnant at the time, and gave birth to Jackson’s first child, Michael Joseph Jackson Jr., on February 13, 1997. Their second child, Paris-Michael Katherine Jackson, was born on April 3, 1998. Jackson and Rowe divorced in 1999, with Jackson getting full custody of their children.

Jackson had a third child from a surrogate mother on February 21, 2002. He was named Prince Michael Jackson II. He became the center of a controversy in his early days, when Jackson held him aloft in his room’s balcony in the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, in order to allow the gathered public to see him better. The baby dangled beyond the railing, an action which invited widespread criticism for Michael, who later apologized profusely.

This great entertainer died a controversial and mysterious death on his bed in a rented mansion in Los Angeles, on June 25, 2009. The news of his death caused a huge upsurge in internet usage, causing several prominent websites, including Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter, to crash due to user overload.

His death was mysterious, with suspicions of homicide, a drug-induced accidental death or suicide, or some malice on the part of his personal physician, who prescribed his daily medication. The physician was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and completed a two-year sentence in 2013.

Michael Jackson’s contribution to the world of pop and dance are irreplaceable and irrevocable. This legend’s music has a strong hold on all the music lovers over the globe. It is, therefore, not a surprise that we have his records playing in clubs even today, and wannabes still trying to perfect the moonwalk.

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10 of Michael Jackson's Most Iconic Moments

Michael Jackson rocketed to global stardom in the early 1980s, but his legacy as the King of Pop is based on more than the height of his career. Famous since the age of 11, he was a superstar by his mid 20s and continued to be a beloved, if flawed, phenomenon through his death on June 25, 2009. As one of the 20th century’s most important and enduringly popular entertainers, he had dozens of newsworthy, career-shaping moments: Here’s a look at 10 of the most iconic:

The 'Thriller' album and music video

The album Thriller reinvented all standards of commercial pop success. Released on November 30, 1982, it debuted at No. 1, containing seven top 10 hits on Billboard Hot 100, including the rock-driven cautionary tale “Beat It” and the plaintive “Billie Jean,” as well as the spooky but danceable title track. The album made Jackson the first artist to win eight Grammy Awards in one night. Thriller stayed at the top of the charts for 37 weeks, which was a first, and though its position waned, it shot back to No. 1 when its ghoulish video was released a year later. The video’s unison zombie dance still inspires mass groups to try the choreography, and the album continues to be the world’s best-selling album with estimated sales of at least 66 million, according to the Guinness World Records, though some estimates set the number much higher.

READ MORE: Michael Jackson: Behind the Scenes of His Iconic 'Thriller' Music Video

Debuting the moonwalk and his signature glove

On May 16, 1983, Jackson stunned the world with the moonwalk, the backward gliding step he adapted from street dance. He debuted the move while performing the song “Billie Jean” to cap off NBC’s broadcast of Motown 25 , an anniversary tribute to the label. Though the moonwalk had been seen on the streets, Jackson polished the move and raised it to a sharper level, adding on his spin and toe-stand as flourish. The moonwalk became a signature and a generation-defining dance move. In the same performance, Jackson debuted his one rhinestone-encrusted white glove, a costume choice that would define his look for years.

When Jackson's hair caught on fire

In a shocking accident, Jackson’s hair caught on fire during the filming of a Pepsi commercial on January 27, 1984. The singer was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles with second and third-degree burns. The moment made headlines around the world — and probably changed his life: To help him sleep, he was given painkillers and sedatives, which are believed to have led him to regular usage and to his tragic overdose.

The music videos he danced in

Before videos like “Beat It” and “Thriller,” singers rarely led fully choreographed dances. But Jackson’s exceptional ability to pair fresh beats with precision movement added captivating depth to his videos. In “Beat It,” his thigh-slapping kicks and finger snaps led a formation of rival gang members. In “Billie Jean,” he slinks through city streets with graceful footwork and spins. Zombies obey him in “Thriller,” dancing behind him with spookily stylized arms. “Smooth Criminal,” though, best captures his combination of Fred Astaire-quality smoothness and sharp, precision popping — and that expertly crafted 45-degree lean forward, aided by patented shoes with pegs that locked the dancers in position.

The music videos he didn't dance in

When not dancing in his videos, Jackson used the burgeoning art form to make political and cultural statements. The video for “Man in the Mirror,” from his 1987 album “Bad,” features a sometimes oddly juxtaposed montage of world-historic events, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and children in poverty. Later, the video for his 1991 song “Black or White” used new technology to create morph the faces of a series of people to show that all races and ethnicities have similarities. The visual effect may have become overused later, but at the time, it was groundbreaking.

Leading the Jackson 5

Because adult Jackson ruled the 80s so dominantly, it’s easy to forget that the adorable pre-teen Jackson was a Motown sensation in the 70s. A child prodigy with cheerful charisma and natural dance talent, he led his band of brothers Jackie, Tito, Jermaine and Marlon. With four singles hitting the top of the Billboard charts, the Jackson 5 were among the first Black groups to appeal to a racially diverse audience. With hits like “ABC” and “I Want You Back,” Jackson established his path to global stardom.

READ MORE: Inside Michael Jackson's Early Years in Gary, Indiana With His Musical Family

His one-of-a-kind fashion

The fedora. The white sparkly socks with black shoes. The giant sunglasses. The glove. The statement jackets. Whatever Jackson wore, he caused a sensation. But in some ways, his choices were practical: His large jackets added shape to his rail-thin frame, while his slim black pants helped show off the perfect poses he would hit in dance.

The Super Bowl XXVII halftime show

He took the world stage on January 31, 1993. And he stood there — for what seemed like an outrageously long time for live television. He was allowing us to take in the King of Pop, who, by 1993, had faded from glory. But then he earned that title all over again with a fast-paced, TV-history changing show. Until 1993, halftime entertainment was corny, mostly lead by marching bands. With Jackson’s performance, the NFL had a new standard: Juggernauts only.

Leading "We are the World"

In 1985, Jackson used his international mega-stardom for good when he and Lionel Richie co-wrote the song “We are the World” to support African-famine relief. With producer Quincy Jones , they recorded the song with about three dozen of the hottest, most famous vocalists at the time, including headliners Stevie Wonder , Diana Ross , Billy Joel , Tina Turner and Ray Charles . The charity recording, released in 1985 as a single, raised more than $60 million under the auspices of USA for Africa, which continues to operate today. Jackson's solos on the album, and his gold-brocade black jacket in the video, still stand out as the highlight of the ultimate supergroup.

Starring in 'The Wiz'

In 1978, the musical The Wiz was pivotal for Jackson's career. It showed his versatility and kept alive his post-Motown status as a national entertainer, playing the Scarecrow opposite Ross as Dorothy. More importantly, it introduced him to Jones, who produced The Wiz and was already a major record producer, notably of Frank Sinatra . Prior to meeting Jones, Jackson’s career was floundering in his post-Jackson 5, late teen years. But with Jones, Jackson found a partner to take him to the next level. Their albums started with Off The Wall , then Thriller and Bad — and entertainment history was never the same.

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