The many narratives of Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson remains one of the most influential and celebrated musicians in modern history, yet his legacy continues to inspire both intense criticism and fascination. The new film, Michael, is set for release this week, raising the question of whether an estate-approved biopic can truly redefine an artist's legacy. Aisha Harris explores the various music videos and biopics related to this generational talent, whose narrative was crafted throughout his lifetime and long after his death, especially in the wake of sexual abuse allegations. Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus at plus.npr.org/happyhour https://plus.npr.org/happy See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:17Aisha Harris?

  A warning: This episode contains discussion of sexual abuse. In early 2019, an audience sat in the Times Center auditorium in Manhattan for a preview screening of Leaving Neverland, that's Dan Reed's controversial HBO documentary about Michael Jackson. The film's approximately four hours of testimony from James "Safe" Chuck and Wade Robson, who allege in great detail that the pop star groomed and abused them when they were children.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  Secrets will eat you up. You feel so alone. I want to be able to speak the truth.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  As loud as I had to speak the lie for so long.

• 0:56Aisha Harris?

  Many of the audience members at that screening were sexual abuse survivors. And once the final credits had rolled, the house lights came up and Oprah Winfrey took the stage, joined by Safe Chuck, Robson, and a psychological trauma consultant for a Q and A. The filmed conversation was meant to help everyone in that room process what they just witnessed, and it aired later on HBO as the special After Neverland.

• 1:18Speaker 03

  For me, this moment transcends Michael Jackson. It is much bigger than any one person. This is a moment in time that allows us to see this societal corruption. It's like a scourge on humanity.

• 1:36Aisha Harris?

  So I was at that taping as a member of the press. I was a TV editor at The New York Times. And this was a huge story we were covering from multiple angles. But like so many people, I'd also been a lifelong Michael Jackson fan. He was my first and most intense pop cultural obsession. I'd devoured all the music and video choreography and archival footage I could. I'd bawled when he died in 2009. And I'd always doubted the allegations of child abuse. Watching Leaving Neverland and being in the room for that Oprah conversation removed pretty much all of my doubt. And for that brief moment around the documentary's release, it seemed, to me at least, as if the general public might finally reckon with Jackson's complicated legacy, that in the

• 2:18Aisha Harris?

  midst of the Me Too movement, one of entertainment's biggest stars could fade a bit. Maybe.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Ready whenever you are, Michael.

• 2:30Aisha Harris?

  Or maybe I was wrong. "Michael," a glossy, estate-approved biopic directed by Antoine Fuqua, is headed for theaters this month. Big stars are involved. Carmen Domingo and Nia Long are playing Joe and Katherine Jackson, and Michael's own nephew, Jafar Jackson, Jermaine's kid, has been cast to channel his uncle's persona.

• 2:51Speaker 05

  Spread love, joy, and peace. That is what I want the world to feel.

• 3:06Speaker 05

  Magic.

• 3:07Aisha Harris?

  He's big on Broadway, too. The hit Tony-winning show "MJ: The Musical" has been filling seats since 2021. It focuses on Jackson's artistry and less on his biggest controversies, which makes it even harder to feel leaving Neverland's impact, if there was any at all. Artist biopics, especially ones that come authorized by their subjects or their subjects' estates, are usually meant to function as a legacy reset. Obviously, there's the financial incentive. Send those old songs back up the charts, sell more merch, et cetera. But there's also an intent to cement a narrative about creative genius and individual triumph. Ultimately, the point is to make you admire them, even if that means sanitizing the truth.

• 3:50Aisha Harris?

  Michael Jackson's especially tricky to try to sanitize, and his public persona has always ebbed and flowed. And I have to wonder if it's even possible to start over again with him. What even is his legacy now? I'm Aisha Harris, and on this special episode of NPR's "Pop Culture Happy Hour," we're talking about Michael Jackson, the many stories that have been told about his life, and the mythical spell he still seems to cast today. We'll be right back after the break.

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• 5:53Aisha Harris?

  If you're even moderately curious about the legend around the king of pop, I highly recommend Margot Jefferson's book on Michael Jackson. Now, this was originally published in 2006, but in 2019, the critic and scholar published a new intro for the book that was a response to Leaving Neverland. One of her observations has really stuck with me. She writes, "He didn't want us to understand him. He wanted us to love him unconditionally." And when I think of MJ, I often think about this facet of his personality: the perfectionist, the tryhard, who was both uniquely gifted and obsessed with proving himself to the world via the billboard charts, awards, and world record stats. A kind of precursor to the Beyonce's and Taylor Swift's of today.

• 6:37Aisha Harris?

