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He was the consummate performer, the ultimate showman. The creator of the biggest-selling album of all time, who three decades ago crashed through racial barriers on the music charts, ushered in the music video age and remade the pop music landscape. A song-and-dance man who took soul, funk, R&B, rock and disco and turned them into a sound distinctively his own, just as seamlessly as he drew upon the work of James Brown, Jackie Wilson and Fred Astaire to create otherworldly dance moves never before seen on this planet. An entertainer who would imprint the imaginations of several generations of fans and shape the work of performers from Justin Timberlake to Beyoncé to Usher.
Oops, the lost children. Yeah, totally overlooked that. As far as I'm concerned, that song doesn't exist. So my version of Invincible has 15 songs and has YAML replaced with Shout. | |
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yeah it's about the media like privacy, but mj lyrics a lot of times have double meanings and multiple meanings too, which is why I look up to him so much | |
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I just realized that since I did not include the title track, we need a new name. | |
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Definitly.....
Unbreakable Lyrics Now I'm just wondering why you think I'm still around
I took this stanza as he is questioning why someone would think they could hurt him or bring him down and after all the bullshit his been through his still standing strong
I took this stanza as that nobody can bring him down and he has tough skin to ever allow someone to hurt him
I took this stanza as he knows that he has alot of critics that want him to fail but he is not going to or feed into the negative mind control and wont allow that to break him.
I took this stanza as regardless of the games and lies he is still going to do him. I took the bolded line as some of the critics or people that focus to much on other peoples lives are really insecure or have flaws of their own.
I took this stanza as regardless of all the bs. you cant break me
Thats how I interpreted the song.
The song is really a very positive, motivating and encouraging song that teaches you not to care what others think or allow others to hurt you or bring you down. [Edited 11/8/12 19:22pm] | |
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Never saw this pic... Monica tweeted this I think around the time MJ passed, nice pic | |
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Never saw this pic either. Very nice, thanks for posting MJ L.O.V.E: https://www.facebook.com/...689&type=2 / YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/us...nderSilent | |
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Unbreakable is a great song and I [Edited 11/9/12 10:19am] [Edited 11/9/12 10:20am] [Edited 11/9/12 10:21am] [Edited 11/9/12 10:22am] |
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that's a nice pic of him and Monica, I thik she was sporting an mj t shirt too I also felt the song was about being positive for a long time cause he always came out on top. Though I don't think the death was his fault, it was such a let down that I almost feel like he wasn't unbreakable this time, no one is | |
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Monica always been a big MJ fan. She was on MJ 30th anniversary, sampled his PYT song and Ive heard her say nothing but positive things on MJ and even defended him one time.
Yea unfornately nobody is unbreakable in that respect | |
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yep I knew it from that too, though I'm sure I did know it somehow too through hearing her voice in the 90's....sometimes by how people sang, I could tell if they were channeling mj or not, from any given era. | |
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After reading an interview with the songwriter of Whatever Happens, Gil Cang, confirming that the song, melody and lyrics were written without Michael and Teddy Riley and their names were added as a case of "Give us credit, otherwise you will never see your song on the album?" I wrote this on MJJC:
It confirms what I suspected all along - MJ relied way too heavily on outside songwriters for Invincible. I don't mind the occasional song from outside writers (after all, MITM wasn't written by MJ and it's one of his best songs), but I get the impression he relied very heavily on this with Invincible (Butterflies, Cry, Whatever Happens, YAML, Don't Walk Away, 2000 Watts). |
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I also prefer the songs that Michael wrote for himself. Whatever happens - the only song of the album, which I really love. But stylistically it is obvious that the most that Michael did for this song - changed a few words in some places. | |
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Not even that.
The original demo presented to MJ:
http://www.youtube.com/wa...r_embedded
Of course, MJ's version is infinately superior, but he clearly didn't contribute to the songwriting, despite his and Teddy Riley's name appearing on the credits. [Edited 11/12/12 4:38am] |
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but this version does not contain such a little hysterical end .. | |
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I agree with everything on this post. Well when I first purchased Invincible I was probably 8/9 | |
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I agree that Michael's best songs are the ones he wrote himself.
IMO, "Working Day and Night" was the best song on OTW. "Billie Jean" and "Beat It" were the best-written songs on Thriller. ("The Lady In My Life" is my favorite, but only because of his vocal performance... it's a generic song.) "Just Good Friends" was the worst song on Bad. "Heal The World" and "Who Is It" were the highlights of Dangerous. "They Don't Care About Us", "Stranger In Moscow" and "Earth Song" were the highlights of HIStory etc....
I wish he'd wrote his own songs more often.. and that's why I think Bad will always be my favorite album/era of his. [Edited 11/12/12 18:07pm] | |
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i had no idea that the song "Bad" was sampled from Cyndi Lauper's "She Bop"!!
