Michael Jackson is "evil"

uh, not "concing".. convincing.

I find that the tendency to think of the scruples of an artist as being somehow transferable with their genius is the root cause of why an individual like MJ's behaviour was enabled. Being able to enjoy MJ's music while acknowledging that he's a child predator becomes an act of defiance, consuming the man's work while vilifying the man. The ultimate expression of this idea I guess would be if somebody were to learn the moonwalk so they could dance on his grave

People also ask
Is Captain EO still open?

Is Captain EO still at Disney World?

How much did Captain EO cost?

Can you rent out Disneyland?

https://media.giphy.com/media/6bdgw4Myfpxr1jkTiG/giphy.gif

I think the reason people wanted to not believe wasn’t because they didn’t take it seriously, but because they did. The crimes are too reprehensible to square with the idea of the person eho made such great music. Not an “excuse” for overlooking the crimes but an explanation.

― Trϵϵship, Saturday, January 26, 2019 3:46 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't think people wanted to *not* believe, i just think that casual knowledge of the situation would lead one to think that the real story was he was a super strange, childlike, damaged man, and his hanging out with kids all the time was deeply misunderstood as a result, and since nothing ever came of the allegations years ago, it could have all just been some kind of misunderstanding.

for a long time i've personally really only had extremely casual knowledge of the situation and allegations from long ago, and as a casual observer i thought it really was a thing where he was completely fucked up and creepy but maybe not exactly creepy in *that* way.

In a vacuum, without specific reference to Michael Jackson, at this point, I would consider “hanging out with kids all the time” to be indicative of someone likely to abuse kids.

yeah that’s a good summation. i was less willing to believe the basic reporting, because it seemed like such a gleeful takedown. the deeper investigative reporting I read left me with the impression that he had spent so long messing with reporters that the ultimate media field day about his pedophilia was largely of his own doing. but at the time it also felt like the initial accusers were kids coached by cash-grabbing parents.

it’s not that i didn’t think it was possible he was a legit predator, it was more that I hadn’t found what was being reported at the time to be convincing/credible. I admit part of me didn’t want it to be true, and i had some confirmation bias for sure.

and since nothing ever came of the allegations years ago

Nothing except Jackson’s representatives paying tens of millions to his accusers, and corroborated testimony of him regularly plying his prepubescent same-bed sleepover pals with alcohol, and Jackson throwing massive publicity stunts to try and avoid testifying, and...

"nothing ever came of the allegations" doesn't mean, imo, there wasn't smoke there. but for me all that's not a punishment or justice, that's just making a problem go away. it went away enough that he was still a star, primed for a massive comeback concert before he died, and the jokes about his issues turned him into a clown, not so much a monster.

VG is right that the casual observer who didn't pay much attention would think a lot of things based on the tone of the whole thing at the time, and maybe not so much that he was guilty.

the reporting on him in the 80’s-90’s seemed like endless variations on WACKO JACKO themes so if you were any kind of fan you were kinda skeptical of the media’s take on him anyway. Or at least I was.

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*

(not trying to scold anyone for concluding differently, or not seeing the same reporting - just saying there totally was plenty of evidence all along for ppl to conclude that he 100% was a predator)


* Veg - eg from Skase to Pell

There were bits from the police reports (iirc the boy describing accurately a birthmark on the underside of his penis for example) which should have been enough to give anyone pause.

i'm just sorry I skipped that Woody Allen double feature last night

I've never been a fan of his music ('Wanna Be Startin' Something' excepted) so I can't be suspected of exonerating him for personal reasons, but for the longest time – in part due to lack of interest – I merely thought of him as a broken eccentric whose insuperable frame of reference was childhood trauma. And yes, this excused many things (short of pedophilia, of course), which in retrospect seems selective and naïve (how many 'common' criminals get a free pass on account of deterministic psychosocial factors?). I never cared enough to look into the details of his alleged misdeeds, however (I had no idea about the birthmark episode, for instance), which explains why reading articles about this documentary is the first time I've ever felt positive that he was, indeed, a child predator. I'm just throwing this out there to corroborate what VG and omar little are saying about casual observers.

