Is it still okay to enjoy Michael Jackson’s music?

The answer is obviously “no”. Enjoy the music of an alleged paedophile? What a terrible thing to suggest…

Except, of course, few things in life are that simple. Music doesn’t enter the ear and then pass through some morality filter before we decide if we like it or not. Listen to the opening bars of “Billy Jean” and you’ll still tap your foot up to the point when you decide you better not. Not now. Not given what we now know or think we know.

That’s why art must be filtered through morality long before our brain has a chance to digest it. The filter comes in the form of you not adding Jackson to your playlists. It comes in the form of TV burying him deep in their archives in the same way that the BBC did of Jimmy Savile. The filtering comes, now, in the form of radio stations banning Jackson’s music given the revelations of a new Netflix documentary, Leaving Neverland.

It’s easy to understand why Jackson is suddenly falling out of favour. The details in the documentary are graphic. Maybe even too graphic. Do we really need depraved acts described down to the anatomical detail to understand sexual abuse and especially the abuse of children? Well, perhaps we do. Perhaps this is necessary if we are to fully understand the man that Jackson was when he was alive. Perhaps it takes revelations this shocking to ensure we stop making excuses for a superstar who was rarely held to the same standards as the rest of humanity. Jackson was, unquestionably, a musical genius, but that genius was too often used to excuse his odd behaviour. It excused his strange lifestyle. Excused too his strange confessions about children. Excused his morality because he was, after all, the “Peter Pan of Pop” and his Neverland a kingdom as innocent as Disneyland.

Except, it was never that innocent. Cynics were always right to point out that there was something deeply unwholesome about an adult man sleeping with pre-pubescent children with no supervision. (Even with supervision it would have still been a bloody odd business). They were right to point out that life is never as simple as the pages of children’s fiction, where creative geniuses can be as asexual as Willy Wonka; a role Jackson coveted so desperately that he submitted his own soundtrack for Tim Burton’s 2005 movie, only to shelve it when he was refused the role.

“Whacko Jacko” was the kind of strange beast you only find in entertainment; lauded as a celebrity yet condemned as a man. In 1993, he was sued by the family of 13-year-old Jordan Chandler. Jackson eventually settled the case for $23 million. His 1995 album, ‘HIStory: Past, Present and Future, Book I’, sold 20 million copies worldwide. There were more allegations and an arrest in 2003. At trial, he was acquitted on all counts. Yet still, the enigma overshadowed the stigma. Jackson was still marketable and his death in 2009 was treated as one of those seminal moments in our culture.

So why did so many of us carry on listening? Why, apparently, did it take us until 2019 before we accepted the reality? Was Jackson simply too big to be that bad?

Looking back, is seems that he was. It also seems that we, as a culture, were also complicit in the insanity that surround him. Even as we cherished his music, we knew that Jackson was a hugely flawed man, born into a family ruled over by a monster of a father who drove his children to stardom but also, in the case of Michael, into a lifestyle that fed his insecurities. Perhaps nothing could have stopped that lifestyle from turning Michael into a monster. Our veneration of him was too much. That perhaps explains the overcorrection now, as we erase his significance from our lives.

So, to ask again, should we still enjoy his music?

If the answer is still “no”, then it’s only a qualified “no”. It speaks to our own morality that we now choose to set aside music that we have valued for the best part of fifty years. What we are perhaps witnessing is a healthy severing of our own ties to Jackson. To understand Jackson’s art properly, we need to disentangle it from the present. Music that was part of our daily lives needs space to become music of our collective history. Then we might have the space to appreciate it in the context of a complex life but also in a world newly awoken to mass media and the unreality of superstardom. In the way that Van Gogh’s work is properly understood in the context of his own descent into madness, Jackson’s work will find a kind of salvation once we can start understanding the man he was, rather than the man we’d imagined him to be.