WHA!
Is this common knowledge?
RIP 1958-2016 Prince  RIP 1947-2016 David Bowie
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That's why Bad is my favourite era too, and I light up like the baby I was when the most popular songs off Thriller written by Michael come on. I often tie Dangerous with Bad being my favourite era though it always changes, I used to lump Invincible with the two, but now I don't know what I was thinking. Maybe I just really really missed MJ and sure he was better than the others at the time, but certainly not better than the other albums before though his voice was still really good IMO. The songs that made it onto Ultimate collection were far superior to many on Invincible. And I don't want to believe he had no lyrical involvement with Shout :*(
I always thought Bad sounded like She Bop (great song btw, I did enjoy it more than Bad in the 80's actually!), but I really don't think it was sampled, just similar sounding. A lot of blues songs had a similar chord progression. [Edited 11/13/12 4:54am] | |
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As a fan of MJs songwriting & arrangements skills, I find it very dissapointing that he did this. But then again, I never liked Invincible that much. I still like it, but to me it never felt as an MJ album. It was one of the best albums released in the early 00s, but MJ is much better than Invincible. MJ & Teddy added some drums, new keyboard parts and a more cinematic feeling to the song. It's still one of my fav songs on the album though. When the power of love overcomes the love of power,the world will know peace -Jimi Hendrix | |
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Threatened sounds better if it followed right after The Lost Children. Kinda adds a creep factor to it in my opinion. | |
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has anyone read the new book "untouchable" i was really excitted about it, but i waited to read some reviews before purchasing.. from the reviews i have seen everything from "amazing" to "terrible" people have called it a "true insight" others have called it "tabloid garbage".. anyone know anything about it?
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It's based on fiction from Vanity Fair this summer and talks about the Jacksons incident as well as a re-hash of stories about the Jacksons you could find in other books such as the one by Jermaine's former wife Margaret. Although it gives examples of the family hounding him for money and MJ hiding from them, I don't think it works in his favour for the most part and if you must read it, I would not suggest buying it, just read it online...
I don't like the idea of a creep factor, thank god for whatever happens in between....I never even thought of them like that until one fan suggested it to me too. | |
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Here's a book review ‘Untouchable,’ Michael Jackson’s Life, by Randall SullivanBy MICHIKO KAKUTANIPublished: November 12, 2012In those days, before the Internet niche-ification of culture and the ridiculously accelerated spin cycle of fame, he was the avatar of the celebrity age, at once a self-conscious and self-destructive pursuant of publicity. In later years his private life — accusations of child molesting, and a swirl of lawsuits, financial woes, drug addiction and erratic behavior — increasingly came to overshadow his music. His drug-induced death at the age of 50 in 2009 would itself turn into a worldwide spectacle of grief, speculation and unseemly jockeying for money and position among family members and lawyers.
Michael Jackson — a k a “the King of Pop,” “the Gloved One,” “the Earl of Whirl” or simply “M J” — has already been the subject of yards upon yards of coverage: magazine and newspaper articles, documentaries, interminable Internet discussions and wall-to-wall television reportage. According to Randall Sullivan’s dreary new Jackson book, “Untouchable,” the evening news programs of ABC, CBS and NBC “devoted more than a third of their broadcast coverage for an entire week to Michael Jackson” after his death.
Mr. Sullivan, who was a contributing editor to Rolling Stone for more than 20 years, does an adequate job of chronicling Jackson’s over-the-top fame. He conveys the tabloid madness that orbited around the pop star for several decades, and the grandiosity of his later self-presentations. (An estimated $30 million was spent on the publicity campaign for Jackson’s album “HIStory,” which included nine 30-odd-foot-high statues, one of which was floated down the Thames in London.) Such accounts, however, will be highly familiar to even the casual follower ofJackson news, and all too often, this volume feels as if it were constructed out of recycled materials.
Much has already been written about Jackson’s fiscal woes (a result of insanely extravagant spending sprees, convoluted financial dealings and declining record sales) and the shameless maneuvering of family members and business associates over his estate (which, despite his huge debts, soared in value as his death led to a surge in sales of Jackson merchandise). Still, Mr. Sullivan devotes a huge and depressing amount of this haphazard and unconvincing book to these subjects — in large part, it seems, because two anonymous sources had a lot to say about them.
At the same time Mr. Sullivan makes no serious effort in these pages to communicate or assess the artistry that first propelled Jackson to the pinnacle of pop music. He provides only the most cursory account of the performer’s musical apprenticeship — as a Motown artist and as a member of the Jackson 5 — and sheds little new light on his discovery of his own voice as an artist, the relationship between his music and his life, or the evolution of individual songs and albums.
