..pertaining to 'We've Had Enough' and recent trial nonsense.

Enjoy! (i did)

Robin Meltzer, Sunday, November 21, 2004

This week, I have mostly been listening to We've Had Enough. It's the final song on the Ultimate Collection box set, and one of the finest pieces of work that Michael Jackson has made public. It's pitiful that Sony have chosen the Bad album reject, Cheater, to promote the box set, but that's a subject for another article.

The subject for this article, as with all the articles in this series, is the criminal proceedings against the man we cunningly call the King of Pop. And for several weeks of being fortunate enough to be acquainted with We've Had Enough, I was listening to it to deliberately forget about the appalling situation that Michael finds himself in simply by drinking a few too many red wines out of coke cans. It was an escape from the present and a reminder of a not-so-distant past when Michael Jackson wrote songs like Is It Scary and Earth Song and then sung and squealed on them and all was generally fine with the world. We've Had Enough fits smack back into what I would call Michael's "drama pop" canon. Shameless adlibs, gorgeous key changes, spine chilling harmonies. Gotta love 'im.

But this week I have started to think about the song in a new way. Its subject matter as an anti-war, "Only God Can Decide" diatribe against violence and imperialism is apparent from the moment you hear Michael's lyrics. But, thinking further-on from the obvious, it's a song from 2004. 2004! This year! Post-arrest! Post-Sneddon! Post-Bashir! Post-Dimond! Post-Prince Charles' comments on education! It's a new song, which means that the emotional delivery was probably - how shall we say - delivered, after his arrest. This is big news for big fans.

It puts the song in the same category as Earth Song, written while going through one of his rehabilitation sessions in 1993 in a clinic in London. It's a song that comes from despair. It also shares with Earth Song the uncanny effect whereby the listener feels he has heard it before. Not in that kind of annoying Robbie Williams way where the music is so derivative and musically clichéd that you probably have heard it before. This is one of those songs where the music could be said to come from the bowels of the Earth, if the Earth had bowels. You feel like you've heard it before because you, too, come from the bowels of the Earth and are at one with its being. You know the kind of nonsense I'm talking about. It sounds wanky when you write it down, even when you're being as detached and humorous as me. But wanky is fine at certain times, and this is one of them.

The point is that Michael is channelling. The song's lyrics may be the kind of thing that Bono would write when he doesn't have his head up his own bottom, but the music comes from a place that Bono can't imagine because however many African villages Bono goes to in order to assuage his Catholic guilt, he can never connect to humanity like Michael Jackson, which is strange when you think about it, because Michael Jackson is just about as removed from the rest of humanity as any pop star you can name. In the light of this, it is remarkable that Michael still has that effect that Jonathan Morrish - the man from Sony who accompanied Michael on all his major world tours - once summed up to me perfectly:

"It's one thing to write a hit song for your first album when you're hungry for a record deal. It's a totally different thing to write a hit song in the back of a limousine."

Michael has that gift, and he's not afraid to use it. I like to think that when he's screaming out his adlibs and his 'Hoos' and his 'Hees' and his 'Shoo hoo hees', he's thinking of all the woodlice who are trying to destroy him; he's venting. Michael has created a song this year which, even if the worst were to happen next year, can never be taken away from him - ever. That's a feeling which you or I will almost certainly never be able to comprehend.

But before we kill ourselves over our own inadequacies, let's consider what else has been happening this week other than the astounding news that Robin has been listening to a song.

Perhaps the biggest news arrived in some letters that came to light between Janet Arvizo (the mother of Michael's accuser) and the lawyer Mark Geragos, who was representing Michael at the time the letters were written. As Dr. K. C. Arceneaux of The Raw Story website points out, the letters are a little hostile in tone but refer only to some household objects that one party has that the other wants back.

"So what?" you may ask, if you've not been reading the MJNI.COM Support Michael pages and therefore don't know what on Earth I'm talking about. Well, so THIS. The letters were written immediately after the period in time that Janet Arvizo subsequently claimed that Michael had imprisoned her. You remember - the whole "Michael Jackson as abductor" story which the mass media doesn't pick up on that much because it makes the whole story look a bit too stupid to be worth covering in such depth. If she had been held prisoner, why was she writing letters asking for her clothes pegs and mascara (for example) back? Why wasn't she writing letters saying things like:

Dear Mark,

I've just got back to my trailer park after being held prisoner by your client, the King of Pop. Please can you ask him not to do that again, and to stop having sex with my cancer-ridden son.

Cheers,

Janet (not that one)


The answer, of course, is because the witch wasn't being imprisoned, except perhaps by the demons in her mind, who are presumably the same demons who resided there when she accused her ex-husband of abusing her daughter or the security guards from the store J.C. Penney of abusing her. I for one am very much looking forward to Tom Sneddon explaining those letters away as another example of "scoping".

Gavin is not the only kid with a money-grabbing mother. It was also the week where Aaron Carter, talentless but friendly brother of Backstreet Boy Nick Carter, refuted a story given to the American TV show Access Hollywood by his own mother. In this story she had claimed that at Michael's 45th birthday party at Neverland in August 2003, Michael and Aaron had disappeared off together to make whoopee and drink Jesus Juice and smoke dope (Jesus Dope, presumably) and gosh was she mad with brother Nick for - tut - leaving Aaron in such a dangerous situation with a known madman.

So Aaron chose another worthy bastion of the American media to argue back - he went to People magazine. He said that he really didn't like his mum much. In one of the more heart-warming lines to come from the pages of People or indeed the lips of a teen star, he said: "Just be my mother, just be my sister. It's all about publicity for them. She's the adult, not me. But it seems to be switched around."

Shakespeare it ain't, but it's kind of touching. Anyway, the important thing is that Aaron also said that the whole Michael Jackson sex party story was ridiculous:

"Michael and I have been friends for three years. I went to Neverland for his birthday bash. We were smashing cake in each other's faces. It was really cool. Until 5am, me, him and Chris Tucker were out on four-wheelers, riding around in the mountains. Nothing happened between me and Michael. We didn't sleep in the same room, we didn't share a room. We have a normal friendship. There's nothing sexual about it."

I've always loved Aaron and appreciated his music and his showmanship. But I'm not sure that the cake-smashing comment necessarily equates to most people's idea of a "normal friendship". Still, let's not quibble. Full marks to Aaron for blasting his mother and standing up for Michael. Gavin, are you watching?

Talking of showmanship, what has our friend Diane Dimond been up to this week? The woman who once worked for American tabloid TV show Hard Copy, until even that was considered too highbrow for her, now works for the Court TV channel and this week she was interviewed on the a UK show for Channel 5 called, wait for it, Michael Jackson's Mind. In the show, quite openly and proudly, Dimond talks about the day that Neverland was raided:

"I knew the raid was coming. I had two camera crews and a producer."

How admirable is the American judicial system! It allows an elected man of the law like Tom Sneddon to work so closely with a free American media in order to bring matters of such seismic - and yet balanced - content to the masses so easily and without restriction. "Does Tom get anything back?" you may be asking. Oh, but of course he does! He gets Court TV on his side throughout the case next year.

This, people of Iraq and Afghanistan, is not what your public life has to be like when democratic rule of law and freedom of the press is finally achieved in your lands. Take your lessons not from your self-professed liberators. Dimond's and Sneddon's collusion would have simply been impossible in many democratic nations. Only a country like America, truly at ease with its own freedoms - especially that hallowed 'freedom' of the press - can indulge in such wanton corruption while presenting itself as the beacon of openness and integrity.

May God help Michael Jackson and while we're at it, let's thank the former for the right to trial by jury. See you next week.