  I think of how throughout his life, he sought unconditional love from his fans. And he did this by stressing certain attributes when necessary. For one, artistic excellence, like referring to himself as the king of pop. For another, his black identity, like when he pivoted from down-center pop into the more jagged sounds of hip-hop and new jack swing in the 90s.

• 7:03Aisha Harris?

  And then there was his innocence, like his references to his lost childhood and his fixation on Peter Pan. All three of those attributes are crucial to his mythology. They're very present in a biopic you may remember if you're a black person of a certain age, say, millennial and up. The Jacksons, an American Dream.

• 7:22Speaker 08

  Separately, they paid the price.

• 7:23Speaker 09

  No more people. You hear me? No more!

• 7:26Speaker 08

  ABC presents a shocking look. It's my blood going through your veins. At music's most mysterious family.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  You've just gotta be who you are, Michael.

• 7:33Speaker 08

  From the streets, the studios, and the world.

• 7:36Speaker 05

  Never seen anything like it.

• 7:38Speaker 08

  For the first time, you'll see the whole story.

• 7:40Aisha Harris?

  This is the star-studded 1992 TV miniseries dramatizing the Jackson family's ascent. And when I say star-studded, I mean it. Angela Bassett played matriarch Catherine Jackson. Lawrence Hilton Jacobs, aka Cochise from Cooley High, was domineering father Joe Jackson. Plus, you had none other than Billy Dee Williams as Motown founder Barry Gordy, Vanessa Williams as music producer Suzanne DePass, Terrence Howard as the young adult version of Brother Jackie. The MO of the miniseries is right there in the title. It's selling the Jacksons as the embodiment of the American dream. From working-class Gary Indiana, to Motown superstardom, to the early days of Michael's breakout solo career. From rags to the richest of riches.

• 8:24Aisha Harris?

  A familiar strain of the Jackson lore that the movie depicts is Joe, the hardcore abusive stage dad whose children fear him.

• 8:33Speaker 10

  Who did this? Broke the string of my guitar.

• 8:39Speaker 05

  Who did this? Who did this? I didn't do it. God, God, God, swear to God. Believe me. Then who?

• 8:49Speaker 05

  Who's been touching what's mine?

• 8:51Aisha Harris?

  But whose abuse is nonetheless accepted as a price worth paying. Because, as the family has often publicly stated, it's what steered them toward excellence and mainstream success. Here's Angela Bassett as Katherine Jackson.

• 9:04Speaker 11

  He may have pushed a little too hard sometimes. He may have made some bad business decisions. He may have not listened. But he's the one. He's the one that made all this possible. And you, you're just so lucky because you can put it all in your music.

• 9:23Aisha Harris?

  And here's Michael's sister Janet echoing the same sentiment in a clip from her 2022 self-titled docu-series.

• 9:30Speaker 05

  It was because of my father I've had the career that I've had. It was tough at times. There was nothing easy about it, period. But when you see where we came from and see where we are now, we owe so much to my father.

• 9:48Aisha Harris?

  Now, I'm a late 80s baby, so I didn't experience peak MJ in real time. And I was still too young to catch the American Dream mini-series during its initial airing. But it eventually became part of my initiation into the world of MJ obsession. My parents had a VHS tape recording, and it was constantly rerun on VH1 and BET. It was basically the first way I absorbed his life story and understood who he might be outside of the songs and the music videos. For my parents' generation, this movie was nostalgia. For someone my age or younger, it was an education of sorts.

• 10:22Speaker 12

  That movie, all, what, four, five hours of it, is like part of the informal civil rights, Black history education that you get growing up. Like, you don't sit there and watch all five hours of it in school. But when you are at home and it comes on the TV over the weekend, your parents definitely sit you down.

• 10:40Aisha Harris?

  This is Corey Antonio Rose, a producer on NPR's It's Been a Minute. He's also more than a decade my junior, firmly Gen Z. But his experience with MJ as it relates to the miniseries wasn't all that different from mine.

• 10:53Speaker 12

  Like, right in between Roots and the Malcolm X movie. He's part of your Black history education. Like, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Diana Ross, Michael Jackson. He came into my life as like a cultural figure that is like, what MLK did for civil rights is what Michael Jackson did for music.

• 11:13Aisha Harris?

