27 June 2009
Kigali — He liked to be known as the King Of Pop and only a handful of performers - Presley, Sinatra, the Beatles - could outrank Michael Jackson as the most successful popular music entertainer of all time.
Although ill-health impeded his career in later years and his reputation was irrevocably tarnished by the allegations of child abuse levelled against him in 1993 and again in 2004, the sheer scale of Jackson's achievements remains undiminished.
With sales now in excess of 57 million copies, Thriller, his magnum opus, released in 1982, remains by far the best-selling album ever released.
The follow-up, Bad, from 1987, has sold 23 million copies and sales of Dangerous (1991) also stand at 23 million. His total album sales, by 2005, had passed the 130 million mark.
These staggering statistics mark only some of the peaks of a career begun at the age of five. Born on August 29, 1958, in Gary, Indiana, Michael was the seventh of nine children born to Joe Jackson and his wife Katherine (neé Scruse).
Joe was a steel mill worker who in his spare time played guitar in a local R'n'B group called the Falcons. Katherine, a devout Jehovah's Witness who played clarinet, piano and sang, worked as an assistant in a department store
Under Joe's strict tutelage and with encouragement and support from Katherine, five of the brothers formed a group called the Jackson 5 with Michael as the lead singer.
The sixth, Randy was still too young but eventually joined the line-up much later on while, of the sisters, LaToya enjoyed limited success as a solo act in adult life and Janet eventually became a superstar in her own right.
"I was so little when we began to work on our music that I don't remember much about it", Jackson mused in his autobiography Moonwalk, published in 1988.
"When you're a showbusiness child. people make a lot of decisions concerning your life when you're out of the room."
Joe Jackson managed the group with a rod of iron and in later life Michael spoke regretfully of the rift which subsequently developed and was never healed between him and his father.
Nevertheless, Jackson Snr successfully steered the group from talent competitions and a residency in the local strip-tease parlour, to a recording contract with Tamla Motown records, signed in 1969 reputedly for a dismal 2.7 per cent cut of the royalties.
Success with Motown was both instantaneous and spectacular, as the group's first four singles - I Want You Back, The Love you Save, ABC and I'll be There - all went to the top of the American chart, each title registering sales in excess of one million copies.
Michael was aged 11 when he first saw his own little face on the cover of Rolling Stone. In 1971, two years after the Jackson 5's first hit, Michael was signed separately to Motown as a solo act and immediately sallied forth with a string of his own hits - Got to be There, Rockin' Robin , Ben (a US No. 1 in 1972) and others - which were released in tandem with his work as a member of the group.
In 1975, frustrated by Motown supremo Berry Gordy's unwillingness to let them write or produce their own material, four of the Jackson 5, including Michael, joined the exodus of acts from the ailing label.
Changing their name to the Jacksons for contractual reasons, they signed to Epic, where they teamed up with the celebrated writing and production team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.
The results were mixed. The single Show Me The Way To Go was the group's first and only UK No.1 in 1977, but the album Goin' Places, released later the same year, failed even to breach the American Top 60.
In 1979 Jackson accepted an offer to co-star with his long-standing friend and mentor Diana Ross in The Wiz, a film version of The Wizard of Oz.
While working on the film he met the veteran producer Quincy Jones and invited him to produce his next solo album Off The Wall. This was the collection which marked the start of Jackson's passage to the super league and took his success as a solo artist into realms beyond anything achieved by the Jacksons.
It has sold 15 million copies to date. Even so, no one was fully prepared for the epoch-making success of Thriller.
Again produced by Jones, the album yielded an incredible total of seven Top 10 hit singles in America.
Retailers reported that Thriller's appeal reached far beyond the normal strata of record buyers, attracting people who had never previously visited a record shop in their lives.
Even a documentary, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller (1984), quickly became established as the bestselling music video ever released.
Quite why Jackson should have been so phenomenally successful at this point is difficult fully to explain. Musically, he was no great innovator like Elvis Presley or Bob Dylan, nor was he ever a role model for a generation like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones had been before him.
But he emerged as a spectacularly talented all-rounder at a time when pop music was taking over as the world's primary mainstream entertainment.
He was as good a dancer as he was a singer and he employed new technology to make videos that were as full of stylish impact as his music.
The appeal of his impossibly slick, pneumatic song and dance routines transcended barriers of age, race, class and nationality.
Above all, Jackson was a stringent perfectionist.
He explained why it had taken five years to release Bad, the follow-up to Thriller: "Quincy and I decided that this album should be as close to perfect as humanly possible.
A perfectionist has to take his time. He can't let it go before he's satisfied, he can't. When it's as perfect as you can make it, you put it out there. That's the difference between a number thirty record and a number one record that stays number one for weeks."
Bad was very much in the latter category, as was Jackson's next album, Dangerous, released in 1991. And even HIStory - Past. Present And Future - Book 1, an unwieldy double-album combining 15 greatest hits and 15 new songs released after the torrent of bad publicity surrounding the first allegations of child abuse in 1993, had achieved global sales of 13 million copies by 2005.
Jackson did not react well to the relentless barrage of (frequently prurient) media attention which was generated by success on such a grand scale. "Success definitely brings on loneliness," he wrote in Moonwalk.
"People think you're lucky, that you have everything. They think you can go anywhere and do anything, but that's not the point. One hungers for the basic stuff."
As he became an increasingly reclusive and secretive figure, so reports of his eccentricities became ever more lurid and fantastic. In Britain, The Sun newspaper posed the question that came to dominate popular reportage of his private life: "Is Jacko Wacko?" He was known to have kept snakes and a pet chimpanzee called Bubbles who, it was said, slept in the same room as Jackson.
He attempted to buy the bones of John Merrick, the so-called Elephant Man, after seeing the movie starring John Hurt. He was photographed wearing a face mask to ward off germs and slept in an oxygen chamber, a practice which he apparently believed would help to prolong his life to 150.
He was known to have had a nose job and a cleft put in his chin, but Jackson categorically denied persistent allegations that he had had his whole face restructured and his skin tinted a shade lighter than its natural tone.
As he got older, though, his features became oddly contorted and he took on a distinctly unhealthy pallor. "I have a skin disorder which destroys the pigment of my skin," he told Oprah Winfrey in February 1993. "It's in my family. We're trying to control it. I am a black American."
When his Bad tour reached England in 1988, Jackson's constant companion was the American television child actor Jimmy Safechuck. In London, the pair paid an after-hours visit to the toy store, Hamley's.
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