The obligatory Jackson post

Since so many other Muslims seem to be blogging about Michael Jackson’s death, I thought I might as well, as the papers have been full of coverage, with the Guardian and then the Observer both running “special editions” (the Observer is owned by the Guardian, and their articles all appear on the guardian.co.uk website). I was really quite surprised by how adulatory much of the coverage was, as he had surely become better known for his scandals over the last few years than his music. Of course, people still played his early music, but you would hear Jackson Five and early Michael Jackson music played by DJs who would not have thought of playing anything he did after Thriller.

Jackson’s early music was something that was in the background when I was growing up, but I wasn’t, as far as I remember, really fond of Thriller, the first album I am old enough to remember. The older stuff belonged to my parents’ generation; Bad and everything that came after it was, as far as I could tell, listened to more by girls (certainly in my family, but then, perhaps I’m only saying that because at that time, I had one sister and two cousins, both girls, and they liked Bad and I didn’t, much). Bad was released 22 years ago; nobody now coming of age, however you define that term, would remember its release, but the papers could find no shortage of people much younger than that who said they loved it.

There are a few assertions I have kept hearing on the radio this weekend which I thought needed challenging. One is the persistent reference to him as the “king of pop”, which I thought unjustified as his reputation is essentially built on one record, Thriller. Jackson sang the songs and his name and face are on the cover, but it was a collaborative effort, principally with Quincy Jones. Then again, I always had a bias towards singer-songwriters, and Jackson wrote four of the nine songs on that record. One thing he does share with the other “king”, of course, is that his talent and reputation declined drastically towards the end; people remember the young Elvis and the “fat Elvis”, while Jackson started out as plain Michael Jackson and later became known as “Wacko Jacko”, a name some fans use with much affection although it was not meant as such when it was invented. Jackson’s trajectory was pretty much downhill all the way after Thriller, while Elvis had a revival in the late 1960s.

The second was that he was the first black artist to “cross over” to appeal to white audiences. Well, soul and blues had been popular in the UK among whites for decades before that. In the 1960s, pubs and bars up and down the country had blues nights, and black blues artists from the USA as well as (mostly white) British players performed. On top of the popularity of Motown and other 1960s American soul, much of that music was written by white songwriters: Goffin and King, Leiber and Stoller, Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham and so on (of course, the black songwriting teams of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Whitfield/Strong, and later Gamble and Huff, contributed a fair amount as well). Speaking from a purely British perspective, black music has always been popular here and a lot of white music is directly influenced by it; I recall a lot of white girls listening to the R&B of the time, or “swing”, while I was at college in the mid-1990s. (As I learned much more recently, it stopped being called swing much later here than in the USA.)

Sunday evening on BBC London is dominated by Black shows, first Dotun Adebayo’s and then Eddie Nestor’s, and last weekend, both had substantial Jacko coverage, and even though one caller said that Jackson had broken his heart with his cosmetic surgery, all said he was a great artist, a genius — they couldn’t praise him enough — and that his death had been a huge shock to them. Whatever white people thought of him, blacks definitely seemed to think he was one of them. It is notable that all but one of his producers were black, and the one exception was Bill Bottrell, who was one of nine producers on the HIStory album (he also produced an earlier version of Dangerous, but Jackson was displeased with the results). His last three albums were all produced by the black R&B producers whose records were popular with black youth, such as Teddy Riley, Kenny “Babyface” Edmonds and R Kelly. His collaboration with Kelly raises the issue of how “innocent” Jackson really was; Kelly’s songs at the time were notoriously sexualised, including one song called “I Like the Crotch on You”, and at least one of his albums had a picture of him on the cover holding a walking stick with a cycle mirror on the end, apparently the better to look up ladies’ skirts. His collaborations demonstrate that he was not as divorced from Black culture as is commonly assumed, even if the rock guitar solos (mostly recently by Carlos Santana) kept coming.

I didn’t watch the memorial, partly because I wasn’t interested and partly because I find these kinds of shows of emotion difficult to watch, but one brother commented on all the “phoneys” at the funeral, which reminded me of things I had heard after the suicide of Kurt Cobain: various stars saying he was some kind of soulmate to them when in fact they didn’t really know him at all. I read a letter in Q magazine which opined that an ignorant remark by Liam Gallagher of Oasis, quoted a couple of issues back, “was a breath of fresh air amid the mindless platitudes from people who couldn’t give a flying toss about him when he was alive, but after he died, jumped on the ‘he was my soulmate’ bandwagon”. Jackson was not only well past the height of his powers when he died, unlike Cobain, but as a person was regarded with much contempt by so many people (the worst anyone said about Cobain was that his music was bad), which makes the sudden outpouring of emotion about his death seem unconvincing.

As for the whole question of whether he was a Muslim, I made my feelings on the whole issue clear in a previous posting. Of course, when I heard later that he might have been a Muslim after all, I was pleased, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who felt disappointed when it appeared that he in fact wasn’t. I am glad for anyone who converts, but I still believe that the eagerness of many Muslims for pop stars and rappers to become Muslim reflects an unhealthy attachment to them when they are often only worthy of revilement. This has reached the point of Muslims voting down posts on DeenPort because they state rather too forcefully that Jackson probably wasn’t Muslim and wasn’t exactly a pious role model. There is a hadith that says that the best of us in the jahiliyya, i.e. before Islam, will be the best in it, so when these people do become Muslim, it should really be made sure that it’s not made public unless they are prepared to radically change or curtail their performance and back catalogue — and let’s be clear: these rumours have centred around far worse people than Jackson, including Calvin “Snoop Dogg” Broadus as in a recent flurry of excitement at Mujahideen Ryder — because they are just going to become an embarrassment.

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