As for the infamy that attached to Jackson since he settled a 1993 child-molesting lawsuit for some $20 million, Mr. Sullivan says he told Jackson’s mother that he — Mr. Sullivan — “didn’t believe Michael was a child molester.” Although Mr. Sullivan acknowledges that the detailed account that the boy in the 1993 case gave to police investigators about how a sexual relationship had developed between himself and Jackson is “undeniably disturbing,” he promotes a theory that the singer may have been “presexual.”
“Of all the answers one might offer to the central question hanging over the memory of Michael Jackson,” Mr. Sullivan asserts, “the one best supported by the evidence was that he had died as a 50-year-old virgin, never having had sexual intercourse with any man, woman or child, in a special state of loneliness that was a large part of what made him unique as an artist and so unhappy as a human being.”
Mr. Sullivan, however, does not present any persuasive evidence regarding this assertion. What’s more, he leans heavily, throughout this book, on his “tremendously helpful” source Tom Mesereau, the lawyer who in 2005 helped win Jackson an acquittal on all charges in another child-molesting case. Remarkably enough, Mr. Sullivan ends this book’s last chapter with the suggestion that you might even grant Jackson “the wish that he isn’t sleeping alone tonight.”
Despite such sympathy for his subject, Mr. Sullivan fails to give us any new insight into Jackson’s enigmatic personality or his growing retreat into a fantasy bubble world of his own making. Instead, Mr. Sullivan just reiterates the sorts of observations made countless times before. He tells us that Jackson had been emotionally scarred as a boy by his brutal father’s verbal and physical assaults; that as a child star he was deprived of an ordinary childhood; that he was appalled by the behavior of groupies who circled his older brothers; and that his early Motown lessons in public relations increasingly morphed, in later years, into the belief that “there was no such thing as bad publicity.” Cutting back and forth from Jackson’s earlier days to the period following the 2005 child-molesting trial, Mr. Sullivan spends way too much time chronicling the pop star’s depressing later years: his restless travels to Bahrain and Ireland, his growing dependence on drugs, his downward-spiraling finances and his reluctant decision to embark on a 50-show comeback tour.
Jackson was rehearsing for that tour at the time of his death in June 2009, and rehearsal footage was quickly edited together into a documentary (“This Is It”) released several months later.
Mr. Sullivan cites insiders as saying that the concerts would not only help stabilize Jackson’s finances, but also, in the words of Kenny Ortega — who collaborated with Jackson on the show — would give him back “his dignity as an artist.” And Jackson emerges from the rehearsal footage in “This Is It” not as a frail drug addict, but as a perfectionist, very much in control of his vision and focused on everything from the show’s tone to the phrasing and pacing of the music. The never-to-be-realized concerts were meant to be multimedia extravaganzas — with 3-D videos, Broadway-like numbers with backup dancers, hologramlike effects and an elaborate save-the-Earth sequence — but it is Jackson alone on the stage who commands everyone’s attention. Conserving his energy, he doesn’t do “Billie Jean” full out — the sequence is only a shadow of his dazzling and now legendary performance on the“Motown 25” television special nearly three decades ago — but he reminds the other dancers and crew (and the viewers of the movie) of the magic he could still work as an artist.
Fans of Jackson’s talent (and even those readers only curious about the onstage phenomenon he once was) would be way better off viewing that documentary — or YouTube clips of the Motown show — than reading this bloated and thoroughly dispensable book.
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Michael Jackson's Curse: Fame Drove 'Peter Pan' to Addiction, Confused Sexuality, Book Says
Randall Sullivan, the highly-acclaimed journalist, spent three years getting behind the mask of Michael Jackson, the most celebrated entertainer our world has ever known. "There hasn't been anyone that famous in a single moment as he was during 'Thriller' time," he said. "I think that was probably the peak of celebrity for a human being."
Sullivan's new book, "Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson," in stores Tuesday, is a tale of family, fame, lost childhood, and startling accusations never heard before. It paints a portrait of a prescription drug addict who could spend $250,000 on a shopping spree without thinking.
"The shopping, like the drugs, were a, it was a painkiller for him," Sullivan said. Sullivan said Jackson would often call business partners, including Marc Schaffel, and ask them to bring him bags of cash.
"In one case there was a phone call where he's asking Marc for $7.5 million," Sullivan said. "When Schaffel first gave him cash, for some reason he put it in an Arby's bag, it was like a French fry bag or something and gave it to Michael. And so that became an in joke, 'Well, I want you to Super Size this order.' 'Could you bring me some more money, but this time super size it?' "He wanted to have money he could actually put in his pocket," Sullivan continued. "To him that was real money." In his description of the King of Pop, Sullivan says Jackson was a man-child who couldn't leave fame, or family, behind.