  A biopic's existence implies that the subject is worthy of legend status. A well-made biopic, like "An American Dream," is especially powerful because it carries out a seductive mythological silhouette through the sheer power of movie magic. Now, the miniseries is based on Catherine Jackson's memoir, "My Family," and a couple things are worth noting here. For one, the program premiered in 92, right before the first public allegations of child sex abuse were made against Michael by Evan Chandler, whose son was an alleged victim. And conveniently, the series concludes its story right around the release of "Thriller," just as Michael's solo career explodes and just before the weirdness begins to kick in. So there's a way to read "An American Dream" as the savvy counterpoint to his increasingly

• 11:57Aisha Harris?

  bizarre public image at the time, though this may or may not be intentional. The movie reasserts Jackson's artistic dominance and reconnects him with his Black familial roots, keeping the memory of his youthfulness preserved in nostalgic amber. To this day, the miniseries remains a cultural touchstone, frequently memed in reference, up there with other 90s biopics documenting Black music royalty like "What's Love Got to Do with It," also starring Angela Bassett, and the "Temptations" miniseries. But then, there's "Man in the Mirror." No, not the song on Jackson's blockbuster album, "Bad," this.

• 12:38Speaker 13

  No one ever gets sick. No one ever gets old. And no one, no one ever dies.

• 12:47Aisha Harris?

  Man in the Mirror: The Michael Jackson Story. This is a campy, made-for-TV movie from 2004 that's a far, far cry from the Jacksons in American Dream on nearly every conceivable level. Instead of wholesome, sugar-coated nostalgia, it's this bleary-eyed fever dream. Man in the Mirror features some brief, lo-fi flashbacks to Jackson's lonely childhood, but it's mostly focused on the singer's spiral after the highs of Thriller. The cosmetic surgeries, the brief marriage to Lisa Marie Presley, viewed by many observers as a sham, the disastrous Martin Bashir interview where he gushed about sharing a bed with a teenage boy, it's all recreated here.

• 13:27Speaker 13

  I see God in the faces of children. Why can't you share your bed? The most loving thing you could do is share your bed with someone.

• 13:38Speaker 14

  It was becoming clear to me that Michael Jackson had an obsession with children.

• 13:43Aisha Harris?

  The movie concludes just before his criminal trial for child molestation in 2005, which began a few months after the movie originally aired. Now, crucially, this is an unauthorized biopic. The creators did not acquire the music rights to Jackson's catalog. So instead, we get some schlocky, generic muzak that sounds like it might be lifted from one of those CD compilation commercials from the 90s.

• 14:13Aisha Harris?

  That song plays during a montage where Michael and Lisa Marie are early into their courtship, and they frolic outside on the grounds of Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California. Then there's the wonky dialogue and bizarre flourishes with characters who resemble off-brand imitations of real-life figures like Diana Ross.

• 14:32Speaker 15

  Michael, it's me, Diana. You're going to be a big star, but there will be hurt and pain.

• 14:43Aisha Harris?

  And then there's the makeup. So Michael's played by Flex Alexander, who's dark-skinned, not unlike Michael Jackson was in his earlier years. But as the narrative timeline progresses, he has to undergo the physical transformation to look like Mike post-Bad. But Men in the Mirror cannot moonwalk to the occasion. The actor looks increasingly ashyer and ashyer throughout the film until finally it appears as though he's immersed himself in this giant vat of finely ground white flour. Or let me give you a cinematic reference here. You might remember that part of ET, the Extraterrestrial, when ET is dying really quickly and he's turning this ghastly shade of white? That's basically Flex Alexander in this movie.

• 15:25Aisha Harris?

  It's much closer to Tommy Wiseau's "The Room" than it is to the Jacksons' "In American Dream." But here's my hot take. Men in the Mirror is uniquely fascinating in large part because of its artistic limitations. They allow room for a less sanitized, if extremely muddled, perspective than any estate-approved biopic would ever allow. Men in the Mirror is deliberately vague about where it stands on Michael's guilt or his innocence. It zooms in on Manny, played by Brendan Post. He's a character based on the son of Evan Chandler, who filed a lawsuit against Jackson on allegations of abuse in 1993. Manny's dad's portrayed the way Jackson's legal team portrayed Chandler in real life,

• 16:08Aisha Harris?

  as this craven opportunist who was upset with the superstar for not having read his unproduced screenplay. But in another scene, Manny's interviewed by the police about his relationship with Michael.

• 16:19Speaker 16

  Listen, when you spent the night there, did Michael ever make physical contact with you?

• 16:28Speaker 05

  He'd hug me. Michael likes hugs.

• 16:31Aisha Harris?

  And then Manny's demeanor begins to noticeably shift as the questioning gets more specific.

• 16:36Speaker 16

  Did he ever do more than hug?

• 16:41Speaker 16

  It's OK, Manny. Just tell us what happened. Go ahead, tell them.

• 16:47Speaker 05

  See, I didn't want to, but, um,

• 16:52Speaker 05

  he started, you know, to cry and he got kind of sad. I didn't want him to be sad and to cry. I want, you know, I want him to be happy and have fun.

• 17:03Aisha Harris?

