The Curse of Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson’s album Thriller and the ones after it are all adjectives that describe himself as a demigod. Bad, Dangerous, Invincible. He saw himself as a profoundly mythic figure until his death. His peak happened in 1982 and many forget that though he was the King of Pop, his contemporaries Madonna and Prince weren’t doing too badly on the charts or at the award shows during the height of his reign.

Many do not know that Jackson only wrote only 25% of his songs. He wrote the bangers Beat It, Billie Jean, and The Girl is Mine on the Thriller album but the rest were written by other songwriters. So that means the eponymous track of his biggest album ever, Thriller, was written by someone else. When you hear Thriller, you’re really hearing the genius of Quincy Jones, who was a producer affiliated with Jackson for the years while he was huge.

This is not to diminish Michael Jackson’s excellence as a performer and artist, no, I just want to give credit where credit is due. Michael Jackson was both a person and a product that appealed to the masses for his 80s coolness, fun, and ability to unite people under the banner of music. To this day, Michael Jackson’s style and music remain utterly unique. Like J.R.R. Tolkien, Jackson spawned a million imitators in his genre.

Jackson’s rise was at least partially due to being the right performer at the exact right time. If Thriller had been released in 1972 or 1992, my hypothesis is that would not have hit nearly as hard. Thriller bridged the gap between disco and pop at the precise moment that disco was going out and pop was coming in. The 70s were still about dancing with others and the 80s were about dancing by yourself, alone in the spotlight. The 1990s nearly did away with dancing altogether, and by the 2000s, dance was confined to the mating rituals of nightclubs and reality shows like Dancing with the Stars and Dance Moms.

Aging badly

For Michael Jackson, the high of 1982 was eternal and the fact reality did not match it became an increasing thorn in his side. If ever there was an example of the folly of the psychology of previous investment, Michael Jackson was it. His follow up to Thriller, Bad, insisted in its title track: “I’m bad, I’m really, really bad.” He wasn’t wrong about the album or its songs. Honestly, compared to Thriller, Bad wasn’t just bad. It was terrible.

Thriller pushed the envelope slightly with Beat It’s depiction of the type of street fight that Jackson never came anywhere near in his cloistered, stage-parented youth. There was also plenty of implied sexuality and self-crotch grabs. More was always better to Jackson, so by the album Dangerous in 1991, he went on a full self-masturbation and car bashing frenzy in the video for the song Black or White, a song he co-wrote with Bill Botrell (anything co-written is a mystery as to who wrote most of it). The song, an upbeat ditty about seeing through racism, did not fit at all with the video. Why, my teenage self asked, did Michael go on a rampage, seemingly trying to be as stereotypically, offensively “black” as possible with random violence and compulsive self-touching? What did it have to do with mending racial fences? His words said one thing, our eyes saw another.

King of Pain

Michael Jackson may or may not have been a pedophile. He was indisputably a home wrecker. He repeated the same pattern dozens of times of breaking up families by insinuating himself as part Jovian benefactor and part surrogate son/long-lost brother.

In his serial scenario, Jackson would target a child, usually a young boy. He would become that boy’s best friend in a rough phase of life in a very difficult era to be a child. Whether Jackson had sex with these kids is actually beside the point. We seem to have no proof in the form of DNA evidence or in explicit video that Jackson molested children. What we do have countless examples of times when Jackson introduced himself to a family, became an ersatz family member, and stayed at that family’s home, often for months at a time. He definitely befriended children, usually boys, keeping them on the phone for hours per day. He bought extravagant gifts for them and their families. He slept, ate, and played in their homes, using those homes and relationships as sanctuaries from his normal grind. Sometimes he had a child’s entire family move into his home. I don’t know of a single pop star other than Jackson who has repeatedly befriended normal, middle class families and lived with them while becoming best friends with one or more of the young children in the family. If there is one, please enlighten me.

As you can imagine, an older man who jumps into a family based on interest in the boy-child of that family for a number of months or years and who grants various financial wishes to that family like a capricious genie is not going to be a recipe for stability. Jackson made the families he used into cult members. The cult may not have had a formal name, but it was a cult nonetheless centering around the magnificence of Jackson’s art and his limitless wealth. Jackson became both parent and child in the families he parasitized, preying upon the gullibility of mothers who trusted him, crying and pleading when he wanted his child “friend” to sleep over at one of his mansions or hotel rooms. Any father who tried to get in the way was framed as evil and mean.

Jackson successfully ingratiated himself into the family of Wade Robson, an Australian child who won a talent contest by imitating Michael Jackson at age 5. After many years of a close family relationship with Jackson, Robson’s mother left his father and took Wade to Los Angeles in order to be closer to Jackson. The Robsons had a tight knit, multigenerational clan that Michael Jackson detonated like TNT. This cannot be denied. The family was obliterated via Jackson’s involvement with Wade. Wade’s father took his own life not long after the move. Sadly, by the time Wade and Joy Robson had moved to an apartment in LA, Jackson had already moved on to another boy, Brett Barnes. Though one example of Jackson breaking a family by making himself its star by proxy via a young child would have been enough, he did it multiple times before his life was cut short at age 50.

Michael Jackson’s pets

During the Bad tour, Michael Jackson brought his pet chimpanzee to drink tea with the mayor of Osaka, Japan, Yasushi Oshima. Bubbles had a charmed life after being rescued from an animal testing lab in Texas by Jackson in 1983 as a baby. The chimp lived inside Jackson’s homes in Encino and Neverland Ranch, used the toilet, and slept in a crib in Jackson’s bedroom. By 2003, Bubbles reached adulthood and displayed normal adult, male chimp behavior in the form of aggression. Jackson shunted him off to an animal training facility and later a sanctuary for great apes in Florida, where he remains to this day.

