求一篇迈克尔杰克逊的讣告
Michael Jackson: Singer whose personal troubles overshadowed
his status as one of pop"s greatest performers
By Geoff Brown
Saturday, 27 June 2009
Michael Jackson, an icon of popular music culture since the
late 1960s and one of its leading creative influences in the
1980s, had by the 1990s undergone a disturbing metamorphosis
which threatened to overshadow the impact his considerable
artistic contributions.
His early recordings re-energised the greatest
African-American independent label, Motown; his finest solo
album, Off The Wall (1979), defined pop music of its era and
influenced the music of subsequent decades; and its
follow-up, Thriller, sold some 65 million copies, far more
than any other LP of new work; his stage performances, with
their well-drilled, exuberant dance routines visualising the
music, set new standards for spectacle and energy; his
expansion of the use of video broke though MTV"s unspoken
racial barrier. Yet by the end of his life at just 50 years
old, the talented young singer, performer and songwriter had
become a gargoyle, his face much altered by the cosmetic
surgeon"s scalpel, his reputation was shredded by
allegations of child molestation and an increasing
reputation for bizarre behaviour, which conspired to
diminish the importance of his manifest contributions to the
development of pop.
Jackson was the seventh of nine children. His father, Joe,
began coaching the five eldest sons (Jackie, Tito, Marlon,
Jermaine and Michael) at home in Gary, Indiana, as soon as
the maturest showed signs of imitating him on guitar. But it
was Michael, from the age of four, who caught the eye and
ear, displaying precocity as a dancer and mimic of popular
African-American soul and rhythm and blues stars, notably
James Brown. While playing in the Indiana and Michigan
border area, the Jackson 5 were spotted by both Gladys
Knight and Bobby Taylor, leader of the Vancouvers, who
recommended the young group to the Motown label.
Towards the end of the 1960s, the black independent company
founded in Detroit by Berry Gordy and hitherto dominant as
The Sound of Young America, was at a crossroads. Its older
stars sought either a more mature sound or the financial
security of a Las Vegas cabaret audience, or simply left
bearing a grudge, usually involving either money or Gordy"s
preoccupation with his lover Diana Ross"s career.
After months of grooming, rehearsing and recording material
provided by a hit squad of Motown writers/producers known as
The Corporation, the Jackson 5 were unveiled with Ross"s
imprimatur. Their appearance on a Diana Ross TV special
rekindled the use of that medium as a launch pad for pop
stars. The (still) effervescent I Want You Back began a
series of four straight American No 1 pop hits for the
group.
Their success brought Motown a new teen audience and
bolstered its waning finances. Michael, a confident,
sparkling and accomplished performer with a piping, wailing
voice, and his label"s saviour, was 11, and had been
fronting the group for six years. The Jackson 5 heralded pop
fame for imitative white family acts, such as the Osmonds,
and tapped into a new generation of teenybop fans.
By the mid-1970s, however, relations between the autocratic
Motown and the Jackson 5, who wanted to write and produce
their own records, had reached a low ebb. A few years
earlier, another major star nurtured from pre-teens by the
label, Stevie Wonder, had been granted hitherto unheard of
creative freedom by Motown. But they were unwilling to let
go of the Jackson 5"s reins. Four of the group, including
Michael, signed to Epic where, augmented by their youngest
sibling, Randy, and renamed the Jacksons (Motown retained
ownership of their previous name) they attempted to record
more adult albums, touching on spiritual, ecological and
social matters as well as pop"s staple diet, love. Initially
comparison with their best Jackson 5 work was not
favourable, but they had in their ranks an exceptionally
quick learner.
While at Motown, Michael Jackson had recorded several solo
albums (Got To Be There and Ben, both 1972, among them) of
purely teen appeal - in fact, Michael"s elder brother
Jermaine had been the group"s first heart-throb - and now
as a teenager he sought to work outside the group. His
appearance as a scarecrow in The Wiz (1978), a film of an
all-black Broadway version of The Wizard Of Oz, with Ross
miscast as Dorothy, was one of the few serviceable
performances in the movie.