  We never get any more details than this, but the scene clearly shows Manny's been traumatized by his interactions with Michael, which is a shocking and kind of bold suggestion to even make. It at least tries to acknowledge that shadowy gray area regarding Michael's innocence, both literally and figuratively. It suggests two things can be true. The parents who allowed their kids to befriend Jackson, a grown man, were seduced by the proximity to fame and wealth. And Jackson might have used his star power to sinister ends. Jackson, of course, always denied the allegations. And according to a recent sit-down Flex Alexander did with the celebrity interview series, The Art of the Dialogue, the singer hated this movie.

• 17:45Speaker 17

  And then he made comments about it. He was upset, but he never said anything, you know, about me or my performance. He never, it was the allegations and the stuff that was going on at the time that he was upset. It's like, why do we have to keep talking about this?

• 18:01Aisha Harris?

  But this goes back to what Margot Jefferson said about Jackson in her book, that he wanted us to love him, not understand him. And honestly, that's the way most artist biopics treat their subjects. The Jacksons and American Dream featured a stacked cast of beloved black actors, a tight family-approved script, and a lavish budget. It goes down easy as entertainment, and that's why it endures. Men in the Mirror had none of that. Is it a good movie? Not at all. And yet, it comes closer to acknowledging the realities of the frictions of Jackson's life than he himself was ever able to. And that's got to count for something. Up next, a look at how Michael Jackson constantly rewrote his own legacy in real time.

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• 20:18Aisha Harris?

  In January 1994, Michael Jackson made a surprise appearance at the NAACP Image Awards. He was presenting the award for Outstanding Choreography to Debbie Allen. But before he got to that, he seized the moment to address the pending lawsuit filed against him the previous year, based on allegations of child sex abuse.

• 20:37Speaker 18

  I have been strengthened in my fight to prove my innocence by my faith in God. And by the knowledge that I am not fighting this battle alone.

• 20:46Aisha Harris?

  These weren't his first public remarks on the issue. A couple of weeks earlier, he declared his innocence in a satellite video from Neverland Ranch. And there, he described being humiliated by the investigation into the claims. But that was a statement meant for the world. His speech at the NAACP Awards was something way more specific. It was MJ code switching, preaching directly to the black choir, as it were.

• 21:09Speaker 18

  Members of the NAACP have been jailed and even killed in the noble pursuit of those ideals upon which our country was founded. None of these goals is more meaningful for me at this time in my life than the notion that everyone is presumed to be innocent.

• 21:29Aisha Harris?

  So at this point, the crowd erupted into huge applause before he could even finish the sentence. And then.

• 21:36Speaker 18

  Everyone is presumed to be innocent and totally innocent until they are charged with a crime and then convicted by a jury of their peers.

• 21:45Aisha Harris?

  He was telling this audience, my struggle is our struggle. Or put another way, I'm still black. This moment crystallized what Jackson had been working towards for much of the late 1980s and into the early 90s. It took five years for his follow-up to Thriller. And by the time Bad came out in 1987, the music landscape had shifted. Hip-hop and New Jack Swing were emerging as dominant expressions of black culture.

• 22:12Speaker 19

  The thing to remember is that in the 80s, like, black R&B was largely associated with very corporate, kind of easy listening.

• 22:23Aisha Harris?

  That's Carvel Wallace, a culture critic. Now, Carvel witnessed much of Jackson's ascension in real time and understood why his attempts to stay relevant continued to work in spite of everything that was going on with him personally.

• 22:35Speaker 19

  There's a lot of sax solos and there's a lot of keyboards, you know, Quiet Storm type vibes. One of the reasons New Jack Swing really caught on was because it wasn't R&B that was urban, not in the euphemistic sense, but it was street. It was like R&B that wasn't pastel.

• 22:52Aisha Harris?

  By the late 80s, Jackson's look had shifted too. The cherubic brown kid that the world had first fallen in love with now resembled his dear friend and idol, Elizabeth Taylor. His nose looked a bit slimmer than it had on the Thriller cover, his chin more chiseled, and his complexion was now completely white. However, he always maintained that this was the result of having developed hyperpigmentation caused by the skin disorder vitiligo.

• 23:17Speaker 19

  Not only was he reconnecting with blackness, he was also chasing like literal pop, which was like abandoning the aesthetics that he had established and finding its way back to this other cultural thing. And I don't think he wanted to be left out of that. But he was trying to find a way to do that in a way that felt authentic. Because he couldn't just pop up with like a Gumby high-top fade and just start like, you know what I mean? He couldn't do that. He had to like keep it Michael Jackson, but he had to somehow get there.

• 23:44Aisha Harris?

