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Mike Doherty, Weekend Post · Friday, Dec. 10, 2010
The booklet to the King of Pop’s 1995 album HIStory reproduces a letter from a seven-year-old boy to Bill Clinton. It asks for lower taxes, gun control, a curb on pollution, and for the president to “stop the reporters from bothering Michael Jackson.”
Clearly, Jackson considered his battle with the media to be a matter of vital importance — so much so that he’s now continuing it from beyond the grave. The first track to leak from his posthumous album, Michael (to be released Tuesday by Sony) was Breaking News, in which he sings angrily about “reporters stalking the moves of Michael Jackson” and writing “words to destroy.”
Jackson’s musical legacy is justly celebrated, but it does include at least one dubious gift to humanity: the portrayal of the pop singer as a kind of living martyr. And where the King went, others were bound to follow; some of today’s biggest pop stars, from Britney to Miley, have railed in song against the invasion of their privacy.
For Jackson, pop music wasn’t just a vehicle for listeners to escape into another world; it could also reveal how singers have been
imprisoned by their own popularity. In 1987, as the biggest superstar in the midst of a rapidly expanding mediascape, he released the track Leave Me Alone. Its lyrics describe a former lover who won’t stop “doggin’” him, but in the video, he’s at the wheel of a rocket-shaped rollercoaster car, being pursued by paparazzi with canine heads.
In fact, Jackson and his publicists had knowingly fuelled the media’s interest: They’d planted untrue stories in the press about how he slept in a hyperbaric chamber and that he had bought the bones of the Elephant Man. He thought that the public believed, with John Dryden, that “great wits are sure to madness near allied,” and that by appearing to be stranger than he actually was, he’d be seen as a kind of genius.
Alas, having created ***** *****, Jackson couldn’t kill him off. On HIStory, released the year after he settled a sexual abuse case out of court, he lambasted the press that had refused to lionize him for his eccentricities. Most famously, on Scream, he sings, “Stop pressuring me!” over and over again, accompanied by the kind of primal yells that suggest he’s gone at least a little loony.
Perhaps the best way to convince the media to leave you alone is not to express your views in the form of a chart-seeking single, while your record company pays for a 10-metre statue of you to be floated down the river Thames. And for listeners, it’s not easy to relate to Jackson’s lyrics. Even the clichéd songs about the travails of touring that often plague rock bands’ difficult second albums are closer to a fan’s scope of reference than tracks about having one’s name plastered all over the tabloid press.
Nonetheless, he persisted (on 2001’s Invincible, Jackson sang, “I need my privacy / So paparazzi, get away from me”), evoking little sympathy. Soon, the Princesses of Pop — would-be heirs to his throne — echoed his words. These included Britney Spears (Pieces of Me), Lindsay Lohan (Rumors), Avril Lavigne (Take It), Miley Cyrus (Fly on the Wall) and even Brooke Hogan, whose About Us includes the lyrics, “How’s a girl to breathe with the media / Staring down my mouth with a four-inch lens?”
There’s something disingenuous about all of these songs: One gets the sense their lyrics are designed just as much to indicate the singer is in demand as to denounce the tabloid press. In Hogan’s case, a reality TV star’s pleas for privacy are especially rich. Lady Gaga seems to have sussed out the uneasy relationship between wanting to be famous and professing alarm at those who would help her along the way: her single Paparazzi is in part, she has claimed, “about wooing the paparazzi to fall in love with me.”
Ultimately, the pop star who admits to being conflicted about fame and its trappings has more to say than about the one who portrays the conflict as entirely external, where the “good” singer fights the “bad” media. Kanye West, for instance, may tweet his fingers off about how he’s being “exploited” by interviewers, but in his music, he’s as critical of himself as he is of those who publicly scrutinize him, seeing himself as a sinner as much as a saint.
The cover of Jackson’s Michael, with its solemn, airbrushed-looking painting of the King at various stages of his career, suggests a hagiography. In Breaking News, he invites the listener to cast the first stone in his martyrdom: “No matter what, you just wanna read it again … you just wanna feel it again.” Everyone is implicated in his very public fall from grace. And by crafting a maddeningly catchy song, the King ensured that his subjects want to hear about it again, and again, and again.