More important was his work on the soundtrack with its
producer Quincy Jones, a former jazz musician whose
arrangements, compositions and productions for a wide
variety of artists from Frank Sinatra to Lesley Gore had
made him a back-room legend. When Jackson decided to
reactivate his solo career, Jones collaborated as producer
on Off The Wall (1979). Ten years after his emergence as a
teeny-bop idol, Jackson was revealed as a singer of
maturity, with a natural ear for writing tuneful pop
melodies, who could generate compelling rhythm tracks
perfect for the dancefloor. The record sold more than
contemporaneous albums by the Jacksons and although he would
continue to work with and dominate the group"s music for a
few more years, his main creative energies now went into
solo projects.
On the Jackson 5"s first visits to London, Michael had
seemed much like any child in his teens, sometimes
inquisitive, interested in gadgets, toys and horseplay, but
common sense told one that his upbringing could not have
been normal. His less talented brothers had escaped the
family home, married and had children of their own, while
some had divorced.
Michael Jackson"s personality, by contrast, developed along
radically different lines. He had rarely mixed to any great
extent with others of his own age, apart from his brothers,
was educated on the road by tutors and was taught by both
his father and Motown to be mistrustful of others, secretive
and closeted. His brothers, perhaps envious of his talent
and pre-eminence, teased him about his spots and his skin,
which was darker. Later, Michael and several of his brothers
and sisters accused his father of child abuse. His
romantic involvements centred on young actresses of
roughly his own age, such as Brooke Shields, or, again
later, friendships with much older women who had known
stardom from an early age, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Jane
Fonda.
As the group"s creative focus, the weight of their
expectations (and those of its audiences) fell on Michael"s
shoulders. A natural, increasing shyness was exacerbated in
his mid-teens by acne and a sudden growing spurt which
off-stage made him even more self-conscious.
He was a teenage millionaire, with enough money to finance
whatever whim he fancied. His Californian homes, to where
the family moved, became part-menagerie, part-playground,
part-entertainment complex. The sculpted changes in Michael
Jackson"s physical appearance quickly became alarming. Two
snips narrowed his nose, a cleft in his chin became more
pronounced and his pigmentation became perceptibly lighter,
which he attributed at various times to a skin condition or
a new diet. In January 1984, while Jackson was filming an
extremely lucrative advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, an
accident caused severe burns which altered his hairline.
Jackson followed a strict dietary and exercise regime,
intermittent health scares became the norm and any joke he
might make was taken at face value. Thus a picture was
painted of an increasingly dotty character, part-Peter Pan,
part-Howard Hughes.
However, none of this could obscure the radical changes his
work wrought on pop music in the first half of the 1980s.
The record-breaking Thriller (1982), which has sold 65
million copies worldwide, formed the mould for a large
percentage of dance-orientated pop records, and the tone,
timbre and tics of his voice became much imitated.
In content, Thriller had been Jackson"s darkest and most
personal work to date. Songs such as Billie Jean, about a
paternity suit, expressed lucidly one of the pressures on
him. More pertinently, Jackson and his producer Quincy Jones
hired the heavy metal guitarist Eddie Van Halen to play on a
track, Beat It, which broke an unspoken colour bar by
becoming the first single by a black artist to be repeatedly
played on the American television channel MTV. It opened up
a huge new white rock audience to African-American artists,
which rap and hip hop artists would subsequently appreciate.
The title track"s video, a homage-cum-lampoon of a horror
movie, complete with Vincent Price voiceover, came at
precisely the time when this medium increased in importance
as a promotional vehicle for pop music. It established a
standard for production values, if not budget. Like many
things he did, and could afford to do, it was exorbitantly
expensive. Thriller furnished Jackson with the financial
wherewithal to do whatever he wished and at first he was
astute in his business dealings - acquiring the Beatles"
publishing rights, for instance.
Few artists coped as well as Jackson with the expectations
of pop and rock show audiences in the 1980s and 1990s. Tens
of thousands of fans gathered in huge stadia to watch a
spectacle rather than listen to a concert in a hall. His
inventive dance routines and an imagination which drew on
theatrical and cinematic imagery, visualised his songs. But
he could never emulate the sales and worldwide appeal of
Thriller. No one has, but this rankled. Bad (1987) and
Dangerous (1991) both presaged sold-out world tours. During
the first, he announced his retirement from live performing.
No one took him seriously. His autobiography Moonwalk,
published a year after Bad, was a profoundly unrevealing
work rendered in a wide-eyed tone.
