Michael Jackson is "evil"

i guess i mean that i see a lot of ppl expressing their love for MJ and his music without the kind of qualifiers you'd usually hear if someone were expressing admiration for roman polanski, r. kelly, etc.

like we hardly need to cancel him now, he's dead. but people definitely feel more capable of playing his music, or talking about how good it is, with no qualms and no provisos than they do of say r kelly or gary glitter

or what he said

Where are all the Jimmy Savile fans now?

yeah well, it feels like most people have always been:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36sKMwbwfWc

even around here.

idk what it is about Thriller, it just makes otherwise reasonable people completely lose perspective

whereas I soured on him after idk 8th grade or so

this is perhaps an instructive thread
Bashir's Michael Jackson circus......

funny business is pop-star paedo optics, and Jarvis Cocker looks an even bigger paedo than he did these days.

Dunno why we need four hours when Kunt & The Gang covered it all in 2 minutes and 17 seconds

https://youtu.be/0UvHbBZBias

he's less disgraced than a man who sexually abused children should be

OTFM

I've suspected the allegations against Jackson were true for decades, and believed them fully since Robson, a showbiz professional who actually had something lose, came forward in 2012. And I've never stopped listening to or loving Jackson's music. I've never resolved this, nor do I know that I ever will. But as much as the artist-from-the-art question has been hashed to death, I still think it's a discussion that needs to be revived in this case - I assume there are millions of other people who aren't ready to let Jackson's music go just like that even if they're inclined to believe the worst. Is that chickenshit?

I read the big Taraborelli MJ book and I walked away feeling like he wasn’t a molester but just ... way ... off ... in ways that were weird. Definitely sounds like this doc is gonna make me rethink that. What a drag.

honestly I never really had much doubt that he was pretty much everything his worst critics said he was, at least in re. his pedophilia. everything pointed to it. that he was enormously talented has nothing to do with it. attempts to deny or minimize it have long seemed embarrassingly willful.

i've been surprised that people like quincy jones etc. have stuck by his legacy as if it weren't fatally tarnished. it's one thing to be proud of the music you made, quite another to pretend that jackson didn't inflict terrible damage on people (and, of course, terrible damage seems very likely to have been inflicted on him).

above all the self-made image of MJ as some kind of "humanitarian," which still persists against all the evidence, needs to be put out of its misery.

i guess i don't really see what makes enjoying MJ's music while acknowledging his abuse difficult. i can see being queasy about certain of his more obviously megalomaniacal songs, all the "heal the world" bullshit, but that stuff made me gag when it came out. but given the awesome amount of compartmentalization humans can do (every time you bite into a burger, for one thing...) setting his personal actions aside while enjoying "human nature" seems pretty trivial.

I am in the same boat as Whiney.
I don’t mind being wrong, but I will def need to watch the doc in installments because it sounds like beyond-Frontline levels of awfulness

I will admit that I have been blinkered in what I chose to believe & that’s my own thing that I have to examine

I've always been back and forth on the issue. Like, do I take it at face value that the first two claims from the 90s and 00s were made by what seem like opportunistic jackals, or were they simply just the targets of extremely well-crafted smears by the defense?

I remember one time about 10 years ago, I brought the idea up of Michael Jackson abusing children, because for some reason I was convinced that he did it during that period. I think it was on a thread about some other monster celebrity, but I can't find the post at the moment to link to. I do remember that a poster who I really respected admonished me for bringing it up. Something along the lines of he was found innocent in a court of law. I dunno. So after that, for a while I went back to not believing the accusations.

Also, you have Cory Feldman, a guy who has been open in the past few years as a victim of pedophilia in the music industry. He was friends with MJ as a child and even had a falling out with him. But these days, as he has tried to point the finger at the men who did rape him, says that MJ wasn't a pedo.

I'm definitely not trying to convince anyone otherwise. There's plenty of evidence and anecdotes that MJs behavior around children was inappropriate. And I haven't seen this new documentary or read anything about these more recent accusations yet. Just trying to show how the issue is muddied in my mind.

Ultimately though, I don't think I'll be able to stop singing along to the Tillamook Country Smokers song.

"music industry" should read "entertainment industry"

Adam Bruneau at 9:18 22 Dec 09
The real evil is in the ones that constantly hounded him for that BS. He's was a weird guy, always was, yet it gave everyone a license to take bogus accusations seriously and use them to make a killing off crucifying a pop idol with a bad childhood.

