The Podcast Miniseries Think Twice Provides Fascinating Insight to the Unsolvable Mystery of Michael Jackson
Like his contemporary and rival Prince, Michael Jackson is bigger in death than he was when he was alive. That’s no small feat considering that at the height of his popularity, Jackson was arguably the most famous person alive. When I was a kid the most famous, amazing people in the world were both black men named Michael: Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan. As a third generation Chicagoan in the 1980s I could not have more respect for either man. They weren’t men to me: they were Gods. I didn’t just have respect for them: I had reverence.
That’s how I saw Jackson as a child: as a genius and a God who was bigger and better and more successful than everyone else because of his explosive, undeniable talent as a singer, dancer, songwriter and musician.
When he died in 2009 of a drug overdose, however, Jackson was decades removed from his creative and commercial peak. He was a very different, sadder, stranger man than the icon who recorded the best-selling album of all time in Thriller.
Jackson left behind a complicated, messy and sometimes exceedingly dark legacy but when he died at fifty he was the beneficiary of the Halo Effect. In death Jackson's sins were forgotten and forgiven while his incredible contributions to pop culture and pop music were celebrated.
Then came 2019’s Leaving Neverland. It was an explosive expose that reminded a culture deeply committed to forgetting all of the horrible things Jackson was credibly accused of so they could get back to enjoying his music with a clear conscience that Jackson probably committed sins both egregious and unforgivable.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about Michael Jackson since his death, just as I spent a lot of time thinking about him while he was alive.
So I was the target demographic for the podcast mini-series Think Twice. The audio series accomplishes something borderline miraculous: it treats Jackson in a fair and even-handed manner that acknowledges what a magical performer Jackson could be, and how much his life and his accomplishments meant to black America, without ignoring or downplaying his transgressions.
The complicated, brilliant, frustrating, multi-faceted Jackson of Think Twice is more savvy and calculating than the beatific man-child persona Jackson cultivated would suggest.
Like Donald Trump, Jackson had a love-hate relationship with a press he alternately considered a great ally and his worst enemy. Jackson complained bitterly about the relentlessness of a press that would not leave him alone or let him be a normal person. Yet he also fed tabloids stories or had his manager feed tabloids stories that contributed to his image as a world-class eccentric who used his wealth to do things like sleep in a hyperbaric chamber and try to buy the Elephant Man’s bones.
Trump and Jackson’s habit of feeding the press stories that they then complained were unfair and cruel only seems paradoxical on the surface.
Both men desperately needed the oxygen and attention of the media being obsessed with them and their exploits. They needed to feel like whatever they did was newsworthy because they were that famous and that important.
Yet they also could not control the nature of the stories that would be written about them. This was true even of stories that they themselves fed the media. They opened a Pandora’s Box and were shocked by all the snakes and demons and evil spirits that emerged.
Trump couldn’t keep the press from writing stories depicting him as a narcissistic pathological liar any more than Jackson could keep newspapers and magazines from writing about him leading a bizarre lifestyle and spending way too much time with children that were not his own.
Listening to Think Twice made me better understand moments in Jackson’s life that previously did not make a lot of sense.
For example for some reason I vividly remember Jackson complaining about how much he hated the nickname Wacko Jacko. I recall him telling an interviewer how much he hated the nickname.
“Wacko Jacko? What’s that? I’m not Jacko!” I inexplicably but indelibly remember Jackson saying.
I could understand why Jackson didn’t want to be called Wacko. That does, of course, have a negative connotation but Jacko seemed like nothing more than a snappy shortening of Jackson’s name.
I was wrong! I learned from the podcast that in Cockney slang Jacko refers to a monkey as well as Jacko Macacco, a celebrated nineteenth century simian fighter known for his prowess in monkey-baiting, a “sport" where monkeys would fight dogs to the death.
So the Wacko Jacko nickname was racist AND insulting. I understand now why he found it so maddening.
I never tire of learning new things about Jackson. He’s endlessly fascinating, the proverbial riddle wrapped up inside an enigma inside a mystery.
Like the people behind Think Twice I’ve spent a lot of time trying to reconcile my adoration for Jackson’s talent and sympathy for all that he went through as an abused and exploited child star and black man in America with my horror at the things he’s been accused of.
This is particularly true because my eldest son is about the same age as the boys Jackson is accused of grooming and molesting in Leaving Neverland.
We’ll probably never figure out Jackson out. He’s too tricky and elusive but that does not mean that there is not tremendous value in at least trying.
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