In 1992, faced with both the personal humiliation of the
comparative failure of the album Dangerous and the raised
expectations of Sony, the new Japanese owners of his record
company, Jackson engineered a series of remarkable publicity
coups, the most significant of which were his performance
during the half-time interval of the Super Bowl and an
invitation to the American television personality Oprah
Winfrey to visit his home and interview him. The week after
the latter was screened, Dangerous rapidly climbed up the
charts again and has now sold 29 million copies.
He embarked on another world tour but during the long slog
his health again gave cause for concern and allegations that
he had sexually abused young boys came to a head. A few days
before the end of the tour, when he was due to return to the
United States and face his accusers, Jackson cancelled the
few remaining tour dates and fled to Europe to enter a
detoxification clinic, his doctor claiming that he had
become addicted to painkillers soon after the filming
accident. He lost the massive Pepsi-Cola sponsorship deal
and, after a brief prurient surge in sales, his records
quickly fell from the charts.
At the start of 1994, he attempted to reassemble his career
by settling out of court the child abuse charges made by a
former companion, the 14-year-old Jordan Chandler. The deal
was part-brokered by Jackson"s attorney Johnnie Cochrane,
who would later successfully defend O.J. Simpson on murder
charges. Although many in the African-American community
disliked Jackson"s image, which appeared to deny his
blackness, they felt he had been set up by a racist law
enforcement and judicial system - having his penis
photographed and minutely examined by Los Angeles police was
deeply humiliating, he said, but results of the examination
suggested that his accuser had not seen this particular
appendage as alleged.
To widespread disbelief and some jocularity, Jackson, the
king of pop, married Lisa Marie Presley, only daughter of
Elvis, the king of rock "n" roll, in May 1994 in the
Dominican Republic. Announcement of an imminent happy event
was met with even greater incredulity. The marriage lasted
some 18 months and was childless, but Jackson later did have
two children by his second wife, Debbie Rowe, and a third
with an unnamed woman. With his personal crises circumvented
for the time being, Jackson returned to the recording studio
to cut three new tracks to accompany a Greatest Hits
collection.
He was enthused by his new work and three tracks became 15,
in 1995 forming the second CD of HIStory: past, present and
future book one, the first CD being the promised hits
collection. Although met with a lukewarm critical response,
like most of his work since Thriller, his singing had a new
intensity and anger as he ranged across personal and global
issues. News of another illness in December 1995 helped
Earth Song, a track off the album, keep the Beatles off
the top of the UK charts.
Jackson"s private life attracted intermittent attention,
punctuated by various charm offensives usually consisting of
exclusive interviews granted to television personalities,
but his music would never again be vital and defining, and
it was around the time of yet another career-spanning
retrospective, The Ultimate Collection (2004), that further
charges of child molestation were made which resulted in a
court case in Santa Barbara, California, that held the
entertainment and gossip media in thrall for many months
before he was cleared of all charges. Its start was
punctuated, perhaps inevitably, by another brief health
scare.
Jackson"s albums Off the Wall, Thriller and Bad were
benchmark pop recordings; his live shows set standards in
staging and spectacle; his videos broke new ground for
production values and budgets. And although he could never
throw off the Peter Pan image of a man-child with, at best,
a very quirky, dangerously naïve take on life and,
ultimately, a quirky take on personal health and diet, his
musical legacy will stand the test of time.
He earned more money, for himself and others, than any other
entertainer of his generation, yet in the new century his
business empire, unsteady in the "90s, crumbled, debts rose,
his Neverland estate in Los Angeles was shuttered. At the
time of his death he was rehearsing for a massive series of
dates, 50 in number, at London"s 02 Arena due to start on 13
July, which were aimed at injecting cash into his ailing
accounts, regenerating demand for his music and cementing
his place in the pop pantheon. But always there seemed to be
an unspoken caveat: if his body will take it.
Michael Joseph Jackson, singer and dancer: born Gary,
Indiana 29 August 1958; married 1994 Lisa Marie Presley
(marriage dissolved 1996), 1996 Deborah Rowe (one son, one
daughter; marriage dissolved 1999), (plus one son); died Los
Angeles 25 June 2009.
抱歉因为字数太多，没有现成的中文翻译。