The New Criterion

What would propel Margo Jefferson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times critic, and self-styled intellectual (she spells Napoleon with an acute accent) write a mini-biography of Michael Jackson? In 160 very loosely packed pages, On Michael Jackson tries to rehearse and evaluate the life and oeuvre of this popular dancer, singer, and video creator, who may or may not be a pedophile, but is haunted by a bad childhood and badgered by the media. His fans are legion, as are his detractors, both of whom Miss Jefferson embodies as an egregious practitioner of Times-style criticism, i.e., talking out of both sides of the mouth.

It is, accordingly, impossible to determine whether she considers Jackson guilty or not of sexual acts with the boys he brought to his Disneyesque Xanadu, called, with appropriate Peter Pan-ishness, “Neverland.” The Southern California law courts, to be sure, acquitted Jackson, but where being a black celebrity gets you away with uxoricide and double murder, who would convict a mere stellar pedophile? Feeding a young boy pornographic literature and spiking his drinks with booze before sharing a bed with him is surely proof of nothing, and Nicole Simpson and that hapless young waiter undoubtedly died of mere fright at the sight of a wrathful O.J.

Yet Jackson’s sex life, or lack of it, is less amazing than his turning surgically from a black boy into what for all practical purposes looks like a white woman. Though his Ruritanian wardrobe and creepy videos bespeak a blend of bad taste and ghoulishness, and his singing is humdrum, Jackson’s dancing is incontestably expert, to which Fred Astaire himself testified. Even so, why write a lipsmacking book about Michael, his horrid father, and troubled family, when, like Miss Jefferson, you interviewed nobody, and merely watched T.V. and did all kinds of reading, thereupon plying a winged pair of scissors and potbellied paste pot?

What is the original contribution here when, in the Acknowledgments, you thank twenty-four individuals plus the Chicago Northeasterners (number unspecified)? Presumably the style of writing. This tends to be in short, snappy sentences or sentence fragments, suitable for use by rappers, alternating with poetical effusions begotten on an ad agency copy desk. Take this blaxploitation or Blake-exploitation rap:

Little freak, who made you? Dost thou know who made you? Genes made you. Disease and illness made you. Religion made you. Show business and science made you. History made you: The norms and needs of your time made you. Your family and your psyche made you.

And with what conclusion does this black sister’s tribute—or cashing-in-on—her little black-and-white brother leave us? “Michael Jackson speaks to and for the monstrous child in us all.” And even more, perhaps, to the righteous adult who would concoct such a book.