The defences by otherwise reasonable people have always sounded completely deranged - “no, he collected and slept with children in a totally innocent, non-molesty way”. Like listen to yourselves ffs

AB always reliably had the worst take on everything though

I think the reason many hedged one way was that the first two cases were brought by parents and the affected kids didn't really talk about the incidents publicly when they became adults (which is of course their right not to).

now that you have two adults corroborating what happened when they were kids, a little more difficult to say "ahh they have ulterior motives", esp when one of them is Wade Robson.

The defences by otherwise reasonable people have always sounded completely deranged - “no, he collected and slept with children in a totally innocent, non-molesty way”. Like listen to yourselves ffs

OTFM

i guess i don't really see what makes enjoying MJ's music while acknowledging his abuse difficult. i can see being queasy about certain of his more obviously megalomaniacal songs, all the "heal the world" bullshit, but that stuff made me gag when it came out. but given the awesome amount of compartmentalization humans can do (every time you bite into a burger, for one thing...) setting his personal actions aside while enjoying "human nature" seems pretty trivial.

― affects breves telnet (Gummy Gummy)

i stopped having a personal problem listening to and enjoying his music once he became incapable of taking actions that would hurt other people, but i have also never been sexually abused or assaulted and i understand that others' mileage may vary

The way I framed it was "would you give a regular person anywhere near this much benefit of the doubt?" Think we can all understand the feeling of not wanting to hear the creator of something you like has done bad things, but should also recognise that this same instinct leads abusers to believe they can get away with anything, just because they made whatever album / film / book and have everyone telling them they are therefore special.

^^^^

ime it’s always been accompanied by this weird pop psychology “he was just trying to get back to the childhood he was denied” - but never just to explain his actions, always rather to exonerate him completely - and as you say the same sympathy would never have been extended to your average person who touches up kids

Just read Ben Lee's review in The Guardian and even that is hard to take.

FYI "Ben Lee's review in The Guardian" -> https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/25/michael-jackson-documentary-leaving-neverland

ebro the letter (Whiney G. Weingarten)
Posted: January 25, 2019 at 11:47:31 PM
I read the big Taraborelli MJ book and I walked away feeling like he wasn’t a molester but just ... way ... off ... in ways that were weird. Definitely sounds like this doc is gonna make me rethink that. What a drag.

Are you referring to Untouchable? I read that a couple years ago and came away with the same feeling. The book was pretty unsparing toward MJ otherwise. I don’t remember what year it was written but maybe those earlier weird parent driven accusations were all there was to go on at the time.

that review...this will be grim

Yeah. Just read it.

Described as “a sensitive boy”, he preferred dance over basketball

He's Australian, I doubt he'd be playing basketball tbh.

The Rolling Stone review similarly doesn't hold back

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/leaving-neverland-michael-jackson-doc-sundance-784801/

Cool that as a society we waited til after he was dead to figure this out

He's Australian, I doubt he'd be playing basketball tbh.

Friends of mine were on the basketball team in high school, and the Sydney Kings were a pretty huge thing in culture and merch amongst youths at the time*. Just looked it up & Robson’s home team won the championship twice in his time living there, and were in the finals the last year before he moved to America.

*not least because they were ~the~ Sydney team, vs 30-odd rugby teams, but

as a society we waited til after he was dead

We figured this out over and over during the last two decades of his life, stans are still going to disbelieve despite this latest documentary

(xp) Ah right, I was thinking he must have mentioned something about basketball himself in the documentary.

I honestly have not spent much time digging into the MJ accusations, since I had WGW’s take on things, always thinking he was more a deeply fucked up victim and deeply weird than an actual criminal. Obv he was a victim at this be point too, of course...

It’s not surprising at all that his hardcore fans would completely disbelieve it, we live in world where Ted Bundy still has fans who believe he was innocent, the scumbag from lostprophets probably gets fan mail every day, R. Kelly is being railroaded and the girls were “getting something out of it too...”

I just wonder if he was always like that, if any of this shit goes back further than these accusations. I haven’t read any biographies on the dude so idk. From the far outside looking in, he seems to have had it more together at the beginning of his solo success, and then he just rapidly disintegrated personally, professionally, creatively...

Obv he was a victim at this be point too, of course...

“...a victim at one point too...”