"Michael was tired of being a song and dance man," he said. "He didn't want to perform on stage from the time, well from the time of the History tour, which was 1995, 1996."
Jackson, who starred as the Scarecrow in the 1978 blockbuster flop, "The Wiz," wanted to be an actor, Sullivan said. He had wanted to buy the rights to every Marvel character before anyone else thought of making them into movies.
"He wanted to play Spiderman," Sullivan said. "How that would have worked? I don't know." And he wanted to play Willy Wonka in the 2005 remake of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," but he didn't get that role either. Jackson claimed to be a child trapped in an adult world. Sullivan said even as an adult, Jackson never got to express his sexuality.
"I think he did all that he could to neutralize himself," he said. "I don't think Michael was trying to be homosexual, heterosexual, pedophile, I think he was trying to be asexual: pre-sexual actually. I think he was aiming to be pre-sexual because he saw that as the one place where innocence and purity and great ideas and you know, artistic visions and poetic fantasies all abided."
Sullivan said Jackson long saw himself as a real-life Peter Pan, and his insistence on this make-believe role became so sincere that he had plastic surgery to copy the appearance of actor Bobby Driscoll's "Peter Pan's nose."
"He eventually gave himself the nose of the boy, the young actor Bobby Driscoll, who was the model for Peter Pan in Walt Disney's movie," Sullivan said. There were of course the accusations that Jackson's love of children was, in fact, sexual. There is no proof Jackson molested anyone. In 2003, he was cleared of the only accusation that ever made it to trial, but he admitted to sharing a bed with pre-pubescent kids. According to Sullivan, he slept next to dozens of children.
"The ultimate question is, did Michael Jackson ever molest a child?" he said. "My conclusion is that I don't think he did. I wish I could say conclusively, 'no he didn't.' I can't. There is a shadow of doubt. And I had to come to accept I was going to have to live with it. And I think anyone who is honest about Michael will have to learn to live with it too.
"He wanted to be a child himself," he continued. "He wanted to believe that he was another 12-year-old or 13-year-old... He wanted a sleepover. He felt he didn't get childhood." Jackson was a star from a young age, perhaps too soon. He became the focal point of the family at age 7 as the lead vocalist on many Jackson Five smash hits, including "I Want You Back," "ABC" and "I'll Be There."
"People want to believe that the Jacksons are a family of very, very talented people," Sullivan said. "Really there was one very, very talented person. I mean Jermaine has a bit of a voice, but I don't think he'd have risen above the level of lounge singer without Michael." Michael, desperately lonely, apparently sought the company of a handful of other people who could understand his level of fame. He was, Sullivan said, given the brush-off by Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana.
"For lack of a better word, I think [Diana] was a little creeped out by him because of the intensity of his desire to be with her," Sullivan said.
Sullivan said he tried and failed to interview family members for his book, including Joe Jackson, but claims the patriarch has mellowed with age.
"He's a comical figure in a lot of ways," he said. "People would tell me he was carrying a gun in the waistband of his pants a lot and would always let them see to let them know that at 84 he's still a bad dude, or he would make a point of telling people, 'When I go to visit Katherine, she stills cuts my toe nails.' Like, 'I'm the man.'"
In the book, Sullivan describes how various people, including Michael Jackson's wife Lisa Marie Presley, were beguiled by the star's intelligence and charm. Sullivan himself admitted that he too felt a "deep affection" for Jackson after writing his book.
"I hope I fell for what's good about him," he said. "I don't think I ever was blinded to the aspects of Michael's character that are not so attractive, or questionable." In all, Sullivan's book sprawls over nearly 800 pages, including 165 pages of bibliography and notes.
"You're relying on sources and in Michael Jackson's universe you have to bear in mind, there is no one with truly clean hands," Sullivan said. "So you're talking to people that always someone, some people have accused of this or that or who has this is or that issue. That was Michael Jackson's world."
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Review: New Michael Jackson Book Misses Great Stuff, Cobbles Together Old NewsPart 1: If Randall Sullivan’s 700 page book about Michael Jackson, called “Untouchable,” had footnotes on its pages it would look like a mathematics printout. So Sullivan instead simply wrote his book, then tacked on a couple hundred pages of ‘chapter notes’ and explanations for how he mixed together thousands of pieces of previously published pieces about Jackson to make them look original. And got most of it wrong.
As it is, this part of “Untouchable” is more interesting than the book. It’s where I found my own name cited at least 87 times in the book--and not always favorably. (He does say some nice things about me, for which I am certainly grateful.) I don’t know Randall Sullivan, I’ve never spoken to him or met him. He’s never tried to contact me. I’m sure I’m not the only person from whom he’s constructed his story. David Jones of the UK’s Daily Mail will find a lot of his work in there.
