Watching the Jackson debacle has me asking questions about his unusual lifestyle. At first, it simply seemed sad that someone with so much talent has so many inner demons. But I soon began wondering, could he have been the same without the freakishness that went with it?
His father Joe seems to be where it begins, perhaps at the genetic level. When you realize what he “accomplished” with his young children, it becomes apparent that, good or bad, he is not ordinary guy. On the weird side, when asked, as he was entering the BET music awards about Michael’s death (only a couple of days after Michael had died), he soon began talking about big things to come, seemingly more interested at that moment in the business that would be coming because of Michael's death. Watch the video on YouTube. He might have been in shock, but I fear this is not the explanation. I think he is just weird, freakishly so.
Perhaps Michael is like a child raised by a machine, lacking the personal relationships others take for granted. Imagine, from a very young age Michael was a superstar. Thus, from this young age, encompassing his entire memory of life by the time he became an adult, everyone that was friendly with Michael had an agenda. At some level within he had to know this. Worse yet, sadly, it seems that his father was on this same list. He did not have a dad; he had an agent. As a father, I find this painful to imagine for a child.
It seems reasonable to speculate that this sterile way of growing up would lead someone to find a way to get people to like them. In Michael’s case, this may have been the source of freakish entertainment genius. James Lipton, in his Inside the Actor’s Studio, likes to highlight how many of his guests come from broken homes, implying that it is their thirst for attention that leads them to the entertainment business. Could Michael Jackson simply be a supercharged version of this?
I don’t know how this might explain his childlike characteristics, but at least feel like it could be related. The presence of such freakish talent with such a unique way of growing up would seem to potentially be related to his unusual way of living, whether it cause him to desire to be Peter Pan, as Professor J. Michael Bailey speculates in his article “Michael Jackson: Erotic Identify Disorder,” or is instead some innocent (or not) combination of clueless and preference.
