Ben. Michael Jackson. 1972. Motown.

 The difficulty in writing about a personality like Michael Jackson comes in having to choose which one of the performer’s multi-parsed personas to write about. The problem is then compounded by the uncomfortable certainty that Jackson, the wealthy celebrity who continued to produce recorded music, outlived Jackson, the talented vocalist with a gift for challenging himself in the recording studio to produce music that was superior to the product that preceded it. Beginning with Bad, the first record to chronologically succeed the global sales phenomenon of Thriller, Jackson’s recorded output became less and less interesting even as, perversely, his public persona became increasingly weirder. Shortly before his thirtieth birthday, on July 16, 1988, Jackson and Diana, Princess of Wales, forged a cultural merger at Wembley Stadium witnessed by a sold out crowd of 72,000, that went on to become the friendship model for social media contacts to come. So as not to be confused with a conventional, pre-fame friendship, the merger was formalized by the donation of a check in the amount of £150,000. Prefiguring the exclusive use of the social media  comments section, the two never met again, preferring to communicate solely via telephone. Anticipating the 21st century trend of practicing estrangement—through plastic surgery—from the indigent sameness of normality, Jackson began experimenting with radical cosmetic alteration of his physical appearance.  In June, 1987, he reportedly offered London Hospital Medical College $1 million for John Merrick’s skeletal remains, while simultaneously, news reports began appearing detailing the singer’s health issues concerning skin pigmentation and rhinoplasty. By the time of the release of Bad’s follow up LP, the spookily, aptly named Dangerous, in 1991, Jackson was living an embarrassingly public version of the Wildean observation that “To become a work of art is the object of living.” Yet his was a clumsily conceived artistic project, and his dependency upon an audience was palpably desperate. The sham marriage to Lisa Marie, with its awkward public displays of affection, dangling babies off of balcony railings, Pepsi Cola and the combustible Jheri curl; Jackson had moved so far into his own celebrity, where only the rules of self-mythologizing conduct applied, that he had accustomed the real world, against which he interminably brushed, to the shocking/not shocking dynamic of the climate in which he lived and died. Listening now to Ben, recorded when Jackson was fourteen, you hear in the singer’s still tender voice the anxiety of a child beginning to cope with the isolation that comes with having to acknowledge both the major and minor differences between yourself and your peers. Despite a lack overly sentimental tone, it’s a terrifyingly lonely performance, right up there with the bravura Carnegie Hall recordings of Judy Garland, Kurt Cobain’s MTV Unplugged in New York, and Billie Holiday’s Lady In Satin. These were artists who had moved beyond the conventions and artistic pleasures of performative theater, and were struggling to establish a commercial voice somewhere along the dividing line between artifice and exploitative self-deceit. To put it another way, it was the choice either Jackson or those working closest to him made for him of allowing him to go and find the companionship of a real world Ben and thereby take the chance of becoming human, or to go it alone and become the world’s most famous man. It was Jackson’s unique tragedy that he couldn’t have it both ways.