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Tuesday, 31 January 2006 10:12

To its credit, the book is surprisingly educational, giving readers a brief history of blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, Motown, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of which were apparently factors in M.J.’s stage shtick as well as his Cloud Nine personality.

Buy this Book 

(Pantheon Books; 160 pgs; $20)
Is there anyone still breathing who didn’t experience at least a moment, if not a month, of nausea from last year’s never-ending media obsession with Jacko? Are there really inquisitive souls that still want to learn more about what makes the dethroned king of pop tick? Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times critic Margo Jefferson seems to think so.

“Michael Jackson escaped the ghetto of Gary, Indiana and built the sanctuary of Neverland,” the author writes in the opening chapter, going on to compare her subject to a cross between Peter Pan and Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard.

For anyone who has managed to glance at the headlines of the last 20 years, much of this will be familiar ground, as Jefferson attempts to deconstruct Jackson’s psyche as if each chapter were a different mirror in a funhouse. Child protector or pedophile? Damaged genius or scheming celebrity? Man, boy, man-boy, or man-woman? A postmodern case of Jekyll & Hyde in which Mr. Hyde triumphs?

To its credit, the book is surprisingly educational, giving readers a brief history of blackface minstrelsy, vaudeville, Motown, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, all of which were apparently factors in M.J.’s stage shtick as well as his Cloud Nine personality.

There are plenty of noteworthy facts for the trivia hungry. For instance, Jackson fervently read an autobiography of circus pioneer P.T. Barnum and planned to play the role in a movie. He saw The Elephant Man 35 times and made repeated offers to buy the bones from the The British Museum. All information geared toward understanding, but perhaps not empathizing, with arguably the weirdest entertainer of his era.

The net result of all this research is a pop encyclopedic entry of the Jackson family’s dysfunctional saga, in which Jefferson painstakingly details just what did happen to the rest of the Jackson brothers and sisters whose names can never be kept straight.

Jefferson’s effort is admirable and her writing is stellar. But she asks far more questions than she answers, and spends an exhaustive 40 pages rehashing last year’s trial without ever saying if she thinks Jackson was actually guilty.

The real question is whether anyone still wants to analyze a pop icon most people are trying to forget—or better yet, why an esteemed journalist would waste her time on such a tired topic in the first place.