  So he got there through Bad, which was his attempt to remind the public that he was still down. The title track has an 18-minute-long short film that's directed by Martin Scorsese, and Jackson plays Darryl, a student at an elite predominantly white boarding school who returns home to the rough streets of New York City. And there, he reconnects with his black and brown friends from the hood. And one of those friends is played by then-newcomer Wesley Snipes, and all of them clown him for going soft and not wanting to do hoodrat things with them.

• 24:13Speaker 20

  Are you bad?

• 24:16Speaker 20

  Or is that what they teach you up at that little sissy school of yours? How to forget who your friends are?

• 24:21Speaker 19

  The thing about the Bad video that's so sort of weird is that you don't really buy Michael as having any kind of street credibility.

• 24:32Speaker 19

  You know what I mean? He has as much due credibility as the cast of West Side Story, but you know, but he's able to pay people to feed into the narrative.

• 24:42Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 24:43Speaker 19

  And I think there is a sad irony to it. A lot of black people who feel concerned that they won't be accepted into blackness, they often vastly underestimate how much acceptance is available to them. In other words, they tend to underestimate black people as a whole.

• 24:54Aisha Harris?

  The friction between oddball and musical genius was strong for Michael in the late 80s and into the 90s. The era of bad and dangerous. MJ was 20-plus years into his career by then. In pop terms, he was an elder statesman and no longer cool. He was, however, getting progressively weirder, and everyone was noticing. In a classic sketch from the comedy show In Living Color, comedian Tommy Davidson parody Jackson in the video for Black or White.

• 25:39Aisha Harris?

  Okay, but enough black people were still rocking with him, even as some of us were also laughing at him. John Singleton directed Eddie Murphy, Magic Johnson, and supermodel Iman to play out a fantasy of ancient Egypt in the now classic video for Remember the Time.

• 26:00Aisha Harris?

  That was from 1992. And that same year, The Jacksons and American Dream dropped, and its finale topped the Nielsen ratings with about 24 million viewers tuning in live. That week, it beat out shows like Roseanne and Murder She Wrote. And then, in 1993, Jackson performed at the Super Bowl halftime show, laying out the template for the spectacle that it's become today. He was also honored by the NAACP with the Entertainer of the Year Award, presented by Wesley Snipes.

• 26:30Aisha Harris?

  So when Jackson found himself at the NAACP Awards again in 1994, this time in the midst of the child abuse allegations, it made sense he'd use the moment to reassert that support from the Black community.

• 26:43Speaker 21

  Black folks are like every other kind of Americans, which means that we are just as susceptible to sort of conspiratorial thinking as any other group of people. It's just part of the human condition.

• 26:57Aisha Harris?

  Soraya Nadia McDonald is a writer and culture critic. She's written several pieces on Michael Jackson over the years, including for The Washington Post.

• 27:05Speaker 21

  And certainly because of our specific history and experiences as Americans and having part of the experience of being Black and growing up in America, being that you are gaslighted about the experiences of Black people in America and their history. I think it makes it very understandable to have a reaction that when a high-profile Black celebrity, like someone that just holds an enormous amount of meaning to Black communities, is accused of something heinous, to have a reaction that says, this is just these folks trying to take this man down a peg.

• 27:45Aisha Harris?

  There's a long, painful history of Black men being falsely accused of sex crimes. And as Soraya points out, that history has acted as a very powerful shield against holding high-profile Black men accountable when they're accused of similar things today.

• 28:01Aisha Harris?

  There's another shield Jackson was able to wield that proved to be equally powerful for some time: his childlike wonder. The narrative around his father Joe's physical and mental abuse and Michael's "stolen" childhood was something he spoke of often. And it functioned as this explanation for why he seemed to prefer the company of children over adults his own age. After the 1993 lawsuit, he channeled that defense into his art. To sometimes strange effect, there was the saccharine creepy, "Have you seen my childhood?"

• 28:53Aisha Harris?

  And then there's the 40-ish minute long short film for the single Ghosts. It uses this age-old horror trope to directly address the allegations. And Stephen King wrote the screenplay. Stan Winston directed. He's the legendary visual effects artist behind movies like The Terminator. Now, Jackson plays the maestro, this eccentric man living in a haunted mansion. He's beloved by the neighborhood kids, but has been deemed a freak by the mayor, this abrasive old white man, who's also played by Jackson in prosthetics. The mayor very obviously resembles Tom Sneddon, the district attorney who led both of Jackson's child abuse investigations. Now, the entire community descends upon the mansion with the intent of having him banished, despite the children's protests.

• 29:37Speaker 22

  We want you out of town. We have a nice, normal town. Normal people, normal kids. We don't need freaks like you telling them ghost stories.

• 29:47Aisha Harris?