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/Mi...rayal+singer+living+martyr/3958451/story.html
The booklet to the King of Pop’s 1995 album HIStory reproduces a letter from a seven-year-old boy to Bill Clinton. It asks for lower taxes, gun control, a curb on pollution, and for the president to “stop the reporters from bothering Michael Jackson.”
Clearly, Jackson considered his battle with the media to be a matter of vital importance — so much so that he’s now continuing it from beyond the grave. The first track to leak from his posthumous album, Michael (to be released Tuesday by Sony) was Breaking News, in which he sings angrily about “reporters stalking the moves of Michael Jackson” and writing “words to destroy.”
Jackson’s musical legacy is justly celebrated, but it does include at least one dubious gift to humanity: the portrayal of the pop singer as a kind of living martyr. And where the King went, others were bound to follow; some of today’s biggest pop stars, from Britney to Miley, have railed in song against the invasion of their privacy.
For Jackson, pop music wasn’t just a vehicle for listeners to escape into another world; it could also reveal how singers have been
imprisoned by their own popularity. In 1987, as the biggest superstar in the midst of a rapidly expanding mediascape, he released the track Leave Me Alone. Its lyrics describe a former lover who won’t stop “doggin’” him, but in the video, he’s at the wheel of a rocket-shaped rollercoaster car, being pursued by paparazzi with canine heads.
In fact, Jackson and his publicists had knowingly fuelled the media’s interest: They’d planted untrue stories in the press about how he slept in a hyperbaric chamber and that he had bought the bones of the Elephant Man. He thought that the public believed, with John Dryden, that “great wits are sure to madness near allied,” and that by appearing to be stranger than he actually was, he’d be seen as a kind of genius.
Alas, having created ***** *****, Jackson couldn’t kill him off. On HIStory, released the year after he settled a sexual abuse case out of court, he lambasted the press that had refused to lionize him for his eccentricities. Most famously, on Scream, he sings, “Stop pressuring me!” over and over again, accompanied by the kind of primal yells that suggest he’s gone at least a little loony.
Perhaps the best way to convince the media to leave you alone is not to express your views in the form of a chart-seeking single, while your record company pays for a 10-metre statue of you to be floated down the river Thames. And for listeners, it’s not easy to relate to Jackson’s lyrics. Even the clichéd songs about the travails of touring that often plague rock bands’ difficult second albums are closer to a fan’s scope of reference than tracks about having one’s name plastered all over the tabloid press.
Nonetheless, he persisted (on 2001’s Invincible, Jackson sang, “I need my privacy / So paparazzi, get away from me”), evoking little sympathy. Soon, the Princesses of Pop — would-be heirs to his throne — echoed his words. These included Britney Spears (Pieces of Me), Lindsay Lohan (Rumors), Avril Lavigne (Take It), Miley Cyrus (Fly on the Wall) and even Brooke Hogan, whose About Us includes the lyrics, “How’s a girl to breathe with the media / Staring down my mouth with a four-inch lens?”
There’s something disingenuous about all of these songs: One gets the sense their lyrics are designed just as much to indicate the singer is in demand as to denounce the tabloid press. In Hogan’s case, a reality TV star’s pleas for privacy are especially rich. Lady Gaga seems to have sussed out the uneasy relationship between wanting to be famous and professing alarm at those who would help her along the way: her single Paparazzi is in part, she has claimed, “about wooing the paparazzi to fall in love with me.”
Ultimately, the pop star who admits to being conflicted about fame and its trappings has more to say than about the one who portrays the conflict as entirely external, where the “good” singer fights the “bad” media. Kanye West, for instance, may tweet his fingers off about how he’s being “exploited” by interviewers, but in his music, he’s as critical of himself as he is of those who publicly scrutinize him, seeing himself as a sinner as much as a saint.
The cover of Jackson’s Michael, with its solemn, airbrushed-looking painting of the King at various stages of his career, suggests a hagiography. In Breaking News, he invites the listener to cast the first stone in his martyrdom: “No matter what, you just wanna read it again … you just wanna feel it again.” Everyone is implicated in his very public fall from grace. And by crafting a maddeningly catchy song, the King ensured that his subjects want to hear about it again, and again, and again.
http://www.nationalpost.com/arts/Mi...rayal+singer+living+martyr/3958451/story.html