Should be mentioned also that public perception was influenced by the amount of money he spent on lawyers for this very purpose.

The crimes are too reprehensible to square with the idea of the person eho made such great music.

The idea of the person was the idea of a weirdo though, are there defenders of him saying "he's who I want to be?"

There's a great article by Cintra Wilson about him, as someone who's been sent explicit fan mail since he was 8, and told this is what fame and success was - that he should never have been let near kids, but fame gets whatever fame wants.

tergiversation of thought

my.... look at the size of Alfred's
*tips shades*
vocabulary

yet a date canceled on me last night *kicks dirt*

That’s a Henry James word if ever I saw one

My vocabulary's more Sidney James tbh.

An amazing word thank you Professor Alfred

Agree with the thoughts thread about how a less-famous / less-talented person wouldn't have been given a pass on the behavior but. Isn't it a little more complicated here?

His actions were directly related to his fame, and in a lot of ways his predation was enabled by it. He would not have had the same access to kids if he were not MJ.

Ignoring what we know now, imagine two scenarios: "hey mom, Creepy Frank from Radio shack wants me to stay over at his trailer tomorrow night. He says he's gonna get KFC and let me play Atari." Vs. "Hey mom, this fabulously wealthy, globally famous superstar has asked me - ME! - over to his mansion for a sleepover party! He has a private amusement park and a collection of exotic animals."

His fame was bound up with his music, and his predation was bound up with his fame.

Alfred and George Will dropping that word w in 24hrs of each other is lol

and we both write well about baseball

it's nice to learn a new word, even in this dreary context.

aside from the "birthmark" thing (gross), among the many, uh, bread crumbs suggesting that everything in the allegations was true was the cache of pornography (including a great deal of ponography featuring young-looking men--that is, men looking like boys--cavorting around nude) that was discovered in his closets after his death and reported on a number of years ago. all of the accusers explained he "groomed" them with precisely this sort of thing. so for quite a while i'd say it'd have been more surprising if he /wasn't/ an abuser than the other way around.

is it wrong to be grateful he died before he did this to other kids?

course not

90% of hoity-toity words in English are only mildly formal in French, if at all.

I was reading Nixonland on my kindle the other day, and I came across a couple of words I didn't know. So my wife tells me, you know, the kindle has a dictionary! Just highlight the word and press or whatever and it pops up. So I did that ... and the words were not in the dictionary.

I would use that word but i find it a bit flasht

how a less-famous / less-talented person wouldn't have been given a pass on the behavior

Many of these perpetrators hold so much power over their victims in even tragically standard, non-celebrity cases. I think in the case of MJ and his ilk, huge amounts of wealth expanded that power to influence several people around the victim as well, maybe more so than usual. Parents, friends, caretakers, all either under his sway, paid off, pressured to look the other way. In the case of R. Kelly, what's been stressed is how much further out of whack he maintained/designed the power imbalance. Not only did he prey on one of the most traditionally overlooked demographics - poor black girls - he reportedly avoided outwardly pretty girls as well, so he was intentionally exploiting their self-esteem as well, even more than these predators often do. Truly monstrous.

"hey mom, Creepy Frank from Radio shack wants me to stay over at his trailer tomorrow night. He says he's gonna get KFC and let me play Atari." Vs. "Hey mom, this fabulously wealthy, globally famous superstar has asked me - ME! - over to his mansion for a sleepover party! He has a private amusement park and a collection of exotic animals."

True enough, but I am frequently surprised at how close some of these incidents are to the Creepy Frank scenario.

