The Rawness

With Michael Jackson’s death last week, I wanted to do a tribute to him, but I didn’t want to just do fawning praise, and I wanted it to fit in with the theme of this blog, which is decontruction of social and sexual dynamics. I think celebrities are great test cases for learning to evaluate psychology because so much of their life is transparent and well-publicized, making them easy to study. Many short-sighted intellectuals disdain pop culture, but I love it, especially gossip magazines and celebrity biographies because they provide great practice for armchair psychologists like myself. And no celebrity is more psychologically fascinating or rich for analysis as Michael Jackson.

So I posted two videos that I thought gave great insights into his psychology with very little comment. I wanted to see if people who read this blog could see many of the themes I discussed being illustrated in the videos. Sometimes I don’t want to just spell things out for people, I want to challenge them to see read between the lines. It was how Iceberg Slim worked in his writing, and something I feel I don’t do enough of. The first video I posted from Michael Jackson this week was Stranger in Moscow.  I love this one for the message in the lyrics, particularly what they say about fame, wealth, culture, race and the different forms of isolation that can arise both because of and in spite of all those factors. But the lyrics to the song become especially poignant the more you understand his psychology and personal history.

Michael Jackson’s life story is a fascinating case study for psychology and human nature.

Joe Jackson was a steel mill operator and failed musician. He worked full-time at a steel mill factory, and in the 50s formed a music group with his brother Luther called The Falcons, where he played guitar. They failed to get a record deal and Joe was forced to go back to working at the steel mill.

While he went to work, the three older brothers would sneak into his belongings and play with his guitar. This is something that would never happen today as kids are rarely left unstimulated long enough to get bored enough to experiment with something like a guitar. Today those three older brothers would be watching BET and sneaking peeks at Internet porn while their dad was at work. The only time they’d probably come close to playing a guitar would be the controller of a Guitar Hero game. But I digress…

Anyway, Tito would play with Joe’s guitar behind his back, while his brothers Jackie and Jermaine sang and danced. One day Tito broke a string, which caused Joe to discover they were playing with his stuff. Being Joe Jackson, he promptly threatened to beat Tito (or actually did beat his ass, depending on who you ass), then changed his mind and asked him to play the guitar for him to see what he could do. As Tito played and the other brothers sang and danced, Joe realized they were actually pretty good and decided to channel his aspirations to be a musician into his children. That’s right, Tito, the butt of endless jokes, was actually the talent in the Jacksons responsible for launching the pop dynasty.

The three brothers formed The Jackson Brothers with some hometown friends, and eventually two younger brothers joined, Marlon and Michael. Michael around the age of 6 or 7 had displayed an uncanny singing and dancing ability and ended up replacing Jermaine, a talented soul singer in his own right, as the lead singer. How uncanny? See for yourself:

An important thing to realize was the type of music and performing the group was doing before joining Motown. Motown’s big innovation was taking a gritty, dirty, sexy and lowdown sound like black soul rhythm and blues (the rhythm and blues that was the precursor of rock and roll, not the genre of music we call rhythm and blues today) and sanitizing and whitewashing it to make it palatable to mainstream America. When you see the clip above, one thing that strikes you is that it’s not the type of music and dancing you normally picture when you picture the Jackson Five. It’s funkier and sassier. Sexier. Less bubblegum and kid-friendly. Very adult. Michael Jackson’s dancing in the vein of Jackie Wilson and James Brown, in a very adult, freewheeling swaggering and strutting sexual fashion. And keep in mind he’s 6 or 7 years old in this clip. And watch him dance again. This is very sexy and adult dancing, especially for the 60s. It’s actually very inappropriate for his age, but the problem was that he was so damned talented you’re willing to overlook it. If you have to choose between being denied seeing such talent and doing what’s right for the kid, most people selfishly choose seeing the talent. And that would be a recurring theme for the boy in his life ahead.

Now keep in mind, this boy is 6 or 7 years old and can dance with an incredible sexual swagger. This is the kind of dancing that could make a grown woman moist to watch. Yet another often overlooked aspect of the Jackson family is that they were very devout Jehovah’s Witnesses, especially the mother, and Michael grew up very much a true believer. This created a very profound conflict in him, as he was incredibly sexualized from a tender young age, and encouraged to increasingly play up his sexuality in his suggestive dancing and singing, yet on the other hand he was very indoctrinated with a belief system of repressive religious social attitudes. He was so deeply involved in the Witnesses that he was going door to door professing the faith as a youth. Yes, he was one of those door-to-door Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Many psychologists theorize that this is where many of Michael’s dysfunctions arose from: the mental and emotional conflict from trying to resolve the freewheeling and inherently sexual lifestyle that he was exposed to and encouraged to chase with the intensely repressive and morally rigorous Jehovah’s Witness religious belief system he was indoctrinated into from birth.

