This is a must read! When it comes to Jackson’s story today, we’re still doing our best to compartmentalize. We put “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” in one box and put his personal life in another box and try our best not to think about it too much. Two years ago I was forced to reconcile that split. Bill Whitfield and Javon Beard, two men who’d served as Jackson’s personal security team for the last two and a half years of his life, approached me and asked if I’d help them write a book about Jackson’s final days, a time spent alone with his family behind the gated walls of a rented Las Vegas mansion, away from the glare of the spotlight. You can’t write a good biography of an abstraction. You have to excavate the human being from the mythology and misinformation built up over the decades. Empathy is the tool required above all others, and empathy is the quality that’s missing from virtually everything ever written about Michael Jackson. We glorify him or we vilify him or we pity him or we take his changing appearance and we use it as fodder for theories about race and gender—the highbrow equivalent of the objectification you’ll find in the tabloids. We do all of this, but we do not attempt to understand him. AA
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 20:03:51 +0000
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