His actions were directly related to his fame, and in a lot of ways his predation was enabled by it. He would not have had the same access to kids if he were not MJ.

as opposed to run of the mill priests, scout leaders, teachers, sports coaches, party clowns ....

we are embodied subjects. art of any kind is interesting to us because people made it. there isn't just "art" and "life" these things are co-implicated

― Trϵϵship, Saturday, January 26, 2019 4:47 PM (yesterday)

this is a good point. Dunno why ppl were giving you shit about it ... though, there are some people who are "outliers" who do separate these things, or they do for certain artists/works ... like in general, I think this is true, but I don't think it's true of everyone and everything, but MJ tends to be someone who it is true of moreso than like, jazz dudes or classical composers, and I wonder how much the connection is fandom that began in childhood/youth, connecting this to the post upthread who commented that this was a childish mode of thought

otm. i think that the fandom starting in early childhood is def a big part of my experience & why it took longer for me to accept

and sure, childhood fandoms fade & some ppl don’t hold onto shit for that long & can accept facts etc but that wasn’t me.

I think it’s hard for a lot of people to connect weird era MJ to their childhood memories of peak level Off the Wall/Thriller MJ, it almost seems like two different people, like he completely transformed mentally and physically into another person. Which is not to say he wasn’t always weird or creepy, it just wasn’t so obvious earlier.

Anyway all of my comments upthread were to say that so many details of the earlier accusations were successfully brushed off by the payouts and joking tone of the media and how some of the gleeful mockery of MJ was so focused on his public image, which was separate from the allegations (and having known victims of childhood abuse I can say that at least one of them is so traumatized that she is similarly childlike and incapable of healthy relationships). I think the media coverage of this was a farce and didn’t serve the victims very well.

Agree with that omar

agree

A friend of mine is 5 years younger than me & always thought I was from outer space for liking MJ. She’s like, “all i remember is he was a creepy-ass weird looking dude” and she did NOT fuck w his music at all.

A few xps: Sarahell, fair point

I was born in 1986, so I don't remember a time when MJ wasn't a huge punchline. None of my friends were really into him, up until he died and suddenly it was "damn Michael you were always such a huge inspiration to me". To tell the truth I was sorta the same, it's not until he died and I saw the 24/7 coverage of his life that I realized how many great songs he really had. I'd never seen the "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough" video, nor the Motown 25 performance, etc etc. The only ones I knew were the ones Weird Al covered and "Billie Jean". The accusations of molestation and whatever the fuck he was doing to his face kinda superseded everything. I read a *lot* about that and still had no clue what to make of it. Best I could conclude was the same as a lot of people here, the fact that he was so incredibly strange and obsessed with his lost childhood makes it difficult to conclusively say. MJ probably got scammed a *lot* while he was alive. I was in the "definitely inappropriate but probably not sexual" camp, though obviously that's wishful thinking since I was starting to like his music. I remember thinking, "if he really is guilty of this surely people will come out after his death"...

The real Xennial/Millennial generation gap regarding MJ is represented by what your elementary school did as the second bar of “I pledge allegiance to the flag/Michael Jackson is a fag”

MJ was my first musical hero, I played my tape of Bad constantly, went to the cinema to see Moonwalker, even read the tie-in book aged 10 or so, but then by the mid-90s I had gone off him completely and have never regained that interest, so was odd to see peers waxing nostalgic about him, always wanting to make excuses for his obviously terrible behaviour, what was it they were getting out of it? Still don't understand tbh.

xp - uh, what?

Did they not have that in OAKLAND? They certainly had it in Florida

What I assume was the OG version was about Pepsi, what I assume was the new school version was about the allegations

Never heard of either thing but I’m sheltered

Never heard of either thing either, does that make me a millennial or an xennial

I cannot be the only ILXor who had those!

Here, I was figuring I'd just never heard of it because we didn't pledge allegiance to a flag.

i was born in 76, was in love with MJ as early as I can remember, trying to dance like him, watching his videos all the time. like, i remember when he was so huge they would interrupt the goddamn evening news to debut a new music video. I stayed a fan for a long long time. but it dropped off hella fast. by the time i was at uni i had maybe 1 or 2 friends who still liked him, but if you were too overt about you seemed like a weirdo so it was def something you kinda played down.

They dont say the pledge at school anymore fyi. At least, not around here

lol I did not grow up in Oakland. also it's been like 35 years since i did the pledge of allegiance in elementary school so I don't remember these details, but hey I don't want be too much of a dick about our charming running joke about my special snowflake life