  The video's message is, he's not a monster, just misunderstood. But let's be real. He also relished much of this attention. Because apart from the music, he was known for shrewdly courting the tabloids with outrageous stories about himself.

• 30:03Speaker 23

  You know, he was a guy who idolized P.T. Barnum.

• 30:07Aisha Harris?

  This is Rodney Carmichael, a correspondent for NPR Music.

• 30:10Speaker 23

  And there are so many stories about the way he and his team, you know, his managers, his publicists, would sit around and strategize what kind of crazy stuff they could push to the tabloids in order to create this circus-like environment. Feeding the tabloids the pictures of him sleeping in the hyperbaric chamber, or the rumors of buying the Elephant Man's bones, crowning himself king of pop, but not out of his mouth, right? But putting it into the mouths of the reporters and journalists who were covering him at the time. So it was as if they, the fans and the public, were decreeing this on his behalf.

• 30:53Aisha Harris?

  The movie, Man in the Mirror, The Michael Jackson Story, paints this side of the singer in a scene between him and his bodyguard Bobby, played by Eugene Clark. Bobby suggests that Flex Alexander's Michael needs to show his fans he's moved on after the allegations by getting together with Lisa Marie Presley.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  Who better than the king of pop than the princess of rock and roll?

• 31:15Aisha Harris?

  Are you saying what I think you're saying?

• 31:17Speaker 04

  You're the king, her daddy was the king, and now she's a princess.

• 31:21Aisha Harris?

  Huh? That's a good idea. So all of this shrouded the man in mystery and uncertainty. So much was going on with him that it could be hard to know where the truth ended, and the manufactured narratives began. Throughout his life, Jackson tried to have it both ways, to be perceived as this extraordinary outlier and an artistic genius, and therefore above scrutiny, but also, when it suited his narrative, to be seen as, you know, just like the rest of us. Eventually, though, his efforts to walk that tightrope just stopped being as effective. He remains a source of tabloid fascination in the US and hugely popular abroad, but the music, that was no longer the main draw.

• 32:03Aisha Harris?

  His last studio album, Invincible, debuted at number one on Billboard in 2001. And, look, it's got some bankers. Yet, it wasn't on the commercial level of thriller or bad, because nothing could be. Those bars he set for himself were just way too high. And then, of course, came the new round of allegations, which led to the highly-publicized 2005 trial. NPR's Day to Day was among many outlets covering it at the time.

• 32:29Speaker 24

  The judge in the Michael Jackson child molestation trial has ended the first stage of jury selection a day early. A surprisingly large number of prospective jurors, about 250 of them, are willing to serve the estimated six months the trial may last.

• 32:46Aisha Harris?

  There were 14 charges under People versus Jackson, including child molestation, conspiracy, and providing alcohol to a minor. The trial lasted five months, and the jury found Jackson not guilty. He avoided a possible 20-year prison sentence. And after the trial, he never returned to his home in Neverland. He resided abroad for several years before landing in Los Angeles, where he died on June 25, 2009. Here's NPR's All Things Considered reporting on the news.

• 33:14Speaker 25

  I'm Robert Siegel, and we're hearing the news now from multiple outlets citing many sources that Michael Jackson has died. The singer was found at his home today, where he reportedly was not breathing. He was rushed to UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles.

• 33:31Aisha Harris?

  I remember exactly where I was that day. I'd just graduated from college a week or so earlier and had temporarily moved back home to live with my dad while I figured out my next moves. I was devastated and practically lewd to my TV for days, binging The Marathon of Videos, Tributes, and, of course, The Jacksons and American Dream. They were all playing on all the major TV music channels. Now he's been gone for almost 20 years, and I'm wondering, where does he fit in in the culture today? Stay with us.

• 34:11Speaker 00

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• 34:53Speaker 00

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• 35:02Aisha Harris?

  For anyone like me who wasn't around to witness peak Michael Jackson hysteria, the Brace Yourself video is a perfect entry point for understanding just how massive he was.

• 35:16Aisha Harris?

  It's about three and a half minutes of really effective montage set to a version of O Fortuna from Karl Orf's cantata, Carmina Verona. Most of the clips capture Jackson being mobbed by throngs of fans attempting to break past security as his motorcade passes through cities all around the world. Other scenes show concert moments from his historic Bad World Tour, performing for manic audience members who scream, sob, or even pass out. Many of them are soaked in sweat from all the excitement and body heat and don't even really seem to care. It all builds up to that familiar O Fortuna climax, when the choir swells while the instrumentals crash and explode underneath like thunderclaps.

• 35:57Aisha Harris?