But it gets worse. The boys got their start performing gigs in the circuit of strip clubs, burlesque houses and adult black dance clubs called the chitlin circuit. At one point they even had a residency in a strip club, where they performed in between stripteases and during down time. Anyone with a kid knows their minds are like sponges, and you can only imagine the type of vulgarity he was exposed to and forced to process. Yet while he wasn’t being immersed in that life, he was being immersed in his mother’s devout faith. At the same time, it’s probably very likely that much of the sexualized titillation he saw in the performances highly influenced his own showmanship as well.

When he wasn’t performing and being involved in religious activities, he was forced to practice, practice, practice at a feverish pace. If he wasn’t performing or involved with religion, he was in practice being overseen by his dad. His father was like a drill sergeant and Michael never had a childhood. The act of interacting with other kids in a peer group is very important to properly socializing a human being. Socialization through peer groups is something we often take for granted, so we never realize the severity of damage it can do to one’s psyche and social skills to be deprived of it:

Developmental psychologists Vygotsky, Piaget, and Sullivan have all argued that peer relationships provide a unique context for cognitive, social, and emotional development, with equality, reciprocity, cooperation, and intimacy maturing and enhancing children’s reasoning abilities and concern for others. Modern research echoes these sentiments, showing that social and emotional gains are indeed provided by peer interaction.

When Michael was 10 years old, they got a recording contract with Steeltown records. He had been singing and performing for over 3 years at this point:

Journalist, J. Randy Taraborrelli said of the groups two singles released through Steeltown Records, “Both were mediocre numbers that don’t really hint at Michael Jackson’s potential as a vocalist, but the boys were thrilled with them just the same. After all, these were their first records”. The Jackson family gathered around a radio to hear the song broadcast for the first time. Michael Jackson—who was 10 years old at the time—said of the period, “[the family] all laughed and hugged one another. We felt we had arrived”. “Big Boy” did not appear on any Billboard charts of the period but sold in excess of 10,000 copies…

The Jackson 5 would release a second and final single through Steeltown Records—”We Don’t Have To Be Over 21 (to Fall in Love)”. The two singles were to be supported by an eleven track studio album but it was never released. On July 26, 1968, the group signed a new contract with Motown Records. However, as the groups Steeltown contract had not yet expired, the new contract could not be fully executed until March 11, 1969. Motown Records tried to get the group out of their Steeltown contract, ultimately with a financial settlement.

By the time he was ready for the national stage at Motown, he was now 11 years old and a seasoned performer.

In his autobiography, Moonwalk, Michael Jackson has described his childhood as “mostly work.” The Jackson brothers were rehearsed and managed by their overly-strict father, whose insistence on perfect performances … in school work as well as in rehearsals and talent shows … frequently ended in physical and/or verbal violence. Michael was eleven-years-old when the group signed with Motown in 1969 (although the Motown press corps published his age as nine, explaining that he would be much cuter and more appealing to the public if he were two years younger. They called it “public relations.”)

Apparently Michael was very disturbed at this lie. We’re used to adult performers lying about their age all the time, but it’s important to remember that he was 11 years old and very devout in his faith, meaning he took much of it literally, including the ban on lying. Yet he was being asked to lie about his age in interviews and press conferences. To get him to do this, the adults around him explained to him the lying was okay so long as you’re doing it to further his career. Young Michael accepted this answer as satisfactory and went along with it. But that message, that the truth is flexible and lying is acceptable when done to further your career is said to have stuck with him throughout his life. Now his sense of right and wrong and his relationship to honesty were warped.

As grueling as his work schedule and the demands of his father were before the big time, they only got worse after fame:

He gives a rare glimpse of his youth in his statement that in the summer of 1970, the Jackson 5 performed in 45 cities, with 50 more cities being added later in the year. Forty-five cities within a ninety-day period meant that he and his brothers were performing concerts [on average] every second day during that summer. Travel to and from the concerts accounted for a portion of the non-performing day. And this does NOT account for recording sessions, picture sessions, interviews, or the interminable rehearsals Joseph Jackson insisted upon. It also does not account for the fact that, unlike many lead singers of the time, Michael was present at EACH of these recording sessions. He recorded with his brothers and his is the beautiful, clear treble in the backgrounds of all of the Jackson 5 early hits. Later, he would return to the recording studio while his brothers played basketball or tinkered with cars to lay in the lead tracks and round off the recordings.

Michael Jackson describes his relationship with his father, Joseph, as “turbulent”, understating rather than sensationalizing that relationship. But, much later, during a televised interview, he replied to his interrogator’s questions regarding this relationship with the words, [I was] “frightened … very frightened. There were times when he would come to see me, I would get sick. I would start to regurgitate.” When asked if such occasions occurred “as a child … or as an adult,” he responded with one word … “both.” He was 35 years old at the time of the interview.