In that thread I linked above ilxors compare MJs behavior w kids to an adult who climbs trees - ie weird but not dangerous or criminal

just an Icarus flying too close to the sun

or a kelly slater of pedophilia, endlessly riding the barrel, but never gettin truly pitted into the nastiness of it all

the scumbag from lostprophets probably gets fan mail every day

a while back i was startled at seeing him on the cover of some true crime magazine on the stand at walmart.

confirmation bias : I voted for X so he must be right, I liked Y's records so he must be innocent

looking forward to seeing this, but...I’m surprised there are so many MJ truthers on this site

i think we can safely remove the quote marks from this thread's title now

Yeah, no

https://globalnews.ca/news/4890058/michael-jackson-musical-to-hit-broadway-in-2020/

all hardcore fandom is bizarre, but that there are people, in 2019, sending threats to the director of an anti-MJ movie is just astonishing to me

I mean, he was probably the greatest performer of the 20th century

Wrong

James Brown

People have more cognitive dissonance about jackson than other celebrities discovered to be abusers

I have more cognitive dissonance over Woody Allen than I do about MJ

I don't care about MJ anymore, I only want to make sure his victims are able to move on with their lives and get past what he did to them. As a person he has been dead to me; his music is something I am going to have to listen to because it's part of the fabric of society but I don't have to subject myself to it voluntarily.

of course i googled this morning to make sure Safechuck was doing ok and found this
Safechuck told Vanity Fair in February that he can't even listen to a Jackson song in public without feeling overwhelmed. "It's still really hard for me. And I don't think a day goes by where I don't hear a song," he said. "You go out to have a drink with your friend, you're trying to relax and let everything go, and he'll come on. Every time. It's hard. It gets easier, but it's still hard."

which led me to the VF article, which I haven't read because I need a break atm. still the headline says it all: "Michael is Everywhere"
In the doc, Safechuck's pronoun usage (frequently deferring to "you" when discussing what happened to himself, rather than saying me/I) led me to believe everything is still quite raw for him. :( but he does seem to be doing ok.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/02/michael-jackson-accusers-explain-speaking-out-hbo-leaving-neverland

I can still listen to his music but fault no one who can't.

and, yeah, I hear his music in the wild often, less so on quiet storm R&B, formally a redoubt.

I still hear his stuff all the time and yeah it just sounds different to me now, can't separate them out anymore. of course this stuff was all out there well before the documentary but there was juuuust enough plausible deniability that I figured, hmmm maybe you don't need to think about this every time Billie Jean comes on. but yeah at this point I'm too creeped out by it

funny enough I just got back from a restaurant where the first song I heard was "I Believe I Can Fly"...someone didn't get the memo I guess

idk how anyone can hear "PYT" and not think "hmmm, child fucking"

oddly the Thriller single I've most heard in the wild

that's the thing with some of these #metoo/cancel culture moments - when the stuff is front and center in the work (see also: R. Kelly, "Manhattan", a bunch of Gary Glitter songs) it's just impossible to get around. For me, anyway.

"Billie Jean is not my lover. But the kid is not my son."

yuck.

Glitter in particular is tough for me cuz the *sound* of those singles is so great but then you get to something like the "I'm the man who put the bang in gang!" line and I'm just like... ok, I'm done

after seeing this doc i can't even think about the word "bad" without feeling his unwanted presence

i read the vanity fair interview; there is a lot of interesting stuff about why the filmmakers did the doc the way they did, how much Robson and Safechuck were able to talk before they saw the film (one meeting, supervised) and how grateful they were for each other's presence. interestingly for me, they also talk about dissociation.

I thought the documentary a shoddy piece of work, but it did what it was supposed to, although not enough. I haven't read about what Robson and Safechuck are up to.

there was one point in the doc when i was like "can we please stop talking about the dad?!" and i think that could have been cut out probably, though i can see why they included it to show what was going on with their family dynamic. and it was sad, though not esp relevant to the larger arc.

One of the things I thought most interesting about the VF piece was learning that Robson didn't know what his family had said, or how deeply the relationship w MJ had torn up his family until they all sat down to watch the movie together and their interviews were on screen for the whole world to see. As for Safechuck's quiet demeanor, he seemed like he had been mildly sedated to me. Not in a bad way, like he was fucked up but to keep himself from wigging out on camera. :( can you imagine how hard it was to say all that stuff to a camera and then watch it in a room full of people? i wish him nothing but peace.

ime reporting on someone due in court who suddenly has health issues that preclude travel, or a previously unheralded condition, or injury, that lead to them arriving at court hours or days or years past their scheduled dates, clad in hospital attire or carrying oxygen tanks, in front of cameras, never ends up with that person being a sweet blameless angel

eg from Skase to Pell

hey I got this one in under the wire

and in other "kept going to court very late in wheelchairs and oxygen tanks in order to somehow prove they couldn't be child molesters" news, Dragoncon founder Ed Kramer lasted two months out of his 5-year house arrest before getting caught photographing a child in a doctor's office

https://i.imgur.com/807omva.jpg