Michael Jackson: The Issue of Ownership

The death of a celebrity tends to be a shock in a society which values it as an achievement onto itself. It produces addled reactions. The latest was Jamie Foxx’s idea that Jackson was a black man who was owned by America’s black community. The British actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah thought the gesture of reclamation perfectly logical: the Black family was asserting its cleansing rites. Others sensed a betrayal: race was like a millstone, and Jackson had tried to abandon his obligations to his ‘people’, defecting to a whitewashed world. Still others felt that that race should never have been mentioned.

Why this obsession with ownership? It’s hard to believe he belonged to anybody, least of all himself. His corrosive insecurities kept the cosmetic surgeons busy and documentary makers like Martin Bashir in business. It also kept innumerable guards and personnel occupied, not to mention those who helped him create that veritable Xanadu, Neverland.

Despite not belonging to anybody as such, this has not stopped all and sundry from running to the celebrity auction to claim their bit of Jackson. Jackson must have felt, in the wake of child abuse allegations, that he had ceased to be in control of anything. The police certainly did much to create that impression when they took an interest in his curious Pan-like diversions. As the singer recalled famously, he had been served a warrant ‘which allowed them to view and photograph my body, including my penis, my buttocks, my lower torso, my thighs and any other areas they wanted.’ They were on the hunt for ‘discoloration, spotting, blotches’, signs of ‘vitiligo.’ Failure to cooperate in this examination would have been taken as evidence of guilt.

Then there are commentators who feel that Jackson was never allowed to be himself, having been appropriated by sociological processes beyond his control. Personal choice was somehow negated by a stifling society. Jackson became a ‘Frankenstein’ of white society, what a commentator on BBC’s World Have Your Say called the ‘white superstructure’. Black was less than beautiful; white was all beautiful. This, of course, somehow ignored the debilitating effects of his own family, always a pit of psychological trauma. His father subjected him to frequent aesthetic critiques.

What is also forgotten are the agents who tried to directly own him, or at least his profits, during his life. Child fans and their families, at least according to Jackson’s defenders, were merely exploiting the singer’s fame. The defense lawyer Thomas A. Mesereau, Jr, dismissed most of his accusers, whether they be children or their parents, as ‘con artists, actors and liars.’ With deft reverse psychology, Mesereau insisted that it was Jackson’s own childish, naïve approach to matters of daily routine which had enabled his finances and image to be exploited.

Jackson belonged to a peculiar series of processes that canonized him at stages and demonized him at others. He became a source of social unease, his eccentricity a constant reminder of a deeply troubled life. Perhaps the issue of ownership should be put to rest, like Jackson’s tormented life. The only canon now worth appraising, whether through ownership or otherwise, should be his music.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

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