And 87 times isn’t enough. He’s made it seem like he reported a lot, but it’s just noted at the back, separately. Not credited to me: Michael Jackson’s prosecutors throwing a victory party before the verdict came in. Here’s the original story, which the Drudge Report picked up from me on June 11, 2005 as its top story with a flashing ambulance siren: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2...40,00.html
Indeed so much of “Untouchable” comes out of my old stories, reading the book was like re-encountering long lost friends. Sullivan is very odd about the 2005 molestation trial because he wasn’t there. And strangely, he does quote Fox News’s Wendy Murphy, who was a commentator but didn’t report on the trial. I was in Santa Maria, California for months but never met her. But Fox had Trace Gallagher and lots of good people on the ground whom I saw often.
Because he wasn’t at the trial, Sullivan’s missed two of the funniest moments. At one point Janet Arvizo, the crazy mother who accused Michael Jackson of molesting her son, told defense lawyer Tom Mesereau on the stand that she thought Michael was going to kidnap her kids and take them away “in a hot air balloon.” It was one of Mesereau’s more stunning moments. And it’s too bad Sullivan didn’t get it since he lavishes praise on Mesereau for speaking with him. Mesereau’s dazzling performance in that courtroom still has not been adequately portrayed. This is from my trial notes, and the printed transcript:
Mesereau to Janet Arvizo: Now, you told the sheriffs at one point you thought your family might disappear in a hot air balloon from Neverland, correct? Witness: I made them aware that they had a variety of ways of getting my children out and that was one of them. Also, Sullivan, I guess, never actually saw the outtakes that Jackson’s own videographer had of the Martin Bashir interview. Michael, drunk on wine from a Coke can, tells Bashir he wanted to throw a celebrity going away party for Bubbles the Chimp. Lassie wouldn’t be able to attend, Michael said, because he was probably dead. The press saw that video four times in the courtroom, and we even threw our own “Celebrity Animal Party” one night. It was the high point of a long, pointless four months. More in Part 2, coming up…
Michael Jackson: Correcting the New, and Not Very Good, Book About the Pop StarPart 2: Randall Sullivan is just overwhelmed by his material, but gets lots of stuff wrong in his new book about Michael Jackson, called “Untouchable.” The book is panned by Michiko Kakutani in today’s New York Times. For example, Jackson hosted a Christmas in Bahrain for friends from the U.S. (which I reported exclusively at the time). Sullivan says Michael was thrilled when “Frank Cascio and his family” arrived. Wrong. Frank Cascio never went to Bahrain. He even said so in his book this year. Michael didn’t see Frank Cascio from some time before he was arrested in November 2003 until Jackson arrived at the Cascios’ home in New Jersey (which I also reported exclusively) in August 2007.
Sullivan’s main problem is that he wasn’t there for any of it, but tried to cash in on Michael Jackson once he died. Imagine someone writing a biography of Batman and only interviewing the Penguin, the Riddler, Catwoman, and the Joker. The writer fails to speak to Robin, Alfred or Commissioner Gordon.
Sullivan’s sources are a rogues’ gallery of adversaries: Tohme, Raymone Bain, Brian Oxman, Ray Chandler (brother of Evan, uncle of Jordie), Raymone Bain, etc. Former lawyer Oxman was disbarred on July 6, 2012, which Sullivan only mentions as an aside late in his book. He needed him as a legit source. Tohme wormed his way into Jackson’s life, and had to be excised in the final months by people who actually cared about Jackson. Apparently, Sullivan and Tohme became quite close. According to his alarming notes in the book: “At the time, I was trying to help Tohme settle his differences with both the Jackson family and the Michael Jackson estate (and, of course, collect whatever useful information might surface in the process).”
Conflicts of interest abound: buried deep in the book is this revelation: Sullivan introduced Katherine Jackson to her new lawyer, Perry Sanders, who was also Sullivan’s friend. Then Sullivan turned around and used Sanders and his associate Sandy Ribera as sources. Sullivan even admits he gave Ribera a first draft of the book to comment on. What is going on here?
As for Tohme: I’ve never met him, but for a time I listened to his prevarications on the phone. These included that he was a doctor of some kind, and a special ambassador to Senegal. He conceded to me that he was actually not a licensed physician finally. He held on to the ambassador story.
I received this email on March 23, 2009 from the Senegal embassy in Washington DC: Mansour, Senegal has no Ambassador at large in that name. the Ambassadors at large Fatoumata B. NDAO Sullivan doesn’t like this piece of information. He says in his notes that I “found someone” with the Embassy who didn’t know Tohme. He says he’s seen Tohme’s Senegalese passport, with the words ‘special ambassador’ written in by the country’s dictator, er, president for life. Well, I have the email chain from the embassy. And unless Sullivan can i.d. the handwriting of the president, I think there’s a problem.