Jackson had approximately 130 animals at Neverland, collecting them like living trophies and fueling the trend of exotic animal menageries among the rich. Jackson paid zero attention to how he sourced animals and employed a bullhook-using trainer at his ranch to tame his elephants.

Jane Gooddall made the mistake of visiting Neverland Ranch in 1989 and ended up scolding him for his maltreatment of the animals in his charge.

"There was a poor little bear in a sort of circular cage crying. It shouldn't have left its mother," she says. "People were bending over to stroke it. It was the most pathetic little thing. The whole situation was horrendous." -Jane Gooddall

At Neverland, Jackson’s boa ended up eating his parrot. His llama Snow White was slaughtered by dogs. His giraffes died of faulty care and neglect over the years.

Jackson abandoned Neverland Ranch and its zoo in 1995 entirely after being acquitted of child molestation charges. The animals went to various handlers, zoos, and sanctuaries like they were never there.

When Sean Lennon was 8 years old, he met Michael Jackson. Jackson manifested his usual whirlwind pattern of becoming the boy’s best friend, enticing young Lennon with movie nights, candy binges, and sleepovers. Lennon was given a fantasy childhood out of a dream, which all ground to a halt when he aged into a man and was no longer appealing to Jackson. This was always the pattern.

Like Jackson’s zoo animals, Lennon was thrown away when he reached adulthood. His song Bubbles Burst is an artistic memento mori of being harvested for his boyhood. The video is clearly and obviously about Michael Jackson, with a creepy establishing shot of a Peter Pan statue that hints darkly about denied allegations.

Can’t blame the Jews for this one

Without any sex at all, we still have a picture where Michael Jackson detonated families by making sure that he was the primary focus of these peoples’ lives for any number of years. The “Jews did MJ dirty” conspiracy, which claims that all the sexual evidence against Jackson was planted by the evil Tribe cabal holds no water. You cannot blame the Jews for Michael Jackson becoming super-friendly with these children and disrupting their family’s lives.

You can perhaps blame the Jews for the news coming to light, because the Jewish media loves to sow discord with negative, salacious, and boundary-pushing “news”. You cannot blame the Jews for how Michael Jackson projected his own angst toward his father on young children. You can perhaps blame the Jewish handlers and managers for looking the other way when Jackson exhibited questionable behavior. If you do this, you will also have to cast blame on the small army of housekeepers, tour directors, stylists, and other paid help who saw Michael Jackson’s misdeeds up close. Very few of those lowly, peon-types were Jewish.

What we have in Michael Jackson is a narcissist who was obsessed with being the center of attention, and if he had to collect animals and people to do it, he was fine with that. He sought to replace the father in all of these relationships.

Teflon Man

Michael Jackson has skated away from every allegation by which he has been confronted, including those made after his death. There are huge camps of Jackson superfans who utterly refuse to believe their idol was capable of harm. Some people are so determined to believe in the innocence of their heroes, they will cling to it like medieval peasants to a grisly relic.

The Michael Jackson evidence deniers can claim haters planted everything; they did not need to. If Michael Jackson was innocent, why did he pay off so many people? His innocence should have been self-evident. If there had been any lack of compelling evidence of his pedophilia, there would be no need for gaslighting campaigns and large settlements. Instead, there is a deluge of compelling evidence and testimony that he diddled boys between the ages of 5-15 and then cast them off like dirty socks at puberty.

There should be more maids willing to stand up against the system that protects Michael Jackson well beyond his death. To my knowledge, there are only two: Bianca Francia and Adrian McManus, both who worked at Neverland Ranch. Francia became disgusted by Jackson after seeing him in bed with children and the evidence of sexual activity strewn around various rooms. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the alleged abuse of her own son, who said there was horseplay where he was fondled on multiple occasions. Francia quit immediately, believing her son.

Adrian McManus came forward with similar reports of Jackson’s vile behavior for a 60 Minutes Australia interview. She was charged with cleaning Jackson’s sloppy, single-family-home-sized, hoarder bedroom 3 weeks into her employment and Jackson made veiled threats about her finding suspicious things in his room. She spoke anyway, and she is ripped online by MJ cult members for her eyeliner choices and her completely random resemblance to Tejano superstar Selena’s murderer.

Jackson’s superfans insist that every one of Jackson’s pedophilia accusers are in it for the money/shekels, ignoring the reality that every one of Jackson’s detractors faces an fusillade of abusive insults, trolling, and harassment from both fans and the minions of the Jackson estate. Jackson’s fans are rabid, and the more concrete evidence is laid on the table, the further they retreat into an insane refusal to grow up, just like their idol.

Pedophiles also enjoy status as the world’s most protected class, and Michael Jackson reaped the benefit of that privilege, whether or not he actually diddled children. Jimmy Savile was not known to be a pedophile until he was dead in the grave and all his crimes had been committed. Saville likely claimed thousands of victims, all of whom were afforded less status than him during his prolific reign.

Jackson cut off his nose to spite his face and his abusive father, externalizing his unprocessed angst as self-mutilation. He bleached his impetigo-addled skin until he was a white chick, and generally looked the part of a frantic, aging Baby Jane clinging to youth and relevance. He played innocent and looked guilty. The wake of broken lives and homes he left behind him will eclipse his music and dancing.

This is how he will be remembered, and too damn bad if you cannot handle it.