Then it got even worse than that. On the road, they had a lot of groupies. The older boys were better socialized than Michael because they had more of a life before fame, including more years of formal schooling and peer group socialization. They had a healthier relationship to sex and girls than Michael did, especially the older brothers, who were approaching 18 at the time and had the raging hormones that come with that age. Since the brothers shared a room, they would have sex with the groupies in the same room as Michael. Michael would hide underneath the sheets and pretend to be asleep as the brothers banged out their groupies. This apparently traumatized him greatly. To make matters worse, Joe Jackson didn’t want to be left out of the sexual rewards. Joe would present himself as a “gatekeeper” to the boys, and groupies would often have to provide him sexual favors before they were able to get a crack at the boys.

Then young, extremely religious Michael would have to go home to his devout, beloved mother and lie to her face about everything that happened. Lie about the sex that his brothers had as well as the sex his dad had. The pressure and guilt of such secrets and the burden of having to lie to his mother, who he adored, combined with the grueling schedule and the psychological terrorism waged by his father wore greatly on Michael’s psyche and is the reason many mental health experts theorize his psyche fractured and became frozen at that age, 11 years old.

The seeds for all his adult problems were sown in his youth, and you can see it in what I’ve described: His issues with sexuality, both being obsessed with it from constant exposure and sexualization, but not being able to get a healthy relationship with it due to his extreme youth, his repressive religious values and his lack of peer group socialization. Not to mention that sex was something he was trained to be secretive and dishonest about. Adult sexuality became something that terrified him for all the reasons described.

As for his obsession with being around children, it was never proven that he molested those boys, so as far as I’m concerned they will remain allegations and not facts. But his obsession with children I think comes from two factors. First, he never got that peer group socialization that he so desperately needed, and since his psyche was frozen at age 11, he chose a peer group of that age. Second, his whole life consisted of being used, abused and let down by adults. Second, adults were either selfishly using him for short term benefits without any thoughts of the long term detriments, like his father, Berry Gordy or the Motown publicity machine, or they were letting him down like his mother, who failed to protect him from his father’s abuse and stayed with him, implicitly cosigning his behavior. So he probably was very distrustful of adults and wary of them. “I haven’t been betrayed or deceived by children,” Jackson once said. “Adults have let me down.” And because he was so horribly tyrannized and abused by his own dad, this caused him to be excessively gentle and nurturing to children when he became an adult.

I think it was Bill Murray who said (I paraphrase) that with fame, it’s not about whether you get screwed up or become an asshole, but how much of a screwed-up asshole you become. His point was that when fame hits you, nothing can prepare you from it and at some point you get screwed up. If fame does that to healthy adults, imagine what international superstardom did to an 11-year old with the dysfunctional background I just described?

When Michael Jackson was acquitted of molestation charges in 2005, a great piece appeared in Slate celebrating his acquittal and explaining the reasons it was likely he didn’t do it, and I suggest if you guys click one link in this whole piece you make it this one. I’d also suggest watching VH-1 to see if they ever air a special called “Michael Jackson’s Secret Childhood” again. Both touch on a lot of what I mentioned here and more.

Many say that the child abuse trials were the final emotional blow to him, something he perceived as his last and greatest betrayal, and that he sank into a depression that he never fully recovered from, because now not only were his relationships to adults ruined, he now had to be distrustful of kids. He was never safe from feeling used and isolated. Which is why I posted the song “Stranger in Moscow,” as it’s incredibly exposing of his personal psychology:

“Stranger in Moscow” is the fifth and final single from Michael Jackson’s album HIStory. The song was released worldwide in November 1996 but was not released in the US until August 1997. The track was written by Jackson in 1993, at the height of the highly publicized child abuse accusations made against him, while on tour in Moscow. In the ballad, Jackson sings of a fall from grace that has left him lonely, isolated, paranoid and on the verge of insanity.

See if the meaning and emotional impact you derive from the song has changed at all after reading this piece. Below is a version of the video with the lyrics printed on the screen for you to read as you listen:

UPDATE: GQ released an article in 1994 titled was “Michael Jackson Framed?” that made a pretty strong case that the first accuser was severely lacking in credibility. The article can be found at this link here.

Not only was insufficient evidence found in all criminal matters against Michael Jackson, but there was a matter of a $20 Million settlement paid to the accuser that Jackson’s detractors use as proof that he was actually guilty. After all, he was innocent why pay the money, right? Well I’m glad you asked.

A recent article by Daily Mail reveals the reason:

When Jackson settled out of court with his first accuser, Jordan Chandler, for more than $15million in 1994, his career went into a rapid decline from which he never recovered.

Jackson had not wanted to settle the case. I have obtained legal documents proving that his insurance company forced the settlement on him against his will.

The documents state: ‘The [1994 Chandler] settlement agreement was for global claims of negligence and the lawsuit was defended by Mr Jackson’s insurance carrier. The insurance carrier negotiated and paid the settlement, over the protests of Mr Jackson and his personal legal counsel.’

Jackson was said to have almost collapsed as the settlement was forced upon him. His aides insist this marked the beginning of his mental and physical breakdown.

That last sentence also adds more context to the lyrics and theme of the “Stranger in Moscow” video.

Also, this video covers just about ever flaw in the molestation charges:

Next: Dissection of MJ’s “Liberian Girl” video.