“Untouchable” is full of assumptions. And to get away with it, Sullivan admits to them in the back of his book. He writes: “I acknowledge that the long plastic surgery section in this chapter could be described as interpretive, perhaps even as opinionated. It was the result of nearly three years of research and dozens of conversations with people who knew MJ. The point of view is my own, but it’s an informed point of view.” Huh? He wrote a 700 page book but doesn’t have the facts. His informed point of view, plus 3 bucks, will get you a copy of the National Enquirer.
I do take particular exception with Sullivan’s intent to throw Michael’s long time friend and manager, the late Frank DiLeo, under the bus so to speak. DiLeo was a complex man, certainly. But he loved Michael and vice versa. Early on Frank was cheated out of millions that he could have made from Thriller and Bad.
After he and Michael split, Frank’s life was full of financial difficulties. As others grew rich from his projects, he struggled. Now Sullivan, taking Tohme’s side, thinks he can paint DiLeo as a villain to Tohme’s hero. I won’t allow it. Frank knew a charlatan when he saw one, and he disliked Tohme from the start. Now Tohme gets to exact his revenge against a dead man– and Sullivan is only too happy to help in exchange for his “exclusive” interview.
Also wrong, wrong, wrong: Frank DiLeo had open heart surgery at Cedars Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles on March 21, 2011. He did not “check into a hospital in Pittsburgh.” Frank languished in coma at Cedars Sinai for three months until he was moved to a facility in Pittsburgh.
And there’s more that Sullivan gets wrong, like how the story broke that Jackson and his kids stayed in New Jersey in the summer and fall of 2007–there’s the story: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2...20,00.html. What Sullivan has done is chop up a lot of pieces he’s found in research, mash them together and put them in a blender on high speed. The result is something that tastes and smells bad.
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More on the book from Randy Sullivan
11 Juiciest Bits from ‘Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson’Nov 14, 2012 1:54 PM EST Michael Jackson’s tragic story is well-trodden territory, but Rolling Stone contributor Randall Sullivan brings the King of Pop’s rise and fall back to life. From the revelation that Michael was a “presexual” to his belief that leprechauns are real, Abby Haglage speed-reads Untouchable. In Untouchable: The Strange ...el Jackson, Randall Sullivan more than tells the story of Michael Jackson—he relives it. Weaving through painful childhood memories, accusations of child molestation, and a deadly drug addiction, the nearly 800-page book is a journey through a life of hidden torture and pain. A longtime Rolling Stone contributor, Sullivan leaves few stones left unturned, despite charges by other reviewers such asMichiko Kakutani of The New York Times that deem the book mostly recycled material. “Such accounts, will be highly familiar to even the casual follower ofJackson news,” he says. Roger Friedman quips that the book contains so much of his reported material that reading it is like “reencountering long lost friends.” Still, recycled as it may be, Sullivan’s account is no less fascinating—or real. One of the world’s most celebrated performers, the “King of Pop” was cast as both a hero and a villain, at once all-powerful, and helplessly alone. From his father’s sadistic torture tactics to the “presexual” tendencies that drove him to befriend young boys, The Daily Beast rounds up 11 of the books most telling scenes.
1. He took the brunt of the horrific blows from his abusive father Joe. Working the 4-to-midnight shift as a crane operator in Gary, Ind., Joe Jackson was determined that his five boys be successful. Cutthroat, abusive, and—at times—barbaric, he picked on Michael for being effeminate, having a big nose, and “liver lips.” Jackson describes his father’s “discipline” at its worst as both ritualized and sadistic, forcing the boys to strip down naked then slathering them in baby oil before bringing the “cut-off cord” from the steam iron. Michael remembers the feeling of the whip against his thighs, “like an electric shock.” Sometimes, to humiliate Michael, he would make him stand in front of a line of girls that he had chosen from their concerts—while they laughed and pointed. If the then-14-year-old Michael so much as whispered, his father would slap him “hard in the face” until he cried. On multiple occasions, Michael vomited and fainted—simply from the presence of his father. It’s a period of time that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
2. Michael’s brothers and father locked 15-year-old Michael in a room with two adult hookers. Michael turned 14 the same month that the album Ben was released—hitting puberty shortly after. As girls swooned over his dimpled smile, his father and brothers began ridiculing him about his sexuality—urging him to get out there and “do it.” According to his sister Rebbie an “intervention” of sorts occurred when Michael was just 15. Locked in a hotel room with two adult hookers—Michael was told to say goodbye to his virginity. Instead, he picked up the Bible on the nightstand and began “reading passages from Scripture aloud to them.” When finally released from the room, the hookers were allegedly more shaken than Michael himself, who had tears streaming down his face. 3. A paralyzing self-consciousness about his appearance was rooted in teenage acne. The world wanted Michael Jackson to look like his 5-year-old self for eternity. It was an impossible expectation, and one that would catastrophically cloud his self-image. When puberty brought Michael an unfortunate case of acne, it humiliated him. “People actually shook their heads when they realized ‘cute little Michael’ had been replace by this awkward teenager with erupting skin,” he later told Los Angeles Times music writer Robert Hillburn. Michael’s mom claims that his severe acne, which “circled his face from forehead to chin,” changed him from an “outgoing, devilish boy” to a “loner.” It was during this embarrassing period for Michael that he first discovered the beauty of masks—while filmingThe Wiz in New York. The full makeup that he wore daily to play the scarecrow in the show gave him the freedom to “hide and hold his head high at the same time.” Sullivan says he “reveled in the discovery of how freeing it could be to meet people while wearing a mask.” He would continue wearing masks for the rest of his life.