  And then there's this rapid fire series of images summarizing Jackson's career as it syncs up with this musical climax. Album and magazine covers, music videos, TV performances, archival concert footage. Brace Yourself worked on me when I watched it as a kid countless times. It was on my VHS copy of Michael Jackson Video Greatest Hits. It made me think, I'm a believer. This is the greatest artist of all time. The whole thing is dramatique, a pure adrenaline shot of emotion. There's no real friction there because it's not meant to be deep, it's meant to seduce. This frictionless version of Michael Jackson is the way he wanted to be remembered.

• 36:39Aisha Harris?

  To some extent, this is the version that persists on the internet all these years later. Like a lot of long-dead celebrities, his online presence relies heavily on being reduced to straight-up memedom like TikTok dance challenges and impersonations. There is, though, this flip side to the spliced and diced memes. Some people are trying to connect with Jackson through a distinctly modern lens. There's this viral image that shows a young adult version of him on a beach, wearing only swim trunks. His complexion is mostly dark, except for a few parts of his body that are displaying the visible effects of vitiligo. The image is pure fantasy, though. This attempt, I guess, to make Jackson seem more relatable. This alternate universe sidesteps a more complicated truth, that while his autopsy

• 37:24Aisha Harris?

  report revealed he did indeed have vitiligo, Jackson still went to extremes to appear less and less like the black person he was born as. What are we to make of this? And then, there's the theory that Jackson was on the spectrum.

• 37:38Speaker 12

  When I see people on TikTok talking about Michael, I'm seeing fan cam edits of how people who are in the neurodivergent community can see themselves in some of his responses to some of these interview questions.

• 37:50Aisha Harris?

  Again, Corey Antonio Rose.

• 37:53Speaker 12

  Like, people are saying, like, you know, Michael had autism and little ticks.

• 37:57Aisha Harris?

  Or, as one TikTok user who goes by the handle @beautyexpeditions puts it,

• 38:02Speaker 26

  "Michael Jackson was autistic. I don't know why nobody wants to just come out and say it. Half of his songs were vocal stems. Hee hee. Makes me feel like, ooh. And of course, the mama say mama say mama kusa, mama say mama say mama kusa."

• 38:15Aisha Harris?

  Okay, for the record, that mama say mama say mama kusa chant from "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'?" Is actually adapted from Manu de Bongo's song Soul Macosa. I'm not sure that's strong evidence of neurodivergence. But it is fascinating that younger people seem to be trying to extract meaning, however strange, from an artist who died before many of them were even sentient.

• 38:37Speaker 12

  There's an emotional distance there for Gen Z. Like, the primary life event that Gen Z was present for was his death. I mean, my little cultural baby memory, Beyonce single ladies, Obama, Michael Jackson dies. Like, in that order.

• 38:54Aisha Harris?

  Though I wonder if that emotional distance is something the Jackson estate is counting on, an audience aware of his music and greatness, but who didn't live through either round of allegations during his lifetime. An audience without the emotional baggage that comes with watching a beloved superstar disintegrate in real time. That doesn't mean they're unaware of the controversies.

• 39:15Speaker 12

  I think that my generation is more, like, because we didn't grow up with him in person, right in front of our face like that, I don't remember having to take all of those steps. I think I was much more ready to accept that he may have been a predator from the very first offhand mention of like, oh, you know, he was touching them kids. I was like, oh, damn, okay.

• 39:35Aisha Harris?

  But maybe it's just accepted by them, and a lot of people, really, as an asterisk, a matter-of-fact piece of his legacy.

• 39:43Speaker 12

  There's nothing in Leaving Neverland that I feel like I didn't hear in barber shops or at Thanksgiving when Michael was brought up.

• 39:51Aisha Harris?

  So, speaking of Leaving Neverland, it's pretty much all but disappeared, faded into the background, just as the 2004 movie Men in the Mirror did. The Jackson estate sued HBO for breach of contract on the basis of a non-disparagement clause in a deal to air one of Jackson's concerts in 1992. Now, there were some reports that a settlement was reached, and HBO agreed to permanently remove Leaving Neverland from its platforms in the US. As recently as February 2026, new child abuse allegations surfaced against Jackson, though they've hardly made a dent in the media landscape. The reality is, after the world finished collectively mourning his shocking death, the diehard fans kept being diehard fans while his music kept existing in the culture.

• 40:36Aisha Harris?

  But many other people just moved on. A documentary coming nearly a decade after he died may have come too late and felt redundant. But also, Leaving Neverland couldn't withstand the messiness of the internet.

• 40:51Speaker 23

  I feel like I kind of lose the thread on Michael every decade or so.

• 40:56Aisha Harris?

  Again, this is Rodney Carmichael.

