I was born in 1982, the same year Michael Jackson’s Thriller made its debut. At first, the album and I moved through our respective worlds on similar trajectories. Both of us were big on arrival (the album sold millions of copies; I weighed in at a hefty nine pounds) and given positive-but-not-effusive reviews. Of Jackson, John Rockwell wrote in The New York Times, “with luck he will continue to mature”—which, absent the gendered pronoun, is exactly what the doctor said to my parents after I tried to eat a dead beetle I found on the floor.
Fast-forward to a year after our respective births, however, and a discrepancy emerged: I was a 1-year-old baby, but Thriller was a global phenomenon, and its creator both more famous and more ubiquitous than any cultural figure before or since. This was Michael Jackson: the smallest cast member of the Jackson 5ive cartoon series that ran on Saturday mornings. The boyfriend-turned-zombie dancer in a spooky music video that was always popping up around Halloween time. The guy who convinced my entire third-grade class, circa 1989, that grabbing your crotch while letting out a high-pitched squeal was the only way to dance. He was an icon, a superstar, the King of Pop who brought crowds to their feet and women to their knees.
But there was also another Michael Jackson—one often featured on the tabloid covers at the supermarket checkout, alongside stories of alien autopsies, Bigfoot sightings, and the ongoing travails of a creature with pointed ears and luminous eyes known as Bat Boy. And this Michael Jackson was not a gifted pop artist, but a reclusive oddball who slept in a glorified test tube, looked like a ghoul, and once dangled his infant son off a balcony—which, depending upon whom you believed, was one of the less sordid things he ever did to a child. The year I was 12, Jackson settled out of court with the family of Jordan Chandler, a 13-year-old who had accused the musician of sexual abuse. A decade later, Jackson was accused again—and this time officially charged, with multiple counts of child molestation, as well as conspiracy to commit child abduction and extortion.
Jackson was acquitted of every charge at trial, but public opinion was not on his side. Polling at the time revealed that a majority of Americans held unfavorable views of the pop star—although opinions differed drastically depending on whether the respondent was black or white. In the former category, nearly two out of three people believed Jackson was innocent; white people, in the same proportion, believed he was guilty.
The child star, the pop icon, the tabloid freak, the accused sex criminal: How you remember Jackson will depend largely on which of these narratives about his life happened to coincide with your cultural awakening. I was intrigued to learn that my 73-year-old mother remembers Jackson almost exclusively as a preadolescent phenom, but she knows almost nothing about the salacious gossip that dogged him later in life—even though, back in 1993, she would have been standing right there next to me at the supermarket checkout where the tabloids lived. My 30-year-old editor, on the other hand, grew up in a world where it was simply assumed that Jackson was a pedophile; she had no idea that he’d even stood trial, let alone been cleared of wrongdoing.