4. He first met the woman who would bear his first two children (Debbie Rowe) after spilling a “skin-bleaching” agent on his scrotum. Michael met the future biological mother of his two kids, Prince and Paris, while in the final stages of his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley. Described in the book as “quirky,” the 5-foot-10, 200-pound woman towered over Michael. Although extremely close in the latter part of his life, Michael and Debbie met in an extremely unconventional way, when Michael allegedly spilled a “skin-bleaching” agent on his scrotum and Debbie, formerly a dermatology nurse, stepped in to help treat him. In return for the assistance, Michael bought her a car. Voicing his concerns to Debbie about Lisa Presley’s resistance to have children, the self-declared “biker-chick” said she would be happy to help. Michael Joseph (Prince) Jackson was born a year later in February 1997.
5. He idolized Ireland and believed—wholeheartedly—in leprechauns. “Be on the lookout for leprechauns,” he said to Prince, Paris, and Blanket when they arrived in Ireland for a vacation in 2006. Michael would, allegedly, admit to anyone that asked that he truly believed in the little fairies. “He loves the whole idea of leprechauns and the magic and myths of Ireland,” said an unidentified source. In 2009, his older brother Jermaine admitted that Ireland was his little brother’s “getaway” and his favorite place in the world to go and escape his worries.
6. His first meeting of Jordie Chandler—whose family would virtually ruin him with accusations of child molestation—was pure chance. Michael’s relationship with Jordie Chandler—which later prompted his irreparable fall from grace—began on a sunny Santa Monica day in May 1992. After getting a call that Michael Jackson was stranded on Wilshire Boulevard, a stunned Dave Schwartz—who worked at Rent-A-Wreck—sped to the scene, his wife June and stepson Jordan (Jordie) Chandler in tow. In the book, Jordie is described as a “beautiful kid” with “caramel-colored skin, dark eyes, and perfect white teeth.” But it’s Jordie’s mom, June, who seems to have first initiated his relationship with the pop phenomenon. June apparently told Michael that Jordie was a “big fan” and had “sent him a drawing in 1984, after his hair caught fire filming that Pepsi commercial.”
7. Michael never recovered from the emotional anguish caused by the Jordie Chandler case. Although the book confirms that Michael took a liking to Jordie and began calling him, “as he had called many other boys over the years,” it insists that Jordie was pressured into lying about he and Michael’s relationship by his manipulative, bipolar father Evan Chandler (who would ultimately commit suicide). Beginning with the raid of his Neverland Ranch in August 1993, Michael’s life would never be the same. Sullivan is clear to offer his view, that he “doesn’t believe Michael was a child molester.” But doesn’t deny the disturbing nature of Jordie’s testimony to police, “he masturbated me.” Sullivan says a large part of the pop sensation’s adult life was spent trying to get back to the “Michael” he was before the Jordie Chandler case. “It would never happen,” writes Sullivan, “it had all been taken from him.” He would later call his decision to settle the case—paying the Chandler family a massive $18 million dollars—the “worst decision of his life.”
8. Rather than homosexual, bisexual, or even asexual, Michael Jackson was “presexual,” and likely died a “50-year-old virgin.” What many didn’t understand about Michael’s relationship with boys like Jordie, says Sullivan, is the reason he sought their company. It wasn’t an attraction that he felt for these prepubescent young boys, but a yearning to “be one himself.” His Neverland Ranch was an attempt to live in this childhood world—a place of innocence and pure imagination. Tabloids mocked his childlike tendencies (he once hired the little people who played the Seven Dwarfs at Disneyland to his estate at Hayvenhurst) as creepy, calling him “Wacko Jacko.” What they were missing, he says, was that—devoid of a childhood—Michael was still a child himself. “How to tell the world that he wasn’t trying to be heterosexual or homosexual or even asexual, but rather presexual, was a problem he could never solve.” Rather than a sexual predator, Sullivan writes, Michael likely died “a 50-year-old virgin, never having had sexual intercourse with any man, woman or child, in a special state of loneliness that was a large part of what made him unique as an artist and so unhappy as a human being.”