• 40:58Speaker 23

  You couldn't tell me after I watched Leaving Neverland that he was not guilty of all those things. I think a big part of what we deal with now is not just the many narrative threads that he spawned or that his estate continues to spin, but that we all spin because this is, the internet powers all of this now. And so every conspiracy theory suddenly has validity when it's being repeated a thousand times. And that's something that we didn't even have when he was standing trial accused of a lot of this stuff.

• 41:37Aisha Harris?

  Also, never underestimate the general public's being desensitized to and dismissive of abuse. Here's Soraya Nadia McDonald again.

• 41:46Speaker 21

  I think part of the reason why we keep seeing this sort of highly curated and aggrandizing memorials of people, whether they be cinematic or otherwise, is because I think we actually live in a very violent country, a country that normalizes abuse to such a large degree that I think confronting that one wound, you can't compartmentalize it. Because what you see is there are commonalities in the way that we respond to them and rationalize these things. And I think it really bothers people to try to deal with that because it's

• 42:28Speaker 21

  deeply upsetting. And I think compartmentalizing those things and telling ourselves that we can compartmentalize those things is a coping mechanism to avoid confronting this broader atmosphere that we live in and the way that it damages us than figuring out what we're going to do about it to make things different.

• 42:51Aisha Harris?

  Is there room for an ethical examination of MJ through art? Something that sits somewhere between the exaltation of artistry found in the Jacksons in American Dream and the examination of the downfall in Man in the Mirror. A dramatization that can truly complicate his image for a hungry audience in a way Leaving Neverland couldn't. I think so, but it's not going to come out of the Jackson estate. Take MJ the Musical, which was penned by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Lynn Noddage. It literally dances around the toughest questions concerning Jackson's life. It's mostly set during rehearsals for his Dangerous World Tour in 1992, the year before the first public allegations of sexual abuse.

• 43:32Aisha Harris?

  And as for Michael the Movie, so Matt Bellany, co-founder of Puck News, was one of the first to report in 2024 that a version of the Michael screenplay included the 1993 child sex abuse lawsuit against Jackson. Now, his report said the intention was to paint the Chandler family as money hungry and Jackson as innocent. More recently, Bellany and other journalists have published anonymously sourced reports about the movie's production delays. They say the script was given extensive rewrites after the creators learned from the Jackson estate that they were legally prohibited from dramatizing the Chandler family. NPR has not independently confirmed these reports, though in an interview with Australian TV, producer Graham King acknowledged there were reshoots because of what he termed "a

• 44:16Aisha Harris?

  legal issue." The movie's final version covers the early beginnings of the Jackson Five and ends with Jackson's first solo tour, promoting the Bad album at the end of the 80s. There are no real surprises here. Of course, it hangs a thin narrative arc on Michael's antagonistic relationship with Joe. Curiously, there are several scenes of the star interacting with kids, signing autographs in a toy store or visiting them in children's hospitals, almost as if the filmmakers were looking for a way to refute the allegations without actually addressing them head on. As usual, Michael the Movie gets to suppress the friction of his life. More room to love him instead of understand him, and based on the enthusiastic reactions

• 44:58Aisha Harris?

  I heard from the packed audience I saw the movie with, this is something a lot of people want. Still, I think the culture deserves better.

• 45:06Speaker 21

  I think perhaps the way that that you might be able to sort of... Get all of those things together and square that circle is if you have someone who basically has a doctorate in Michael Jacksonology, but who is also willing to face, you know, him and the Jacksons in their entirety. So it's not even just, please trust me to the estate, but it's also, please trust me to this fandom that is keeping his memory alive and being understanding of what it is that they feel so protective of and what they don't want to let go. And being able to say, like, I know this is hard, but it's not impossible.

• 45:44Aisha Harris?

  This is more or less how I've approached my own relationship to Michael Jackson since seeing Leaving Neverland. It's really hard to let go of what his art meant to me. The music remains a part of my life, both voluntarily and not. I probably hear one of his songs pouring out of speakers at the grocery store from a passing car at least once a week. And I still hold deep admiration for his talent, accomplishments, and the cultural influence he continues to have to this day. Still, I have also made room for all the complications his life presented to us, the audience. The stuff that's glossed over or completely absent from the retellings put forth by the estate, the family, and MJ himself over the years.

• 46:27Aisha Harris?

  Because with someone like Michael Jackson, it's never just about the music or the iconography. It could never be. This episode was written by me, Aisha Harris, with production support from Cher Vincent. It was edited by Cher Vincentz and Jessica Reedy, with fact checking by Jane Gilvin. Engineering was done by Robert Rodriguez and Kwesi Lee, and our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangueni. Special thanks to Soraya Nadia McDonald, Corey Antonio Rose, Carvel Wallace, and Rodney Carmichael for speaking with us. Thanks for listening.

• 47:09Speaker 06

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