9. His first wife, Lisa Marie Presley, never really knew the real Michael—and never saw him without makeup. Less than two weeks after announcing her separation from Danny Keough, Elvis’s famed daughter exchanged vows with another legend—Michael Jackson. Rumors swirled early on that the marriage was purely a publicity stunt, meant to repair Michael’s image. Barely a year later, Diane Sawyer’s interview with the couple showed the two were severely at odds (Michael held two fingers in the shape of devil horns above her head mid-interview). A friend of Presley’s, Monica Pastelle, explained how frustrated she was with the “hours and hours her husband spent in the bathroom applying and removing various cosmetics.” Presley, though his bedmate for more than a year, had never seen him without makeup. She complained that she would “find his pillow smeared with [makeup] in the morning.”
10. His autopsy revealed a lot about his body—most shocking, that he was perfectly healthy. Taken to the morgue at the Los Angeles County coroner’s office in Lincoln Heights after his controversial death from a drug overdose, Michael’s body was extremely thin—but not enough to be called emaciated. At just under 5 feet, 10 inches tall, he weighed a meager 136 pounds. Nearly bald at his death, he was donning a black wig stitched into the “fuzzy strands of his closely cropped white hair.” On his face—the subject of much ridicule over the years—doctors found two dark tattoos under his eyebrows and around his eyelids and one pink tattoo where his lips were. What little remained of his nose without it’s prosthetic was “a pair of slightly ridged nostrils.” But the most interesting part of his autopsy wasn’t the cosmetic discoveries—which tabloids had been touting for years—but the determination that he was, physically (despite his gaunt, sickly appearance), in nearly perfect health. With a strong heart and “excellent” muscle tone it was only a slight case of arthritis and allergies that doctors found. All of this is to say, had Michael Jackson not overdosed, he could have easily lived another 30 years.
11. Within hours of his death, Michael’s family and friends began vying for his million—suspected to turn billion—dollar estate. The battle continues today. Sullivan says it was the Jackson women who began what would turn into a weeklong occupation of Michael’s estate. The vulturelike aspect of their greed was nothing new—the Jackson family had been living off of Michael for years in what Sullivan calls the “decaying orbit of Michael Jackson.” It was his sister LaToya who was allegedly the first to ransack Michael’s house following his death, loading up black duffle bags of cash and other goods with her boyfriend (a claim she denies). Katherine Jackson, his mother, apparently arrived several hours later with the same intentions, even calling Michael’s longtime nanny. “Grace, you remember Michael used to hide cash at the house? Where can it be?” she asked. In one particularly jarring passage, Sullivan claims that Michael’s sister Janet delayed his burial by three months—reportedly the Forest Lawn Cemetery, where he was to be buried, owed her $40,000. The Jacksons have vehemently denied nearly all of Sullivan’s claims.
Another article: http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-1114-michael-jackson-book-20121114,0,381332.story
My thoughts: This book isnt worth the time or money, save your $$$
MJ L.O.V.E: https://www.facebook.com/...689&type=2 / YOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/us...nderSilent | |
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Anyone seen this?There are some rare bits. "When Michael Jackson is just singing and dancing, you just think this is an astonishing talent. And he has had this astounding talent all his life, but we want him to be floored as well. We really don´t like the idea that he could have it all." | |
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^^^ Hmm for some reason I always thought Michael was a democrat. And I literally laughed out loud when he said "I LOVE him as an ACTOR" when he was asked about Arnold Shwarzenegar(sp?)...MJ was too nice & classy | |
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Beautiful interview, I miss Michael so much | |
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i wasn't trying to read the excerpts (as not to pollute my brain with sullivan's drivel), only the bold parts of your posts, but i notice rebbie's name in one of them, that she seems to be a source. i see that roger also notes that thome thome is a sullivan source.
if true, i find it sad, though not surprising, that rebbie would feed this vulture out her own hand, but anyone who would use thome as a credible source is a profiteering hack. i mean, come on. a glance at the information in the public record about this man reveals him to be a dubious character at best who engaged in activities which can only be seen as his attempt to rob mj, as he himself realized far too late.
some of these stories seem to be out and out fabrications; i'm pretty sure mj and debbie knew each other a number of years, for example, way before he met lisa (based on a quote i read from teddy riley a long time ago). others are the usual apocryphal stuff that you might expect to read from the national enquirer.
i agree, save your money. | |
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